What is social selling?

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Social networks have acquired strategic importance in sales development. By effectively leveraging your audiences (large or small), social selling enables you to identify potential prospects and boost sales on social platforms. How does it work? Here's how.

As marketing budgets shrink and social networking becomes increasingly important, social selling offers a cost-effective alternative for generating leads. How can you do this? By interacting directly with your prospects. By leveraging social networks, you can share relevant content, connect with potential customers and build credibility.

The benefits of Social Selling

To generate revenue, a company needs to attract prospects. To convert these prospects into customers, it's essential to start a conversation and build a relationship of trust that goes beyond simply satisfying their needs.

If in the past, prospecting and discovering opportunities could be long and tedious, and mainly involved cold calling, social networks have the advantage of making it easier to get in touch. A real Game Changer, they make it quicker and easier to target your buyer personas. Indeed, unlike "cold calling", which, as its name suggests, is cold and impersonal, social platforms enable sales reps to forge authentic and organic relationships, which can then be exploited to generate newbiz. How can they be used? Private messages, comments, shares, likes... are all ways of interacting with your future customers.

According to studies :

• 78.6% of people who use social networks have better results than those who don't.
• 98% of sales reps with over 5,000 LinkedIn contacts reach their sales quotas, compared with 52% of those with fewer than 250 connections.
• Social channels influence around 92% of B2B purchasing decisions
• In the United States, over 90% of companies use social media for marketing purposes.

How can I find social selling opportunities?

Your future customers very often express their needs on social networks, particularly on LinkedIn via "posts" or "job offers". By listening to them, you'll be able to determine what kind of problems they're looking to solve, and, if you're able to answer them, start a conversation to let them know. The more you learn about your prospects and their interests, demands and requirements, the better you'll be able to create a personalized sales pitch, a real asset in improving your sales chances.

Social selling strategies also help you discover :

• Who to target in an organization
• What your competitors are doing
• Trends in your sector
• Opportunities to collaborate with other brands and forge partnerships.

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Give meaning to your interactions

Social selling isn't about bombarding strangers with unsolicited DMs (that's spam). Nor is social selling about adding as many new contacts as possible to your mailing lists. If you want to generate leads, focus on quality rather than quantity. By presenting your service or brand as THE solution to a problem or need you've identified, you're more likely to build trust and loyalty... And, hopefully, convert your audience into customers when the time comes.

Optimize your Social Selling practices

But beware: becoming a successful social seller can't be improvised. Every sales program needs to be supported by a strategy. Establishing a social selling policy with your teams is essential to making social networks a central element of your business.

Remember, selling is about building relationships with your audience by learning from you what they need. As such, the conversation you have with prospects must bring value. Focus on solving customers' problems, rather than simply advertising products and services.

To win and convert leads via social networks, make sure you :

• Create a compelling profile with an insightful bio and compelling photo. Your profile should be as effective as a landing page / capture page.
• Use content strategically to demonstrate your value to your customers' needs. Then maintain this editorial line, while being regular.
• Monitor your customers' conversations (specific tools exist)
• Use tools to collect contact information (taking care to comply with RGPD) and create mailing lists.
• Join and create groups to expand your social community
• Track the results of your campaigns using analytical tools.

Ensure the alignment of your sales and marketing teams

The synchronization of the two departments on content production and curation, lead qualification and development stages is a guarantee of performance. Sales teams will be responsible for feeding back to the marketing department information on content that engages prospects. For their part, marketing teams will need the agility to prepare tailor-made materials, target the communication channels that generate the most leads, and align development initiatives (retargeting campaigns, etc.).

Like the Avengers, where each superhero possesses a unique power that contributes to the greatness of the Marvel universe, an allbound social selling strategy (inbound + outbound) will boost your performance and optimize your results. In this holistic approach, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts, each employee becomes a valuable link contributing to the company's success. Each Avenger initiates conversations with future customers, ultimately maximizing the visibility of the Marvel company. The result: exponential growth in brand awareness and new business.