Published June 2, 2020
What is Social Selling and why should you invest in it?
Marketing and Sales departments have long worked in silos and it is well known that on top of the agenda within businesses and organisations comes synchronization between these two departments.
You can describe Social Selling as the optimal and long-awaited bridge between sales and the marketing. The bridge that enables them to talk to each other, collaborate and drive towards the same goal. This is the focal point where both departments need each other to be successful in their growth.
Social Selling is still a relatively new concept and simply means that the sales team use social media to interact directly with their prospects. Social Selling is about building meaningful personal relationships between people and building relationships based on value. The more value, the better the result.
Social Selling is based on the fact that people want to talk to people, not brands. The more human we can be, the higher trust we will be able to create in our business relationships. This is often forgotten in the ocean of all push messages on various social platforms and in other marketing contexts.
As a part of the sales team, your goal is to reach your prospect in the research phase to influence the buying decision early, and in the concept of Social Selling, it simply means that the seller makes personal contact with the prospect during this time to be able to influence as early as possible in the buying process.
Especially for B2B companies, Social Selling is an incredibly powerful complement to paid marketing in social platforms, where sales and marketing can work on two fronts, target the audiences from two directions and significantly increase the chances of getting results.
Get started with Social Selling
Possibilities with AI and personalization in Social Selling
So how can you use artificial intelligence to be smarter and more efficient in your work? Below we share a tool that can help you in your social selling!
Your personality has a big impact on how you see the world and how you make decisions, and having an initial image of a person’s personality can be powerful for a salesperson to run a customized sales process, especially when the dialogue is mostly digital and the physical space where a large part of the personality radiates disappears.
There are a number of tools that can help us get a picture of the personality of a particular prospect including attitudes, driving forces and values that can be valuable to have knowledge about before entering a sales meeting. One such tool is Crystal Knows, which gives you a quick personality analysis based on a selected Linkedin profile with up to 80% accuracy.
This tool also has a feature called Conversation Coach, which gives you tips on how to communicate with this person to achieve a specific goal in, for example, a phone call, an email or a meeting.
It is also possible to compare the person’s personality with your own, to see how similar the personalities are. This can also be done on colleagues and people who will work together in teams to see how the personalities will work together.
How do we engage our organization and employees in Social Selling?
It is not enough that only a few engaged people work with Social Selling, the goal is to get as many people as possible to do so as this can give incredible results for the organisation.
For example, a report from Sociable showed that content shared by employees gets 8 times more engagement than content shared by brand channels. Another study from the Edelman Trust Barometer shows that content and sharing from employees imply 3 times more trust than content from the company’s own CEO. These studies among several others show the importance of employees creating and distributing content themselves.
If you have a strong culture, your employees can be your best ambassadors and best assets to spread your message and build trust in the brand outwards.
Therefore, invest time and money internally for an ambassador program for your employees, clarify incentives for them to get involved in this and set aside time in the work schedule for employees to make this a part of their work.
Below we have summarized how you engage your employees in Social Selling through 7 simple steps
Watch our latest webinar “Social selling during times you need it the most” here.
Some final tips on Linkedin
When are the best times to post on Linkedin?
If you look at times where Linkedin is mostly used and users are most engaged, it is:
- Mornings: Wednesdays and Thursdays between 8-10, as well as Fridays the same time
- Lunch time: Wednesdays and Thursdays 12-14
- Worst day to post: Sundays
How can I get better reach and engagement on my content?
- First, a good organic spread is about having a quality network from the beginning, with people who are very likely to engage with your content. In other words, people who find value in the knowledge and information you share.
- Get engagement early in your posts. Get help from colleagues and friends. This can help you get better spread
- Share your knowledge and dare to give tips to your network. Use the “Do this” message and post with “tips” in the title. Focus on analyzes, reflections and topics such as trends, future and new technology that are often of interest to many.
- Use native content. Try to avoid sharing links that drives people away from the Linkedin platform. Focus on creating content that is native such as writing your own article, post a photo or video with a matching copy or stick with text to make the words talk for themselves. As on other social media platform, content on Linkedin should strive to be as interesting, eye catching and relevant for the audience as possible (your network)
- Be engaged yourself. Showing interest to others, making comments, paying homage, or contributing their own thoughts in other people’s posts is also a way to show yourself and create opportunities for people to find you interesting.
- Dare to connect. That’s what the whole idea of Linkedin is.
Which CRM should you work with to be able to sync best with Linkedin?
Microsoft, the owner of Linkedin, also has a type of ownership relationship in Salesforce, which makes Salesforce advantageous when it comes to linking with Linkedin, Linkedin Sales Navigator and other tools.
From our own experience, we also recommend Hubspot that has been partially integrated into Linkedin and finally Pipedrive, with a simple but clear and good software that integrates with most things.
We hope you enjoyed the reading and gained some valuable insights about how to include social selling in your marketing strategy. If you’re still unsure for how to tackle things and go about it, we’re always at your disposal!
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pauline.wallander@socialview.se