Six Steps to Social Selling Success
5. MAKE CONTENT READILY AVAILABLE
It’s no secret that a great way to engage people is by sharing articles and videos with them.
However, while salespeople should undoubtedly be doing all they can to learn about and converse with prospects, they shouldn’t be spending much time creating or searching for articles to distribute.
For a formal social selling plan to work, a business ought to be “prepared for the amount and variety of content that the sales force will consume,” Shea says. “Marketing has to be prepared with content and resources to support and enable the program post-rollout.”
An ideal (though somewhat unlikely) scenario is one in which marketing has created all the content that salespeople need and has made it easily searchable.
Indeed, analysts highly recommend that sales and marketing departments are aligned on their content strategies. Dickie, for instance, asserts that an organization’s “strategy for social selling needs to be fully aligned to the company’s strategy for doing ‘social marketing.’”
However, it’s true that many smaller, less equipped companies are simply not advanced enough to have marketing keep up with the sales team’s need for relevant content.
This is why one social selling vendor, rFactr, has formed partnerships with outside content providers to fill in gaps for organizations. With its SocialPort tool, companies can find content from Forbes and other media outlets that is relevant to sales conversations and share it. The system is built to notify reps when they need to engage prospects, schedule posts on various social networks, and track the resulting engagements. The activity is also tied to CRM to provide a revenue attribution.
“It’s one thing to have content [available] at a brand level; it’s a whole other thing to have content that is sophisticated and segmented for buyers, regions, product, industry focus, et cetera,” says Richard Brasser, CEO of rFactr. “We’ve seen that as you get more sophisticated, the impact and the ability for that content to actually engage the customers goes up exponentially.
“You might have the best system in the world, but if you’re spraying bad content into the world, it’s really not going to work and you’re going to say, ‘See, I told you social doesn’t work in our industry, or it doesn’t work for a company like ours,’” he adds. “Well, the problem [is often] the actual content, not the quality of the system, or its ability to move the needle.”
Brasser cites the example of Force Management, a provider of products and services to B2B sales organizations. For this company, comprised of many sellers who rely on traditional methods, it was important to tap into the power of social media. With SocialPort, the company was able to step up its game and generate $1.3 million in revenue from new leads.
Similarly, there are tools designed to help salespeople balance communications and keep their conversations going by providing practical tips for engaging buyers, and recommending the next best actions to take. LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator app allows salespeople to stay on top of the happenings of their most important clients and prospects, notifying them when they have work anniversaries, for instance, or have changed jobs.
And don’t overlook content generated by buyers or potential buyers themselves. Andreas suggests “[showing] the love” by sharing or retweeting blog posts, or other content, from prospects.
6. DON’T FORGET TO CALL
Because there is so much data on prospects available online, Barnes says, it’s important that reps don’t overdo the research portions of the job, or enter a stage of “contact phobia.” From a sales manager’s standpoint, “you can’t have people hide behind research all day long and not do anything,” he says. What’s important is to find the research sweet spot, and to learn to focus on contacting those customers who are most likely to close.
And with all the technologies available, it might be easy to forget that calling people and having them hear your voice, potentially even meeting you in person, is important. “Calling still matters,” Barnes asserts.
Cold calls are undeniably less popular than they once were because there are so many other ways to contact a prospect. However, the preparation enabled by social media enables what Barnes refers to as “warm calls.”
As mentioned above, there are technologies, like rFactr’s, that aim to make it easier to measure the ROI from social selling. But in terms of payoff, if social media efforts lead to better hits and response rates on emails, that’s a good sign that the efforts are beginning to pay off. And as little as a 1.5 percent increase in call success rates suggests an improvement, Barnes argues. Even such small boosts can give you confidence that you’re on the right social selling track.
Associate Editor Oren Smilansky can be reached at osmilansky@infotoday.com.