Social Selling: Answering the What, Why, And How

What is social selling?

Many of you may not be really familiar with the term unless you are part of the digital industry. Social selling is essentially about leveraging your social network in order to find the correct prospects, build trusted relationships and finally achieve the sales goals that you are looking for.

Social selling, therefore, is a sales technique that enables better sales lead generation and sales prospecting processes while also eliminating the need for you to pursue cold calling. You see, building and maintaining relationships is easier within the network that you and your customers can trust upon.

What are the 4 pillars of social selling?

• Create a professional brand first – B2B buyers today are rather selective and extremely well-informed. They will only work with vendors that they can trust. If you have a strong and professional brand it indicates that you are an active participant and a contributor in your industry. This will give you more inquiries from prospects and it will give you more responses in your communications too.

• Focus on the correct prospects – in social selling you need to find and connect with prospects more effectively than you would do in the case of conventional sales. Usually over 76% of buyers feel that they have enough expertise to have a social media conversation as well as identifying prospects that meet your criteria.

• Use your insights for engagement – position yourself as an expert in subject matter through sharing the right and relevant content, commenting on news alerts and even building your very own professional brand. Over 72% of B2B buyers respond to sales personnel that can connect insights and opportunities well. This also means that sales personnel can augment their thought leadership by staying up to date on news about prospects and through identifying new contacts as well as decision makers when accounts make key recruits.
• Build trusted relationships – invest in forging trusted relationships with your prospects. For this, share your perspectives and help provide relevant information to common pet peeves or pain points that you all share. Have high quality and genuine conversations. Focus on the selling second and the needs of the prospect first. 

SSI – the Social Selling Index and measuring your success

Before we get started on this, an example of what an SSI would look like is given below;

It is also equally important to know that social selling also gives you the capacity to measure it. You can therefore, quantify your social selling. LinkedIn produced the first of its kind social selling measurement known as a SSI or a Social Selling Index. It will score on a scale of 1 – 100 based on the LinkedIn activities that relate to the 4 pillars of social selling. There is a strong correlation between achieving goals and sales personnel with a high SSI. For example an internal study found; 
– 45% more sales opportunities
– 51% more likely to hit quota
– 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media
– 3X more likely to go to club

It would also be interesting to know that in a study conducted by Bayler University’s Keller Centre for Research, it was found that the success of cold calling appointments, as indicated below is only a tiny 0.3%

Learning about social selling is important in today’s days and age. Your buyers and customers are well-informed and intelligent. They have everything available at their fingertips in terms of information and that makes you, as a business, liable, if you should give them any data that is incorrect, simply because you want to increase your sales.

Did our blog help clarify your doubts? Let us know. Want to learn about social selling? Contact our team on [email protected] for more information.