The strong impact of the social media landscape increasing transparency ensures that both positive and negative experiences and interests of your company and your customers are visible to everyone. The use of social selling enables your sales department to use the new-found transparency and accessibility to your customer base to their advantage.
In this blog post, we explain exactly what social selling is all about and what you need to consider in order to be successful with it.
Was ist Social Selling?
Social selling describes the use of social media to long-term customer relationships to build, maintain and Interests and wishes your target group. You should use all the information that is available online these days in a targeted manner when marketing and selling your products or services in order to promote your potential sales opportunities. The interests of the profiles of your customer base are therefore an excellent way to start a conversation in order to create a harmonious basis for a relationship. Building on this first contact, you can then have a sales conversation that promises a significantly higher success rate than a conversation without a trusting basis.
Social selling is therefore less about creating high-quality content and more about identifying your potential customers and building a relationship before the actual sales talk. This is the clear difference to classic social media marketing. Social selling therefore aims to make the sales process more efficient, more targeted and more intelligent for sellers and buyers, so that both sides benefit. The goal of the sales people is to build close customer contacts through the networks, thereby creating a long-term added value and ultimately generate more leads and sales.
Why use social selling?
In contrast to the cold calling that was often used in the past, where the success rate was very low, social selling offers clear advantages. One problem with cold calling was that sales staff usually had almost no data about the interests of potential buyers. Contact was then usually made without consent and without additional knowledge, often in the form of unsolicited calls. Another important part of cold calling was the use of sales demonstrations and the time-consuming search for qualified leads, as can be seen in the following figure.
With social selling, your sales team now has the opportunity to identify and contact a consumer online. In the best case scenario, a long-term customer relationship is established. Consumers, in turn, can use these platforms to To facilitate purchasing decisions and to create a basis of trust during the decision-making process. This means that a sophisticated business profile increases awareness and thus creates trust, as the interested party can obtain all important product or service information from you.
Be successful with social selling
In order to achieve positive results with social selling, there are a few things that need to be considered when implementing it. These include optimizing your own business profile, building long-term customer relationships and Interaction and communication with the target group.
Optimizing the profile
Your business profile is fundamental to success in social selling. This means that you must maintain a complete and attractive profile so that a convincing first impression is created. Your profile presents the company or your own employees and should be constantly optimized in all your relevant networks.
Building a customer relationship
Social media should be used in the sales process so that you can build relationships. contact with the consumer is now clear unobtrusive and offers you a larger Additional benefits. You also need to increase awareness and therefore reach by nurturing your existing connections and publishing new content on a regular basis. This increase in reach increases awareness among consumers and ultimately the number of your customers.
Interaction with potential customers
Another important point is the Interaction and management on the platforms. This means that you must regularly provide informative and exciting posts and follow current discussions. Liking, sharing and commenting on posts is also part of this. To further strengthen your customer relationships, your sales representative can invite the interested party to a meeting or event at your company when the opportunity arises.
This is the platform that is best suited for social selling. In principle, social selling can also be applied to other Social media channels like Twitter or Facebook, but LinkedIn has made this strategy more understandable for users with the Social Selling Index (SSI).
Social Selling Index
The platform has developed a dashboard that specifically depicts the social selling process and shows exactly which process step you are currently at. The dashboard also shows which optimization options are available to you. The SSI shows how successfully you have established your business and whether you can address your relevant people.
Social Selling Mistakes
One of the most serious mistakes in social selling is to approach a new contact directly with a sales pitch. This is because people are primarily active on such websites to make new contacts. Before the exchange takes place, you should prepare well before making contact so that, among other things, the Starting a conversation easier. So you should not send standardized messages, but use the transparency to your advantage and respond to the interests of the person in question.
Conclusion
Social selling, like cold calling, requires a high endurance and your regular attention. Important differences are the use and positioning on social media channels and the incorporation of consumer interests into a sales conversation. It is therefore imperative that you as a company devote yourself to social selling and integrate it into your sales so that your sales can be promoted and your number of customers increased.
As a social media marketing agency, we can support you in implementing social selling in your own company. Be it the development of graphic or content, community management to build customer relationships and, of course, monthly reports to measure the success of our measures.
Frequently asked questions
Where and when does social selling make sense?
Every company with an existing or non-existent social media presence should engage with the concept and integrate it into the sales department.
How does social selling work in the everyday life of a salesperson?
Everyday sales should focus on social media and play an important role in every sales phase with the customer. Starting with finding new customers and continuing to maintain existing contacts.
What do you have to do to make your social selling strategy work?
It is important that a routine develops. This means that salespeople answer comments and messages every day, share content, respond to likes and send contact requests.
