Six Steps to Social Selling Success
3. SIMPLIFY PROSPECTING
Barnes says that one of the greatest benefits afforded by social media is the ability to research and learn about new leads. But finding leads online can sometimes be tricky—profiles can be marred by inconsistencies, including with names and the email accounts linked to them.
Fortunately, a number of technologies are designed to ease that process. Hootsuite’s Sales Prodigy product, for instance, links with CRM systems to surface the social media profiles of leads. Users can customize their Hootsuite listening streams to alert them when a keyword they have specified is being used, and to get a better notion of when it is appropriate to begin a conversation.
Similarly, Velocify provides through its sales enablement platform a SocialCaddy feature that give reps the resources for researching new accounts and making introductions. Users are given access to their contacts’ LinkedIn, Facebook, and Crunchbase profiles all within the same window. Using the tool, sales pros can augment existing contacts with additional information that might not have been readily available otherwise, and find new contacts tied to the accounts they are selling to, which can be useful when there are multiple decision makers involved in a purchase. The tool can also surface the email accounts most likely tied to these names, making it easier to contact them.
4. RESEARCH FOR CONTEXT
Finding prospects is the first challenge; finding out more about them, however, can really move a deal forward. And that, Barnes says, is another chief advantage of social media: the contextual insights it yields.
Indeed, at a party, those who tend to be most successful at making new acquaintances are the ones who can get to the heart of what matters to the person they’re talking to, and discuss it in a genuine manner. Similarly, to get an authentic conversation going online, it’s best to learn a few things about the person, ask questions, and maintain dialogue that holds his attention.
Dickie also stresses the power of context. “Social media is a great source of information on new accounts you want to sell into,” he says. This is particularly important, Dickie notes, in light of a recent CSO Insights study that found that the top goal for sales leaders in 2016 was to get their organizations to close new accounts. That is hard to achieve with inaccurate information.
On social networks, people tend to post information about themselves that they often don’t advertise in person. Typically, for instance, we don’t walk around with signs telling people where we went to school, or what social club we belonged to. But on Twitter, professionals will often post about the subjects that are most relevant to their organizations, and mark their profiles with hashtags that describe their primary roles in a company. On LinkedIn and Facebook, they’ll like posts shared by others that reveal something about their current concerns.
“Social is one of the things you can use best to understand the buyer’s situation,” Barnes adds. A salesperson can figure out through online signals, for instance, if investing in a specific piece of software is a prospect’s top priority at the moment, simply an item on the agenda, or something for the back burner.
Many clues can be gleaned through a user’s behavior alone. With the right tools, one can keep tabs, for instance, on what content a person is downloading from a vendor’s Web site, what videos she is sharing with her friends, and what she is “liking” or responding to in real time.
Two companies, Clearslide and PeopleLinx, recently collaborated to provide a tool that allows users to track a customer or prospect’s behavior to determine interest, while linking the insights to social selling tools. The partnership allows sellers to get real-time notifications whenever content shared through Clearslide is opened, giving them insight into what content clients are responding to and showing interest in.
Understandably, many companies still wish to implement standardized and repeatable sales processes. But staying aligned with that philosophy becomes tougher if buyers are in various stages of the journey when they are approached by salespeople.
Barnes encourages a more spontaneous approach, and recommends using social media “to have more of a dialogue...and then [to] adapt your behavior based on what the customer is telling you.” If the customer who’s interested in buying a new software solution suggests at a certain point that he’d like to view a demo, it would be wise to honor his request rather than follow the sales process script.