Gone are the days when you could pick up your phone to call or send a cold email to land a meeting right away! Given the immense pressures and nerve-racking competition from all corners, the process of lead generation is becoming difficult. Having a tried and tested system that works well for sales and marketing teams is no longer enough. You need to discover effective ways to connect with modern buyers.
That’s where the concept of social selling comes into the picture. An innovative mechanism that allows you to discover prospects and nurture relationships, to connect with them in more ways than one. You get to be an invaluable part of an ongoing conversation. With a few customized online tools, you can laser-target your prospecting capabilities.
With the right social conversation, you get to learn the new ways to strengthen and influence the one-on-one relationship with your buyers…and that’s the theme for today’s unique webinar. You’ll discover useful hacks for systemized social selling processes. These tips come straight from Jack Kosakowski, an experienced sales professional who’s also the Global head of social sales at Creation Agency. Let’s discover the key takeaways from an engaging webinar.
Discover prospects through social platforms and qualify them
Before starting a social conversation with a prospect, you need to qualify if somebody is social enough (or not.) Once you have the relevant information, you can invest your energy into a new social conversation. First off, it’s highly recommended that you download a powerful chrome plug-in called 360social. The handy tool will tell you everything relevant about your prospect, starting with every social platform your prospect lives on. You can quickly know the personal and professional websites that are associated with your prospect. You also get to know the Klout score, which is a numerical value between 1 to 100, usually known to gauge the social activeness.
Next step – More research
So, you have double checked whether,
- The prospect is social enough
- The prospect is present on multiple social platforms.
Now is the perfect time to browse through their recent social activity and understand the underlying sentiment. Always collect enough information to leverage, making sure you don’t waste time on wrong prospects. Basic prospect research will help you decide whether someone is worth your time.
Now is the time for the “value touches”
Start following your prospects on social platforms. Once you do that, you enter into their world. You are pretty much visible to everyone. You need to start offering something relevant to get their attention, so you have a chance to move your conversation offline. If you want people to want to give you their time, this is the only formula that will help you achieve that.
Become valuable for your prospects
Research and find out if they have any new events or webinars that are coming out. Also, if you found an attractive piece of content like a blog post or report, share it out and tag your prospect. Follow the same process on every social platform. Just find something relevant and share it. This is the best approach to begin the process of social engagement. That’s how you create a conversation and integrate them into your sales process.
The strategy is quite simple. You are closely following their content and putting the right content in front of more people. The prospects might notice that your offering personal and professional value at each stage.
Use Feedly to save time
Use Feedly plug-in to consistently know what content just came out and is leading in your industry. Discover and select the content which is latest, valuable, and makes you look like an expert. You can also schedule the sharing activities through a powerful tool like Buffer.
For instance, let’s say you’re trying to connect with the prospect who is a VP of a company and he’s just shared something very relevant to their niche. By sharing his post across many social platforms, a wider audience will get a rich value from it. You also get the opportunity to tag your prospect and show that you’re an advocate of their ideas. When sharing the content, always mention the author and use hashtags that you want to dominate.
Concluding thoughts
Social platforms offer a fantastic way for you to become an extension of your prospect’s team and be there advocate. Once you make a habit of doing the value touches periodically, you’ll see an increase in your social activity and expertise. With time, you have more confidence, and you’ll never feel awkward once you get to an offline conversation. It’s like you’ve broken the ice over the social channels and just naturally following the direction in a professional relationship. Your prospects would love to work with a person they already know, whose face is familiar and is fighting for them. That’s how you create great relationships through social selling.
In a nutshell, for value-driven organizations, social selling is going to be pivotal to their sales process. It’s the responsibility of the C-level executives to find the best way to train their marketing and sales departments for the upcoming obstacles along the way. Invest your time and energy since the benefits outweigh the challenges that you might experience in the beginning. The better numbers at the end of the quarter will surely be worth the effort.
Using social selling has already inspired many organizations to adopt it as a full-time strategy for the sales departments. The early adopters are using creative ways to challenge old sales methodologies and churning up excellent ROI. If you’re ready to get some socially active customers on board, sign up and watch the entire webinar containing valuable tips to understand the concept of social selling through the eyes of an expert.
