Whereas marketers and their peers once favored old media tactics on the social networks, simply broadcasting a brand’s message and hoping that it would resonate with someone, today’s more sophisticated B2B social media pros are using platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter for “social selling.” B2B buyers favor vendors they’re familiar with and trust, so the most successful social sellers know how to best use the networks to learn about pain points, to gather intelligence, to develop their own personal brands and to interact directly with prospects. Social selling helps you reduce, or even eliminate the need to call prospects cold, helps you save time, makes it easier to find new opportunities, improve your customer relationships and improve customer retention. LinkedIn recently released a comprehensive study called “The State of Sales in 2016,” which goes beyond telling us about how social selling works, to show us how actual people, including the top-performing social sellers, are using the tools of their trade. LinkedIn’s approach separates this report from the plethora of data already out there about making the most of social selling tools, to give us real insight into how to make social selling tools work for your business. Let’s take a look at how people are using digital tools for better social selling. Social selling tools in the context of overall sales activity LinkedIn’s data indicates that over two-thirds of sales professionals use social selling tools regularly. “The Zoho CRM integration with Zoho Social has enabled us to include social selling as part of our sales and marketing strategy, instead of just a random tactic to generate leads,” he says. Game-changing prospecting functionality According to the LinkedIn report, those who focus on social selling are generating more opportunities. Top performers rely on social networking to build lasting business relationships online and off, allowing them to ultimately close more deals. About three-quarters of the best closers say they depend on their sales intelligence tools, and a similar share says that social selling tools are either “critical” or “extremely critical” to their job performance.
Social media is one of the most powerful channels for driving customer acquisition, but its uses are evolving. Whereas marketers and their peers once favored old media tactics on the social networks, simply broadcasting a brand’s message and hoping that it would resonate with someone, today’s more sophisticated B2B social media pros are using platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter for “social selling.”
B2B buyers favor vendors they’re familiar with and trust, so the most successful social sellers know how to best use the networks to learn about pain points, to gather intelligence, to develop their own personal brands and to interact directly with prospects.
Social selling makes it easier to establish your expertise and credibility, which is necessary to build trust. Social selling helps you reduce, or even eliminate the need to call prospects cold, helps you save time, makes it easier to find new opportunities, improve your customer relationships and improve customer retention.
The tactics involved in social selling were around long before the internet – offline, direct sales companies like Tupperware and Avon have been using social selling for generations. However, while the tactics may be familiar, the tools of the trade are altogether different.
LinkedIn recently released a comprehensive study called “The State of Sales in 2016,” which goes beyond telling us about how social selling works, to show us how actual people, including the top-performing social sellers, are using the tools of their trade. LinkedIn’s approach separates this report from the plethora of data already out there about making the most of social selling tools, to give us real insight into how to make social selling tools work for your business.
Let’s take a look at how people are using digital tools for better social selling.
Social selling tools in the context of overall sales activity
LinkedIn’s data indicates that over two-thirds of sales professionals use social selling tools regularly. These tools allow salespeople to focus on building relationships have the highest revenue impact. What’s more, 90 percent of top-tier salespeople use social selling tools, compared to just 71 percent of overall sales professionals.
Praval Singh, a senior product marketing manager at Zoho, believes that the ability to integrate social selling activity into the big picture of sales operations is pivotal. “The Zoho CRM integration with Zoho Social has enabled us to include social selling as part of our sales and marketing strategy, instead of just a random tactic to generate leads,” he says. “We can now create new leads, and attribute them to the right social network. We can also see the revenue coming from multiple social networks and know which network is working best for us.”
With silos between sales, marketing and data analysis departments being removed, today’s social sellers can take their data-driven insights up a notch by using sophisticated business intelligence platforms. Single-stack, self-service BI platforms like Sisense and Birst allow even the greatest of technophobes to create dashboards with operational relevance that can be viewed from any device.
“Advancements in business analytics software… allow business users to skip the messy spreadsheets and formulas and view their data in one central, graphical and non-threatening dashboard using visualizations and graphical widgets,” Sisense’s VP Marketing Saar Bitner recently wrote. “This is a chance for marketers to start making sense of all the data they’re surrounded in, and to actually start using it to show their true worth to their organizations.”
Now you can funnel all your customer data…
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