In theory, savvy sales managers know the benefits of plugging their teams into social media; however, for many, translating that into practise remains problematic. With a lack of understanding, visible ROI and a coherent social strategy in place, managers face many obstacles when trying to convince their sales teams about the value of being a ‘social seller.’ Here are the top five reasons to help get your team ready to play the social selling game.
1. People buy people, not products.
At the end of the day, it’s always about people. Companies know this. They spend millions of marketing and advertising dollars to position their brands in a way that resonates with their customers. Therefore, companies sell a feeling, or a solution, rather than a product. A great example is Black and Decker – an American manufacturer of industrial tools and household hardware. When deciding how to market one of their newest drills, marketers debated long and hard about how to position it. They broke it down into two potential scenarios: do they sell drills, or do they sell solutions to drill holes? What are you selling? drills or solutions?
2. You have a network, so use it
Of course, the goal is to continue to grow your professional network. At some point though, you must think about the quality of those connections. By having a robust, search strategy – aided with professional, premium search tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator – you can become proactive versus reactive in the connection process, aiming for those people that can be an asset rather than passively accepting or rejecting random connection requests.
3. Tapping into your team
Multi-threading is that act of taking your connections and exponentially growing them through your team, or vice-versa. In other words, leveraging the power of your team to penetrate an account and uncover the buying committee. Did you know that current data suggests that seven members make the buying decisions within a company? The question is how well connected are you within those key accounts, and how can the power of your team help?
4. Controlling the message
Whether you want to believe it or not, people – and potential clients – are looking at social media to gain insights about you and your company. Sadly, many do not take this as an opportunity to build thought leadership, credibility and trust. Just advertising on your company web page doesn’t cut it anymore. Companies are starting to recognize the power of positive positioning in the social space in gaining heart and mindshare of potential and existing clients. Yes, everyone is looking for a challenger, but building relationships still have the highest initial priority. Reminder: for potential customers, YOU ARE THE COMPANY to them, and IT IS PERSONAL. Why not leverage social media – in the case of LinkedIn – and build a professional brand that can give those potential customers a reason to choose your company by choosing you, first. Humanize your brand with authentic content combined with a customer-centric LinkedIn profile to seal the deal.
5. Your customers are looking for you
In case you haven’t heard, the buyer’s journey has changed. Your potential customers are using the internet 80% of the time to research products and services – and, yes, YOU. Now more than ever, it is essential to adopt a positive social media strategy for your B2B approach in the digital space. Pulling together all these reasons, you begin to understand the power of social media at influencing your business opportunities. When done consistently, things like thought-leadership and professional branding online can disrupt that buyers’ journey and bring them to the same side of the table with you, instead of someone else.
Hopefully, these five tips have given you the insights needed to make a better case, at least, for a better conversation about social selling adoption within your sales team. If you would like to know a bit more about how social selling is disrupting the modern sales journey of today’s modern buyer, yielding greater business opportunities, Read our 4-step guide to start leveraging Social Media for Sales teams.
