Immortal Tips For Social Selling!

“A-B-C. A: always, B: be, C: closing,” is the immortal advice Alec Baldwin’s character Blake imparts to a group of hapless salesmen within the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. This basic sales tenet has not changed much since, but the role of sales and marketing has definitely moved on (for the better).

Although many companies are taking social selling seriously lately and developing a solid social selling strategy, who within your organization actually owns it?

The obvious answer would be the sales team. They’re those selling. But the truth is that in many organizations, marketing is driving the initiative in terms of social techniques, where to prospect, and creating content that drives the conversation and engagement with potential buyers. In some cases, the marketing department is even funding the value of the technology employed by sales to try and do social selling.

There is definitely tons of “selling” involved in social selling, and therefore the sales team needs training on creating personal brands, using social listening technology, engagement, and measuring their success. But the marketing department has a crucial role to play in most organizations.

Identifying Watering Holes

By using an equivalent buyer personas created and employed by the marketing department to develop the general marketing strategy, marketing can identify the proper micro markets for sales to focus their social selling efforts on social channels, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Compile an inventory of online groups, forums, and key influencers your sales people should follow and obtain to understand .

Sharing Social Media Techniques

Marketing departments are engaging with their audiences via social media for years and can have a longtime social selling strategy, which sales teams got to cash in of and integrate with. Sales should start by social listening and plugging into online conversations to know the important issues and topics of potential prospects. This would fuel authentic conversations.

Empower Sales to possess Intelligent Conversations

Social selling is far more about sharing quality content than driving a sales angle. Marketing should have a library of developed and curated content to share with sales for target personas, hopefully for every stage of the sales cycle. Build social selling campaigns “in a box” that share the proper messages, the proper calls to action, and within the right format for social channels for sales to simply deploy. Adding some creative elements or image files can help improve engagement for the team’s developed posts and messages.

Sales Training and Enablement

The “last mile” in any good campaign is sales enablement. Marketing must make sure that the sales team understands the campaign messaging and what materials are available, also as where to seek out them easily. Ensure there's sales leadership support. The campaign launch should be a part of standard sales training or enablement, in order that the sales team see it as something they have to try and do, rather just information from marketing.

Working Together for Your Social Selling Strategy

The best a part of social selling is that it gives sales and marketing another opportunity to figure together within the ever-blending roles of the 2 teams. With the customer experience at the middle of both marketing and sales division strategies lately , only by working together will social selling succeed. It’s called social selling, but there’s tons of selling involved.

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