Can social selling improve your bottom line? If you play your cards right, then there's a solid chance.
The opportunities available are great - according to data from LinkedIn, over three-quarters of B2B buyers head to social media when they want to find out more about the products they're thinking about buying. On the other hand, only 31% of salespeople say they use social channels to nurture leads.
So what's the best way to close more deals via social?
Consider the way things work in the offline world - If someone walks into a store, a salesperson will approach them and start a conversation to find out their pain points and determine what kind of help they need. He or she will interact with the customer in a friendly manner to build trust before showing how his or her product can help.
You can follow a similar process online, which is far more effective than using a "one size fits all," broadcast-oriented approach.
Here are three tips to heed so you can become a social selling master.
1. Track Conversations About Your Niche
Technology makes listening in on what people are saying about your brand or niche simple.
Pay attention to what people are posting on social media about your industry, your brand and your competitors using a monitoring tool like Brand Mentions. As you track the chatter, pay extra close attention to each person's problems and pain points. The way to make sales os to connect with customers, so you need to know the pain points that those individuals have.
Over time, this type of listening will also give you a holistic sense of the pain points that are most common among the buyers you're trying to engage with as they advance along their journeys. If you can publish content resources that addresses these pain points, then you'll also have great links to share with future prospects, helping to strengthen the sense that you're a worthy, go-to hub of useful information.
Listening tip for advanced social sellers: Use Quora to learn more about what buyers in your industry want to know.
An awesome social network that allows people to build specialized authority by answering questions from the general public, Quora is also an extremely useful listening platform.
Source: https://www.quora.com/search?q=car+insurance
Follow topics relevant to your industry and you can build yourself a powerful news feed of relevant questions being asked and answered. You can use this to spot weaknesses in competitors' products, to address perceived weaknesses in your own and to know what content you need to publish for eventual sharing with leads on a one-on-one basis.
2. Import and Organize Your Leads
Unless you plan to type each email address and phone number into your customer relationship management (CRM) system, you're going to need to use automation tools in come capacity. Organizing and prioritizing your leads is simple to automate without affecting the personal relationships that'll drive any eventual sale.
Not every email address that you capture via landing pages is truly sales-qualified, so segmenting and scoring are critical, allowing your sales team to concentrate on the most likely potential customers.
Lead import tip for advanced social sellers: Use IFTTT with Twitter search and spreadsheets to log the most relevant chatter.
Twitter conversations are, as a whole, posted for everyone to see, and it's also generally acceptable for users to chime in on discussions, even those being conducted among strangers. It's this functionality and culture that makes Twitter so great for social selling. By tracking and responding to these conversations, you can easily offer your help to Twitter users who are unhappy with your competitors' products.
Just plug your competitors' Twitter handles and product names into Twitter's advanced search, and up will pop a listing of all the unhappy campers.
You can even save time and automate this process by setting up queries in IFTTT, which will then deliver all your results to a spreadsheet in your Google Drive account.
Source: https://ifttt.com
Your sales team can then use the spreadsheet data to contact individual Twitter users.
3. Build Relationships Gradually
No one wants to receive a pitch from a stranger - it's nurturing leads that drives sales.
A study from DemandGen found that B2B lead nurturing increases sales conversions by 20% - people want to buy from sources they are familiar with and trust. You can establish trust by sharing your specialized knowledge and giving advice freely. Sharing links to others' relevant content likewise raises positive perceptions of your brand and expertise. Share what you know.
Being an expert can only help sales when people can see the extent of your knowledge and how much you are keen on using it to help them. There are even tools like HubSpot's drip campaigns, Nurture and GetResponse's autoresponders that can email sequences of relevant links to leads over time. These content drips go out according to scoring rules and recipient action triggers that you set up, giving an almost personalized user experience.
Nurturing tip for advanced social sellers: Use Leadfeeder to know more about your website's anonymous visitors.
If someone's found your website and thinks it might be useful, then he or she could be a lead you'd do well to reach out to. However, unless they leave their contact details on a form, you have no way of knowing who they are and how to reach them.
Leadfeeder is a tool that tells you the pages that each prospect has visited, as well as giving you the name of the company they work for and their contact details.
Source: https://www.leadfeeder.com/
When you nurture leads with their browsing patterns in mind, you can identify what aspects of your product they care about most, and how sales-ready a prospect is. Setting up Leadfeeder is as simple as registering and granting the program access your Google Analytics account.
Making the Sale
Social tools make it easier to engage with large numbers of leads who are in varying stages of researching their purchase. Every company can make more sales when social selling techniques and tools are used to their full potential.
Making the sale is obviously your ultimate objective, but it's a long and winding road to build your brand equity and one-on-one relationships before each prospect is ready to hear a pitch. Social tools make that journey easier, and make it possible to convert many more prospects into customers.