When I told B2B salespeople a few years ago how to leverage social selling in their work, I was mostly met with disbelief. Most salespeople said that social networks were good for promoting trendy consumer products for young people, but in B2B, personal contact still works best.
And this is precisely the paradox. Social Selling is used to support personal contacts. Proper use of social selling tools and techniques will make establishing sales contacts much more effective and when a phone call or a face-to-face meeting finally takes place, both parties will be convinced that they know each other very well.
In this article, you will learn how to use social selling methods guatemala business email list and tools to acquire valuable business contacts. I will also reveal my methods for building an expert image, which is very useful in B2B sales. You will also learn about the composition of the Social Selling Index and methods for increasing its value.
Why do sellers need social selling?
Social Selling in B2B is not intended to replace salespeople, but on the contrary – it is intended to streamline their work and increase their efficiency. How is this possible? In short, it is about getting rid of cold calling, or calling "blindly" to people we do not know and who do not know us.
Getting rid of cold calling does not mean getting rid of the phone as a work tool, but getting rid of the "cold" element. Social Selling will therefore be a tool for us to "warm up" sales conversations by establishing valuable relationships on social platforms and building an expert image.
This is for starters, the next stage will be the so-called Inbound Sales, i.e. the appearance of inquiries about the offer from people we don't know, who came to us after reading an interesting article or advice given on a social network. Does it seem too good to be true? Personally, I acquire about 80% of leads this way.
Of course, this requires some preparation and performing a number of activities that you have not previously associated with sales. However, if you read through this article and implement the advice I am sharing with you, it will certainly have a positive impact on your sales results. Please remember that it does not matter what size company you represent. I worked for large corporations for a dozen or so years, and I currently run a small consulting company - in both cases, the tactics described below work at a similar level.
LinkedIn regularly surveys the opinions of sellers and buyers who use social selling to show off the effectiveness of these practices. It turns out that buyers appreciate contact with a seller via social networks, provided that it is a sharing of knowledge.
From the perspective of sales effectiveness, Linkedin reports that active presence in Linkedin thematic groups increases the acquisition of unplanned sales opportunities by 70%.
Social Selling Index – check your social selling potential
Sometimes during training, when I hear from a salesperson that social selling is not working in his case, I look at his LinkedIn profile and answer (usually in my mind) – I am not surprised.
If your profile was created mainly for the purpose of looking for a job and serves as a CV, it is unlikely to help you with sales.
Good news - a good LinkedIn profile will be useful both in finding clients and in finding a job. I will just add for the record that the better you acquire clients via Linkedin, the more job offers you receive
.LinkedIn comes to the aid of assessing and developing our social selling skills by creating the Social Selling Index – a free tool that allows you to assess your sales potential on a social network – in this case, of course, LinkedIn.
