Q: In the world of sales, what is social selling?
A: Social selling will eventually become just selling. But until that happens, social selling involves salespeople using social media as a layer over top of their existing sales process. For instance, instead of making a cold call or spray & pray email campaign, you could leverage social insights to make your communication more impactful and successful. It involves eliminating dark periods from the sales process by allowing for much touch points over social media.
Q: Do you have any GREAT ideas for combining social media and sales?
A: Social selling will eventually become just selling. But until that happens, social selling involves salespeople using social media as a layer over top of their existing sales process. For instance, instead of making a cold call or spray & pray email campaign, you could leverage social insights to make your communication more impactful and successful. It involves eliminating dark periods from the sales process by allowing for much touch points over social media.
Q: How do you encourage a sales team to use social software?
A: Education, training and executive buy-in. Salespeople are revenue generating machines and need see proof upfront that the will be a greater return if they invest the time into social tactics instead of hitting their quotas. These is already proven and studies like Aberdeen Group clearly demonstrate reps embracing social bury those that don't as far as quota attainment. Next is to provide the right training. People like myself and several others specialize social selling training for global companies around embracing the right social networks and how they can support the sales process to help achieve success. The last part is selecting the right tools that are easy to use, intuitive, and provide great support and training. I recommend HootSuite, or tools like it, to help aggregate all social activity to one area for efficiency which makes the transition easier. It is also useful if you put in a gamification strategy as well since salespeople are inherently competitive.
Q: What are your favorite Social Selling tools?
HootSuite - I use HootSuite to manage all of my social channels. It is my central command center to manage my social media activities from.
Little Bird - Little Bird helps me to identify key influencers in my niche or vertical to connect and engage with. This helps to build credibility.
KiteDesk - Kitedesk allows me to bring Salesforce with me when I surf the web or engage on social. It allows me to mouse over someone and Kitedesk display key information about the contact thereby eliminating the need to jump back and forth wasting valuable time.
Trendspottr - Trendspottr allows me to curate trending content around a specific topic, industry, or niche. Sharing trending content assures you will be adding value with your content helping to establish thought leadership and trust.
Nimble - A great social crm platform the gives you all the social intelligence you need when executing a social sales process.