Social Selling: Our Hidden Strengths to Boost Your Sales Reps

Have you heard about Social Selling and want to strengthen the impact of social media in your sales cycle? Good idea: this practice is increasingly adopted by sales professionals, and the figures prove its effectiveness. According to a Sales for Life study, “84% of B2B decision-makers involve social media in their decision-making process”.

Low cost, intuitive design, and quick returns. These factors boost the appeal of this new sales arsenal. However, this does not diminish the complexity and precision required in business relationships. As a result, many sales professionals today venture onto LinkedIn without a clear objective or strategy. Here are some lesser-known tips that will help you build a real competitive advantage through Social Selling.

Two Social Selling Tools to Leverage the “Trusted Advisor” Role

On social media, your clients are eager for quality content. Regularly publishing content specific to your area of expertise will guarantee you an ideal position as a “trusted advisor” – in other words, an authority in terms of expertise. In reality, unless you have dedicated marketing resources, it is difficult and time-consuming to regularly publish qualified information. Here are two tools that will help you maximize the reach of your messages.

Made available to all users 1 year ago, the LinkedIn Pulse feature (writing and sharing articles on the site) allows you to increase the reach of your publications. It also works in your favor in terms of credibility: it was long used only by LinkedIn’s “influencers”.

Furthermore, content that includes relevant images has a 94% higher chance of being seen online. Enhance the visual aspect of your messages with the very simple tool Pablo Buffer, which allows you to create royalty-free visual messages in two clicks. – Use sparingly.

Boost Your Searches by… Logging Out

Professional social networks are a tremendous source of information for identifying and connecting with new prospects. However, the DNA of these networks involves connecting through intermediaries. As a result, during searches, your sales reps often encounter the same profiles corresponding to 2nd or 3rd degree connections. An infallible recruiter technique to go beyond this horizon and identify new prospects is the following method:

1. Identify the keywords that allow you to target a category of prospects.
2. Completely log out of LinkedIn
3. Go to the Google search bar and enter: site:linkedin.com keyword 1; keyword 2; keyword 3; etc…
4. Use the Boolean operators OR, AND, NOT, *, as well as quotation marks to specify your search.

Let’s take the example of a B2B prospect search among automotive suppliers. Your search might look like site:linkedin.com “Responsable*achat” OR buyer; mechanical; automotive supplier; tier 1. (Pay attention to spaces)

Launch your search, and you will get a significant number of targeted profile pages, much more numerous and precise than if you had done this search directly on LinkedIn. Train your sales reps on Boolean operators (a microlearning session can be largely sufficient) and define a segmented search strategy to increase your efficiency when searching for prospects.

Finally, while we have presented rather technical tools here, don’t forget that Social Selling is above all human-centric. Focus on the customer behind their computer, whom you must listen to, understand, and engage. The success of your strategy will rely on the empathy and boldness you demonstrate during your interactions on social media.

What about you? What are your favorite Social Selling tips? How are your sales reps approaching this new trend? Feel free to share your feedback on these 2.0 sales techniques.

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