Social Selling is being showcased as the best alternative to generating business over cold calling and traditional marketing methods. Some practices are easily transferable, others take more time to learn. Here are 7 tips that will help your team to social sell.
1. Optimise Everyone’s Profile
Before you get started your team needs an attractive profile. The profile is your leaflet, the brochure, the storefront. Just like any digital marketing campaign if people don’t like what they see they won’t advance any further. Additionally, if they don’t find you under the right search terms then you won’t be seen at all. Profiles need to be optimised for search, be branded for appeal and have reasonable calls to action to advance a lead.
2. Inspire Collaboration over Competition
Sporadic actions create hit-and-miss results. If you want to land bigger contracts, embolden your pipeline and become a bigger, better sales team as a whole you need a strategy everyone understands, implements and works together to achieve. You can’t do this if your own team are fighting over contacts, connections and prospects. Make sure one point of contact is established and instil a company culture of helping each other over stealing sales.
3. Set Actions as Deadlines Over Targets
One of the biggest challenges of social selling is keeping on top of the action. Posting content, engaging with others and sending messages may feel like a misuse of time, but it will aid the sales process. Content raises awareness, engaging warms up a prospect and messages create meetings. If you set actions as deadlines you’ll help your team to social sell through them understanding the social selling process better. It takes patience and a strategy to make social selling work, so creating sales targets rather than action targets may force your team to rush the process and miss out on more potential sales.
4. Create a Learning Culture
There is no one person that knows everything. Even Einstien would struggle with his first kickflip. This is why inspiring others to keep learning will help your team to social sell. Whether they are learning to create better content, how to approach a new prospect or how a new tool works. Learning is forever and you need to give your team room to grow and workshops, courses or just time to better themselves.
5. Leverage Social Tools
There are so many prospecting tools online. Tools that can help you reach those key prospects looking for your businesses services. Not everyone is willing to buy straight away, but growing your network and surrounding yourself with potential leads won’t hurt. Learning social tools will also help you understand the platform better and how you can position yourself in front of more prospects.
6. Track Performance
Even if your team have room to grow you need to be able to track how they are growing. Then, you can spot those team members who need additional training. There are many different factors that can influence social selling. Helping your team to social sell isn’t just about giving them space it’s about knowing when to step in and help. Creativity for posting content can be a factor. Misunderstanding the value offering is another. You can track performance through posting metrics, a number of actions taken, or even bluntly the number of sales. What is important is understanding what isn’t working.
7. Invest in Courses and Workshops
You can find courses and workshops pretty much anywhere and each offers its own style and approach. Some take a hands-off approach with the materials presented right in front of you. Others, take a hands-on approach. Evaluating each step to make sure the person understands the material and has a clear path forwards. The difference between in-house learning and courses/workshops is the approach. These courses and workshops can deep dive into topics that will help your team to social sell.
If your team are struggling to adapt to online practices especially when it comes to selling, you need to make sure your team understands social media. What makes a good message, how to interact with leads and what makes a good profile. Without any understanding of how social media works online they could end up hurting the businesses image over paving new avenues for company growth.
