Currently, 43% of salespeople don’t hit their targets. If you’re a sales leader in a large business then I want to show you a different way of using social selling to hit more numbers and get more accounts.
Social selling on social media is all about building relationships. This is something that a lot of people fail to realise. The goal of your business and your team on social media is just to get more interactions and conversations with the right people.
Yet most of what people are doing is just blasting information at people. You’re not relationship building, you haven’t thought about a plan to develop any accounts and you’re not working to seed the value proposition.
Creating relationships
One of the key areas you need to focus on when social selling is building relationships with your prospects. When you or your sales team create their own content, it is easier to develop these relationships with the prospects directly.
By doing this, you and your salespeople will learn how the content that you post on your feed can generate interest in your business. This will help you write better content and will lead to inbound conversations with your prospects.
We teach the salespeople how to use their content to interact and build relationships because what you want from social selling is conversations. That’s the whole goal of the method, two-way relationships with prospects.
Value proposition posting
Seeding your value proposition is an important step of social selling. If you can manage this, then you are already using social media more strategically than 90% of the people on there.
Most people are blasting out promotions about how wonderful they are which is the complete opposite of what we are trying to achieve as that doesn’t add any value whatsoever.
Instead, we show salespeople how they can use posts to seed the value proposition in their prospects and get their content in front of the decision-makers on a regular basis.
Using intentional content
The next thing we do is take your content one step further by encouraging your salespeople to use intentional content to actually get a bite from their prospect. This can help sales teams see what their prospects are interested in while providing deeper insights, customised assets and defining their key pains.
So many sales and business developers forget that for your prospect to pay attention to your business and move to buy from you, they have to see that your product or service can help them with their current reality.
To ensure they see this in your content, it’s important to think about the following questions:
What challenges are your prospects facing within their business that you can fix?
What symptoms will these challenges be causing?
How can your product or service address these challenges?
What are the benefits of your product or service?
How is your product or service better than your competitors?
What are the things that you know you can help them with?
Does this method of social selling work?
If you’ve been on social media you’ve seen how cluttered it can be and how many sales pitches there are. Therefore, the key to unlocking sales on social media is not doing what everyone else is doing.
If you put a sales person on social media and tell them to fire out friend requests and connection requests and then follow up with sales messages two things will happen. Firstly, they will get in trouble with the platform as they will be seen as spam, and secondly their success rate will be just 1%.
Yet the majority of sales people are relying on this strategy. A strategy that 99% of the time won’t work. Our method of social selling is far more relational. While it’s not 100% successful and it will take some time to get used to, it will actually improve the number of conversations your team has with your prospects.
How can we prove this?
In order to monitor the impact of our social selling strategy, we did an experiment. We worked with 15 sales people from a FTSE listed company and trained them in this methodology. In just 3 months they had secured £2.6 million of business, actual invoiced business.
Look at the numbers, 15 people managed to secure £2.6 million worth of business in three months. How? Because they’re doing it the right way.
The Maverrik way of social selling
At Maverrik the first thing we’ll teach about social selling is how to get the attention of the prospects. When it comes to sales, your goal on social media is to actually end up in a two-way conversation with a prospect.
We will help your salespeople use their channels, their content, their interactions, and everything else on their social platforms in order to cement themselves at the top of the minds of your ideal prospects. This will help you remain relevant and seed your value proposition.
If you’re intrigued about how our method of social selling can work for your team then I’d like you to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Drop me a line and I will organise a full presentation on how this can work for you and how your sales team can hit their targets using social selling.
