Social selling is a new digital sales technique that uses the power and popularity of social media platforms, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, to help you influence your target markets by providing valuable information, building connections, and engaging with leads, prospects, and customers online in order to close more deals. It’s not about hard tactics and aggressive selling and it’s not about quick wins. It’s a long game that is successful only when used effectively: by networking.
Social selling can transform the way you sell—in a positive way. Here’s how it can change your business.
Small and mid-sized businesses have always had a difficult time competing with the large corporations in their industry. They simply don’t have the million or billion dollar marketing and advertising budgets that the big conglomerates have. But selling on social media has evened out the playing field. It’s completely free—all it requires is your dedication and time.
With millions of users active on social media sites, you can easily create brand awareness at no cost. You can get your name and logo out there for the world to see. With every piece of content you share, every blog entry you post, and every tweet you send out, you can familiarize your target audience with your brand. The more brand awareness you create and the more prospects get to know your company, the more deals you’ll be able to close.
Social selling is an excellent way of humanizing your brand. After all, you’re selling to human being. You can’t try to sell to them like a robot. Humanizing your brand is key to establishing, building, and nurturing relationships that will turn into sales. Social media gives you a chance to display your fun, quirky brand personality and to let prospects see, hear, and interact with the people within your company, instead of your logo. While many other marketing and selling techniques are cold, generic, and impersonal, social selling allows you to be human again.
Any sales rep will tell you how much more difficult it is to sell products or services to clients when he hasn’t had the opportunity to build a relationship with them. Social selling helps your sales reps more easily create loyal and trusting relationships with a larger number of prospects and customers. By posting valuable and informative content on social media, your salespeople can start to build trust and credibility. They can communicate directly with prospects by joining communities and expanding their networks and answering questions, appeasing concerns, and providing content where and when it’s needed.
Think about how much more effective your selling tactics would be if you already knew your prospects needs, desires, and pain points. What’s great about social selling is that you can find out exactly what your prospects care about simply by listening in on the public conversations happening on social media. Once you know what your prospects want, you can engage them in a more purposeful, significant, and relevant way in order to increase sales.
Every business will have at least a few imminent threats that come in the form of competitors. Naturally, you want to do anything you can to get prospects to buy from you instead of your competition. Social selling can help. As this selling technique is still relatively new, many companies have not yet jumped on board. If you establish a presence on social media now, early in the game, you can have an edge over your competition. By the time other companies start to realize the potential social media has for selling, you’ll have already built relationships with the prospects they’re targeting.
Rhys is a tenacious, top performing Senior Sales Recruiter with 15+ years of focused experience in the Digital Media, Mobile, Software, Technology and B2B verticals. He has a successful track record of headhunting top performing sales candidates for some of the most exciting brands in North America. He is a Certified Recruitment Specialist (CRS) and has expert experience in prospecting new business, client retention/renewals and managing top performing sales and recruitment teams. Rhys enjoys spending quality time with his wife, son, and daughters, BBQing on a hot summer day and tropical vacations.