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Social selling builds long-term mutually beneficial relationships with your customers and prospects.
Social media has become increasingly important in every aspect of work – not just marketing and PR, but sales, customer service, product development, recruitment, retention and how we communicate with our colleagues and partners to deliver day-to-day activities. Just like digital transformation involves using new technologies and tools, social transformation involves learning new behaviours and ways of communicating.
Social selling is part of this social transformation of work. It looks to build long-term mutually beneficial relationships with prospects and customers and harness social media to support them.
Anitia Veszeli, Social Media and Advocacy Director at Ericsson, defines the power of social selling as using social media to “foster key relationships with customers or potential customers, to prospect, to connect leads back to their pipeline and measure performance”.
By utilizing social media at every stage of the buyer’s journey, you are more likely to reach your goals and your customers will be more satisfied with their decisions.
B2B social selling isn’t limited to your sales team. It involves everyone who is responsible for promoting your business and driving growth. That means the CEO, founder, business development teams, marketing, specialists and experts, as well as sales. This joined-up approach benefits not just the organization, but all the individuals involved, as they build their own personal brands and reputations alongside that of your business.
It really works.
Leads cost less, sales professionals perform better and your C-suite cares about what is said on social.
To be successful, you need to take a strategic approach that puts your customer and their needs at the heart of your business. Traditional selling can often be a baton-handing connection, with marketing driving awareness and providing leads to sales teams focused on short-term sales targets and an over-reliance on their personal contact information and event attendance, or cold calling lists. Social selling focuses on the longer term, building relationships as part of a team within your organization and benefiting from a synergy between individual and corporate social media activity.
There are four key stages in the social selling pathway:
Social selling isn’t about hard selling or a quick sale. It’s a long-term commitment that requires a clear plan, an integrated approach and management support. Whether you are a small entrepreneurial start-up or a large global brand, by taking a structured approach, you can build an effective strategy that grows over time. SAP, the market leader in ERP software, started by testing the process in a single division and saw significant pipeline results before rolling it out across the world. Copy House, the independent technology content marketing agency, started by focusing on its founder’s personal brand and saw unprecedented growth within a year.