The Marketing Boutique

Social selling for B2B has lots of potentials. It’s time to bring proper learning practices and knowledge of this method to your sales team. Get them the social selling training because as you’ll read in this post, social selling is effective.

How Effective is Social Selling?

• 78% of salespeople using social media perform better than their peers (source)
• Sales reps who viewed the profiles of at least 10 people at each of their accounts were 69% more likely to exceed quota than those who viewed 4 or fewer (source)
• Social sellers generate 38% more new opportunities than traditional sellers (source)
• 90% of top salespeople use social selling tools, compared with 71% of overall sales professionals (source)
• 62% of employees at large companies agreed that social selling enables them to build stronger, more authentic relationships with customers and prospects
• Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing
• 63.4% of Social sellers reported an increase in company sales revenue, compared to 41.2% of non-social sellers (source)
• Sales teams who embrace social experience report 18% more pipeline (volume) and 28% velocity increase (source)
• The majority of social sellers with long-term training in place (78%) hit their revenue goals in the past 12 months versus those without formalized training (38%) (source)
• Salespeople leveraging social selling experience a 31% higher ROI than those who stick to traditional tactics (source)
• Content shared by employees receive 8x more engagement than the same content shared by company/brand channels (source)
• Brand messages are re-shared 24x more when shared by employees vs. brand/corporate accounts (source)
• 90% of an employee’s social audience is new to the brand (source)
• Messages reach 561% further when shared by employees vs. the same messages shared via official corporate social channels (source)
• Employees have on average 10 times more social connections than a brand does (source)
• 54% of salespeople who use social media can track their social media usage back to at least one closed deal (source)
• Sales reps who leverage social selling in their sales process are 79% more likely to attain their quota than those who don’t use it (source)
• Sales teams that use social selling techniques exceed their quota 31% more than non-users (source)

New Customer in social selling

Today, customers use the internet to help them identify their problems and form their own opinions about solutions. Your future customer has better access to information thanks to social sharing, blogs, content marketing, and the global connectivity of the Internet. We can engage with the company through many digital touchpoints during their research.

What’s changed in B2B selling is our prospective client now jumps between reviewing, asking friends for referrals to choosing a solution, going up and down the sales funnel many times. B2B purchases can now use social media to find, evaluate, and contact your salesperson in their own time, at their own pace.

CEB’s research estimated that about 60% of the purchase process is already completed before a B2B buyer approach a salesman. Potential customers now go to the negotiation table with a much better understanding of their problem and how it can be solved, backed up by statistics for better leverage.

Steps in B2B Social Selling

1. Set-up the right social media platforms
2. Listen and find the right prospects
3. Create content that provides value!
4. Post a social media update daily
5. Network and connect with your prospects
6. Engage and nurture your prospects (According to Linked’s research, prospects feel the most motivation to return a reach out when the sales rep has provided them with some type of value in return for their interaction. Be willing to create content that helps your prospects even though this might not bring in immediate revenue.)
7. Start a content marketing program and this could mean a daily posting on your Business Page on LinkedIn and three daily tweets on Twitter and Facebook and a weekly blog posting on your site.
8. Retain your customers and prospects with a newsletter, content and events.

Make Your Brand a Valuable Resource

A good way to build brand trust and connect with your target list online is to develop great content. It’s not just developing interesting content, you then need to promote the content and get your audience to engage with your content.

If you’re thinking that it sounds like a lot of work – you’re right. But, according to a social selling study performed by LinkedIn, buyers that are active in social media are open to hearing from salespeople and welcome input from industry experts. Therefore, try to position yourself as an expert in your industry.

How to help your brand provide value when social selling:

• Become an industry expert: Share answers or provide insight into how your processes are different
• Provide quick and easy how-to guides and video tutorials that are practical for your leads
• Build conversations by becoming an active listener and acknowledging those that engage with your brand

All this content is to help you when you reach out to your targeted audience, your lead list and you’ve got some brand muscle behind you.

use SOCIAL MEDIA as a:

• Brand Maker
• Sales Tool
• Community Builder
• Customer Service and Support
• Lead Generator
• Shared Effort with sales and marketing team

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