We talk so much about social selling at WSI because your competition is out social selling you using social media. There is a new salespeople breed that is using a new way of building and maintaining relationships online with modern buyers and even engaging them earlier in the buying process. And a lot of times, even beating you in closing a sale with the buyer before you have a chance to. Like it or not, Millennials will represent 50% of the workforce by 2020. These digital natives will be found in a salesperson shoes as well as in decision maker shoes.
The reason social marketing and social selling are important is because they lead you to position yourself as an expert. The buyer will also see you as a resource that adds value, at the business level and person level. Social selling also allows you to show your “human” side online. People buy from people they like.
We get that harnessing social media is scary and time consuming. Get pass the difficulty to be able to see the opportunity that it represents. You have to start somewhere and hopefully this infographic will help you get started with building a routine:
- Step 1: content is king. Find content that is relevant to your buyers and don’t share everything and anything that you find online.
- Step 2: share the selected content with your social networks and be attentive and respond to any inquiries you receive following the post.
- Step 3: the social media platforms allow you to track and measure responses from your posts. Make full use of it.
- Step 4: potential buyers will reach out directly to you by requesting to be connected with you as a 1st degree connection to easily message you and request more information. Others may not be ready yet but would like to start receiving your updates in their feed.
- Step 5: Check and monitor the engagement that you are getting on your content. Are you grabbing the attention of your targeted buyers?
- Step 6: Connect, follow or circle with your readers that find value in your content. Have conversations with them. This is a way to remain top-of-mind.
- Step 7: Practice social listening. It is not all about content sharing. You can gain insights from listening.
- Step8: Leverage the segmentation capabilities of the social media platforms to send targeted messages to a group of contacts of your choosing.
- Step 9: Continue to share insightful content even during the dreadful dead-zone after you sent in your proposal.
- Step 10: Keep your ears to the ground for any trigger event alerts that may signal readiness. You do not want to be missing out on a sale!
- Step 11: Follow-up on in-mails and answer any inquiries in a timely manner.
- Step 12: Engage by starting new conversations because opportunities only happen when you take action.
