Social Selling: How Social Media Is Revolutionizing B2B Marketing and Sales?

Last Friday morning, November 9, the breakfast co-organized by Incenteev and Innov’Com took place, with the theme “Social Selling: How Social Media Is Revolutionizing B2B Marketing and Sales?”

Four experts shared their secrets to make social media your best friends.

What is social selling? It’s the use of social media in a commercial approach, which tends to replace traditional sales techniques.

According to an IKO study, it takes 8.4 calls to reach a prospect, 22 calls to get a qualified exchange, and cold calls result in 1% of sales.

Salespeople who are active on social media are 20% more effective than others.

Given these figures, we can get to the heart of the matter.

Social Selling: How to Boost Your Prospecting Thanks to the 1st European Social Network Dedicated to Salespeople

This morning began with Olivier Piscart, CEO of Salezeo, who explained how to boost your prospecting thanks to the 1st European social network dedicated to salespeople.

Today, social media is essential in B2B. The B2B buying process is evolving and is now influenced by social media for the evaluation and discovery phases.

Two-thirds of the buying process are initiated by the customer.
Today, whether in B2B or B2C, the buying process is the same. That’s why social media is a significant stake.

But it’s not just the buying process that has evolved; roles have also changed. There’s a new distribution of marketing and sales tasks.

Before digital, marketing focused on brand awareness, while salespeople generated and qualified leads.

Now, marketing still works on brand awareness, but it will also generate and qualify leads. Marketing will implement marketing automation to pass on the best leads to salespeople.

Salespeople will therefore be able to focus solely on the sales process and closing.

It’s time for the marketing vs. sales guerrilla warfare to stop and for marketing and sales to collaborate. There’s a real complementarity between marketing and sales.

Marketing will write the messages, salespeople will disseminate them; all of this makes for an effective social selling strategy.

You need to build your reputation as a salesperson, but also as a company, with a single goal: to maximize message dissemination.

Marketing must help salespeople craft messages for social media. For three reasons:

• Time saving
• Message quality
• Ensure a constant flow of information about your company

Furthermore, social media also serves to find prospects and to map out your market.

With a tool like Salezeo, your leads are automatically enriched with a highly qualified database, built through the crowdsourcing of their 25,000 members in Europe.

Here are three key figures for the Salezeo community:

• 2 million decision-makers
• 6 million companies
• 25,000 users in Europe

How to Create a Powerful Synergy Between B2B Marketing and Sales Through Social Selling?

The morning continued with Hervé Gonay, CEO of Get +, who shared feedback on a successful social selling business case. The Business France case.

Business France, formerly Ubifrance, is a French organization that helps executives export abroad.

Their challenge was to find new leads. To do this, they developed a method that allowed them to generate 288 leads via social selling.

Here are the ingredients:

• Budget for advertising (sponsored posts and social media ads)
• A person dedicated to social media communication
• Creation of specific content

The results they obtained were an increase in brand awareness, an increase in their credibility, and an increase in targeted traffic on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Here is the specific social selling strategy they implemented.

They started by defining their persona, messages, positioning, and the tone they wanted to use. They chose to have a tone of closeness and empathy.

Then they defined three different ways to communicate on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

• On Facebook, posts were made three times a week with a light tone
• On Twitter, they posted several times a day in a clear, direct, and concise tone
• On LinkedIn, one post per day was made in a clear and concise tone that also asked questions and invited debate.

The different content offered was very well adapted to social media:

• Infographics
• Short articles
• Plenty of images
• Interviews, success stories, and reports

Once their strategy was determined, here’s how they created their social selling campaign:

1. Creation of the different content to be relayed
2. Implementation of the Get + social tracking tool (lead generation)
3. Implementation of a nurturing tool (sending an email once a week)
4. Reporting to see what worked and what didn’t
5. Lead processing

Here are the results obtained for social media awareness:

Facebook:

• 25% increase in followers
• 28x increase in visibility
• An engagement of 3.5% (compared to 1% normally)

Twitter:

• 46% increase in followers
• 27x increase in visibility
• An engagement of 2.5%

LinkedIn:

• 11% increase in followers
• 2x increase in visibility
• An engagement of 5%

In terms of business, they managed to reach 4,962 companies. Out of these 4,962 companies, after scoring, they identified 288 qualified leads. The 288 qualified leads resulted in 23 quotes.
Out of these 23 quotes, 20 sales were closed.

This business case proves that even in B2B, social media can play an important role and lead to sales. The key is to create a well-thought-out campaign and have the right tools.

How Has Social Selling Changed the Daily Life of Salespeople?

Evelyne Platnic-Cohen, founder of Booster Academy, gave us the results of a study conducted by Booster Academy on employee social capital.

