The social selling toolkit: the technology you need to find and close new business online
1 Everyone from the Harvard Business Review to Gartner has said that at least 60 to 80 percent of the time, buyers begin the buying process without the involvement of sales. Prospects rarely even open - let alone responds to - cold sales emails. And they certainly don’t pick up the phone to answer cold calls.
But there’s at least one sales technique that still works: social selling.
2 Why you need to start social selling
Social selling is when salespeople use social media channels - like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook - to interact directly with individual prospects. It works because:
• Buyers are on social media. Research shows that at least 50 percent of B2B buyers (and 56 percent of B2C shoppers) refer to social media before making a purchase.
• It doesn’t take long to do. The Harvard Business Review says that B2B salespeople only need to invest between five and ten percent of their time each day to be successful social sellers.
• It gets results. There’s also a proven relationship between social selling and revenue; IBM experienced a 400 percent increase in sales as a direct result of a social selling pilot programme.
The best part about social selling? Anyone with a working internet connection and a few social media accounts can do it. Let’s get started.
What to expect from this toolkit
In this social selling toolkit, you’ll find:
• The technology you need to start social selling
• Advice to help you start social selling
• Tips and tricks for effective social selling
If you have questions or need more advice, get in touch with us. We don’t bite.
3 The 5 must-have tech tools you need to start social selling
Social selling is easy, but these tech tools will help you find, engage with and track leads on social more effectively.
1. Social media accounts
This is an obvious one, but it needs to be said: you can’t start selling on social media if you’re not on social media.
So the first step is to set up profiles on a few key platforms, if you don’t have them already. The general consensus is that LinkedIn and Twitter are the best platforms to be on if you’re going to be social selling. Facebook is good too, but probably optional depending on the industry you’re in. If it feels unprofessional to reach out to a prospect on a particular platform, like Facebook, then don’t do it.
Once you’ve got your profiles up and running, make sure you’ve got:
• a profile photo that’s recent and professional-looking. Please, no passport photos or holiday snaps;
• a short bio (biography) on Twitter that includes your job role and the name of the company you work for;
• some additional details on your LinkedIn profile like your job history, achievements and endorsements; and
• a link to your company website and some contact details.
4 If you’re reaching out to prospects and connecting with them on social media, there’s a good chance they’re going to take a look at your profile - especially if they’ve never met or heard from you before. So make sure it looks great.
2. Social listening tools
Social media is a great tool for selling and getting yourself out there, but it’s also a great resource for research.
Platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter can be great for intelligence gathering if you’ve got the right social listening tools. These are tools that let you filter through the noise on social media and get a sense for what people are talking about, what they’re saying about your company (and your competitors), and more.
Here are some social listening tools you can try:
• Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Social Engagement, which collects data from social media platforms and displays trends, sentiment, location data and more.
• Mention, which combines social monitoring with analytics and competitor analysis.
• Hootsuite, which monitors your mentions in real time.
There’s certainly no shortage of social listening and monitoring tools. Try a few different ones and pick one that you find easy to use, has features that fit your needs and ideally integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM) system - more on that later.
5 3. Tools for research and prospecting
Social media is also great for prospecting (in other words, finding leads). But that doesn’t mean you need to spend hours every day manually searching for people, reviewing their profiles and tracking leads.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator (which integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365) is an amazing tool for prospecting. You can:
• create lists of leads and prospects
• receive lead recommendations tailored to your ideal customer profile
• unlock profiles for leads who aren’t in your network;
• find new connections; and more.
If you want to get into social selling, you need a tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find leads and build a relationship with them. You need to be growing your network, not just selling to the connections you already have.
6 4. Social curation tools
The whole point of social selling is to connect with prospects on an individual level and help them by sharing relevant content, answering questions and more. This is where curation comes in.
By curating and sharing articles, infographics and other useful material with your networks, you’re:
A. Helping them find information and potential solutions to their problems and
B. Positioning yourself as a trusted resource.
But again, this doesn’t mean you have to spend hours each day scouring the web for the most relevant, brilliant content you can find. There are tools for that, such as Quuu and Feedly. You can find a nice list of curation tools here and here.
Dynamics 365 on its own is also a good social curation tool. With the Microsoft Sales Engagement integration, you can use the Social Selling Assistant to find, curate and share relevant content with your audiences. You can even link specific posts to customer records in your CRM.
The last thing you should be doing is spamming your social networks with brochures and articles about your products, or hitting them with a cold pitch. Take the time to curate helpful content, and use curation tools make an easier job of it.
5. A customer relationship management (CRM) system
A CRM system is essential whether you’re social selling or not. Every business, especially small and medium-sized ones, should be using CRM software. Why? Because research shows that knowing your customers and what they want correlates strongly with growth.
7 The right CRM system will also help you your social selling efforts enormously. With a CRM system like Dynamics 365, you can:
• Use your data to work out which social platforms are the best to target
• Analyse your social selling process to identify opportunities
• Attribute deals and prospects to specific social posts, platforms and other social selling activity
• Streamline your reporting, customer records and other sales data - which means no more spreadsheets!
• Build a dashboard with your sales KPIs via an integration with Power BI.
And really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Dynamics 365 is packed with features that will help your social selling efforts, from the Social Selling Assistant and the Relationship Sales tools to social monitoring functions and more. But if you need help choosing a CRM system, we’ve got a guide for that too.
8 Ready, set, sell
Social selling is one of the most low-cost, efficient ways to drive sales and increase revenue. Social sellers regularly exceed quotas, and companies like InContact have increased revenue per sale by 122 percent by engaging prospects on social media. As far as sales techniques go, this one’s a winner.
Now you’ve got the tools and the know-how to start social selling. Don’t worry if you’re not feeling 100 percent confident yet. The best thing you can do now is just log on and start engaging with prospects. It’s easier than it sounds, especially with the right tools.
Talk to us if you’d like some help setting up your social selling tech tools, or if you’d like to learn more about CRM. You can also find us on Twitter and LinkedIn, you know.
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