Do not be fooled by the literal translation of social selling: this prospecting technique cannot be reduced to a simple sales method on social networks.
Social selling is directly integrated into the digital revolution affecting sales organizations and is conceived as a comprehensive tool. It notably allows for prospecting, but also to accelerate your sales reps’ sales cycles and improve their individual and collective performance. But then, how to engage your sales reps in an effective social selling approach? Discover our 3-step method!
Step 1: Assess Your Sales Reps’ Digital Profiles
Let’s start by stating the obvious: social selling is an additional work tool and not an end in itself. Therefore, it’s not about imposing it on your sales reps; instead, adopt a coaching approach by explaining and offering this new tool to your teams.
Indeed, not all your sales reps may be inclined to integrate social networks into their prospecting and sales methods. While Generation Y handles Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn with great ease, this may not be the case for all your employees; you will therefore need to adapt to each sales rep’s profile to build your team of social sellers.
Step 2: Define the Scope of Your Social Selling Operations
Once you have selected your social sellers within your teams, you will need to supervise their actions on the various social networks. Social selling indeed allows for achieving different objectives:
- Improve sales prospecting and generate more qualified leads;
- Accelerate prospecting and sales cycles;
- Ensure existing customer loyalty;
- Perform digital monitoring on your business sector.
Depending on the objectives chosen by your sales organization, you will be able to define the actions to be taken on social networks.
These objectives will also help you optimize the digital profiles of your social sellers, select and produce the most relevant content for your target audience, and even script the prospecting, negotiation, or retention of your clients. Do not overlook this crucial step.
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Step 3: Familiarize Your Sales Reps with Social Selling Tools
As we mentioned earlier, your most effective social sellers are certainly familiar with the main uses of the social networks they use. However, these uses are generally in a private context; you will therefore need to familiarize these social sellers with a professional use of social media.
And to achieve this, all methods are valid. You can thus combine ‘classic’ training sessions, in the form of conferences or practical workshops, with micro-learning sessions on your company’s internal server.
Do not hesitate to position yourself as a coach: support, encourage, and train your new team of social sellers to boost their performance.
Finally, do not forget to measure and analyze the scope of your social selling approach: only an objective evaluation of the results obtained will allow you to improve your practices on social networks (and those of your social sellers).