Traditional selling channels are practically obsolete. People now rarely answer phones calls from strangers or open emails that they know are sales pitches. Most customers now research companies and their products extensively online and are already well-educated about products when they contact sales staff. Millennials, who often conduct initial research for business products, have embraced social media more the older generations.
In this new environment, social selling has risen to prominence and taken a large share the marketing and sales funnel. Over a third of sales and marketing decision-makers surveyed (36 percent) believe social selling will become the “default way to engage with buyers in the future,” according to Forrester Consulting. B2B sellers who have embraced social selling outperform their peers by 72 percent.
The Leading Role of Marketing
Marketing departments play an instrumental role in developing successful social selling programs. Marketing may fund and select technology solutions. The marketing staff often creates and curates content and monitors social media to locate user-generated content and customer comments about company products. For that reason, it’s important to select a marketing staff member who works well with sales to lead the social media marketing program.
Effective social selling requires relevant content, properly trained staff and social media listening. Mary Shea, principal analyst at Forrester Shane and Amy McIlwain, global industry principal at Hootsuite, offered these tips to develop an effective social selling program during a Hootsuite webinar.
- Identify key people at different departments whose support will be needed. Make sure they understand the program’s goals, benefits, resources involved and ways to mitigate risks. Be sure to specify what’s needed from them and to explain the potential benefits for them, as opposed assigning them another task.
- Find examples of current outstanding social sellers working on their own internally in order to create case studies and secure buy in from the organization. As the program progresses, publicize successes internally.
- Develop a content plan. Content is integral for social selling. First locate content the organization already has and take advantage of user-generated content. Seek content that covers all stages of the customer’s sales journey, including awareness, consideration and decision. Some sellers may want to write articles or take photos or videos of behind the scenes events. Marketers can help them create that content.
- Train staff. Training is essential to help the staff create social media profiles that exude trust and authority, and build a digital presence that weaves the brand into messages. It’s crucial to know what content is private and what is public. Posts they think are private but are actually public can cause embarrassment. Ongoing training is needed to prevent social selling from declining significantly in a few months. Appreciate that sellers have different aptitudes and require different levels of support. Some are social media savvy but lack selling skills. Provide them with selling skills training.
- Launch the program at a company event with all employees attending to build excitement and “buzz.” After the company-wide launch, training can be delivered remotely or in small groups.
Importance of Social Media Listening
Social listening is the first and one of the most important elements of social selling. “It’s about finding out where those conversations are taking place, and engaging with the people having those discussions,” writes Lucy Rendler-Kaplan, founder of Arkay Marketing and PR, in Social Media Today. “It’s also about responding, delivering content to them when they’ve shown interest, and helping them with problems where you can.”
When seeking a social media listening tool, seek a solution that:
- Can monitor multiple keywords across multiple social media platforms and integrate reports into one intuitive, customizable dashboard.
- Allows advanced search operators, also called Boolean search terms. Search operators such as AND, OR, NOT and punctuation like parenthesis and quotes let users find more targeted results and eliminate irrelevant mentions.
- Can monitor all mentions of your company and brands including common misspellings, nicknames and acronyms.
- Can monitor names of competitors and their products. When someone complains about a competitor’s product, your company’s representatives can introduce your product.
- Monitors for general industry terms, product categories, and keyword phrases people use when searching for solutions to their problems. Listening for those keywords can reveal potential customers that the sales force can engage.
- Can measure the effectiveness of social selling by tracking content shared, engagement rates, and other metrics in a single integrated dashboard.
Bottom Line: A fully-integrated program of social selling can accelerate sales growth for most all companies. Buyers increasingly frequent social media and eschew traditional sales channels. Aligning sales and marketing departments, training the sales staff, and social media listening comprise the main ingredients of a winning social selling program.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
