7 years ago
February 21, 2017

How to Get Your Sales Team to Use Social Media to Their Advantage

In this article, we’ll discuss the advantages of social media and how to get your sales team on board.

Claire McConnachie Recruiter
Claire McConnachie

The modern sales team should be putting a lot of attention on social media. IT’s such a ubiquitous part of modern life, that regardless of your target demographic or the nature of your product, there’s almost certainly an advantage to be leveraged through a clever social media campaign. But not every sales team has bought in to the growth of social media or developed the strategies they need to survive in this new field. In this article, we’ll discuss the advantages of social media, how to get your team on board, and what to expect as you learn the ropes.

Value of social media. 

There are numerous areas that social media can benefit a sales team, but three stand out above the others as especially worthy of attention:  Cultivating your image, finding new prospects, and developing your relationship with current customers. Each of these should be a high priority for any sales team, so the fact that you can check off all three with a single tool should get the attention of anyone looking to improve their efficiency and efficacy. Entire businesses live on their social media presence, and while you may not be positioned for that level of success due to demographics or product type, you can certainly see some of those gains.

Causes of weak buy in. 

Selling your sales team on social media isn’t always the easiest task. They may pay lip service to the idea of a social campaign, put in token effort, but a good manager will easily be able to spot a lackluster buy-in. What’s more difficult to spot is the reason behind it. If your team trends older and more established, they may not appreciate the value of the new technology. Or, they may recognize the value on some level, but underestimate it and thus put aside the admittedly difficult task of learning an entire new arena of sales. Management can also be at fault-enthusiasm and a willingness to work hard to develop strategies, tactics, and practical measures for implementing a social media campaign are all vital to developing buy-in.

Encouraging use. 

Half of getting your team to begin utilizing social media properly lay in putting in the effort to encourage proper use. That means knowing what mileage you can get out of social media, then sharing that knowledge with your team. It’s not enough to simply tell your team ‘use social media more’, you need to provide a foundation, something your team can look at as a jumping off point for developing a more detailed, nuanced strategy. Knowledge is most definitely power in this instance.

Providing the tools. 

Sometimes, sales teams underutilize social media because they lack the tools for efficient campaigns. There are countless pieces of software on the market, designed to automate, organize, and analyze every Tweet, Facebook post, LinkedIn connection, and Quora answer. None of these are, strictly speaking, necessary to put together a strong social media presence, but your sales team will have a much easier time-and be more encouraged to experiment, seeing that you’ve invested in the effort.

Checking the numbers. 

To keep your sales team working effectively with social media, you need analytics and hard data you can point to. Whether you’re trying to encourage buy-in by showing what the early adapters have accomplished or trying to cut wasted efforts and improve useful ones by thorough analysis, you need to be keeping track of your social media efforts and how they correlate to sales, customer satisfaction, and public image. A ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach to social media will only waste time. That’s most definitely not how you want your sales team to be using social media.

Claire McConnachie Recruiter

Claire McConnachie

Claire has 4+ years of experience in sales and recruitment. As a Director of Client Services, her main objective is to connect great people to great companies by building strong relationships with both top clients and candidates in the sales industry. She specializes in sales roles of all seniority levels for both enterprise and start-up clients North American wide. When Claire isn't networking with top talent, she enjoys being outdoors, traveling and spending time with friends & family.

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