Before delving into the study, Evelyne began by giving advice to the audience: “Don’t hire salespeople who don’t know how to use social media”. According to Evelyne, this shows a lack of investment on the salesperson’s part.

To conduct this study on employee social capital, Booster Academy took the 100 most common surnames in France. They then asked respondents how many “Duponds,” for example, they knew, their number of Twitter followers, their number of Facebook friends, and their number of contacts on LinkedIn and Viadeo.

Out of the 300 people who responded to the study:

• 50% have no Twitter followers and few Facebook friends
• 32% have fewer than 10 Facebook friends
• 31% have more than 250 LinkedIn contacts

To the question “how many networks do you frequent” (professional networks, associations…), 38% answered zero, 21% frequent 1 network, 19% 2 networks, and 8% 3 networks.

With all these questions about network participation or social media activity, Booster Academy determined “social capital” levels.
There are four: bronze, silver, gold, and elite.

Out of the 300 participants in the study, 20% are at the bronze level, 59% at the silver level, 12% at the gold level, and 9% at the elite level.

This study shows that salespeople still use social media relatively little.

Evelyne Platnic-Cohen concluded her presentation by discussing 4 misconceptions about social media:

1- Salespeople spend a lot of time on social media

As the study shows, this misconception is false. On the contrary, salespeople don’t spend enough time on social media.

2- Social media is a great prospecting tool

That’s not entirely false; social media allows for targeted prospecting. That said, lead generation is more complex than one might think on social media. Therefore, a real social selling campaign must be implemented, with the right tools to maximize prospecting.

3- Social media belongs to the individual; the company can’t do anything

With the employee’s consent, marketing can easily publish on their profile using tools like Hootsuite.

Publishing quality content on your salespeople’s profiles will allow the company to increase its visibility by accessing the salesperson’s network, but it will also allow the salesperson to increase their visibility and employability. On LinkedIn, active profiles, meaning those who regularly publish content, are seen twice as often as others.

4- The profile is a replica of a good CV

False, LinkedIn allows for true Personal Branding; you can include publications, videos, white papers—all the elements that allow you to increase your credibility and expertise with your network.

When used correctly, social media can be a goldmine for your salespeople.

Social Selling: Prospecting with Social Media. 8 Tips to Put an End to Cold Calling

This morning concluded with the intervention of Simon Vandendriessche, General Manager and Co-founder of Incenteev, who explained how to prospect effectively on social media.

Here are his 8 tips for prospecting on LinkedIn and putting an end to cold calling.

1- Create an appealing profile

On LinkedIn, your profile is your first showcase. Include a good photo, write a description, add contact information, and your professional experience.
In short, showcase yourself.

2- Make plenty of connections

Dare to send connection requests on LinkedIn; you’ll be surprised by the acceptance rate. Additionally, increasing your LinkedIn contacts allows you to expand your personal network, reach more people, and boost your visibility.

3- Engage with valuable content

Thanks to LinkedIn, you’ll be able to regularly share content. Find interesting content for your network and post it. This allows you to demonstrate your expertise to your contacts and keep yourself top of mind.

4- Be discoverable… and discovered

LinkedIn is very well designed for one thing: it is completely “SEO friendly,” meaning it allows you to apply the rules for Search Engine Optimization. Place interesting keywords for yourself and your network in your profile to appear in search engines. You will gain visibility.

5- Be recommendable… and recommended

Thanks to LinkedIn, you can very easily showcase your expertise with recommendations. Don’t hesitate to ask people in your network to recommend your skills or even write recommendation testimonials for you.

For the last point, Simon recommends asking for these testimonials only from people you have worked with, for credibility reasons.

6- Effectively target your prospects

LinkedIn offers a tool, Sales Navigator, which allows you to search for contacts by keywords, company, current title, company size, industry…

Once you have identified a contact and visit their profile, if you look on the right, LinkedIn automatically suggests people with similar profiles.

7- Get started

If you’re not already there, now’s the time: create your profile, ask for recommendations, ask your marketing department to help you write messages and find content, or even post it for you, and start your prospecting.

You’ll be surprised by the number of contacts you’ll be able to reach.

8- Challenge your salespeople

To get your salespeople to play along and increase their LinkedIn contacts, organize a challenge. With a mobile application like Incenteev, you’ll be able to do it very quickly and simply. A fun way to boost your company’s visibility by leveraging the competitive spirit that exists in each of your salespeople.

As you can see, social media can truly boost your business and increase your company’s visibility. There’s no need to be afraid of it anymore. Don’t hesitate any longer, become Social.

Have you implemented a social selling strategy? Feel free to tell us about it in the comments.

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