Most clients I talk to believe that social selling is a purely sales activity. They hope that this will help them reduce the hated cold calling. Unfortunately, they complain about the lack of support from marketing and often expect me to help them implement effective sales activities without involving marketing. This is a very unfavorable situation and I try to dissuade salespeople from fighting this battle alone.
In this article, you will learn how marketing can organize and support social selling activities. Here, I present some practical advice for B2B marketers who want to use the potential of social networks to generate valuable leads and create a professional image of the organization and its employees.
Prepare platform and knowledge
Social Selling requires preparing many resources – platform, content, promotion, reporting, etc. Sellers usually do not have the time or the skills for this. Therefore, marketing involvement is necessary.
Social Selling requires an environment in the form of a presence guatemala business email list on a social platform. Sticking with LinkedIn – it is not enough to create an account and invite wholesale to the network of contacts. You have to take care of many details – from a decent photo, through bio, descriptions to valuable and quality content that can be shared and build a database of contacts. This is where the marketer's workshop will be very useful.
I know from experience that organizing a training session in which participants receive a professional photo and a set of practical tips on their visibility on LinkedIn opens the way to a conversation about greater involvement in promoting company content.
Organize a photoshoot for the sales department, help create professional descriptions optimized for search engines, prepare several good examples of effective profiles, and finally take care of the company website and support sales with targeted campaigns promoting posts by the most active sellers. Even the most reluctant, seeing how thanks to you their number of contacts and interactions is growing, will appreciate these activities and ask for more. They will also become active promoters of company content, expanding its reach.
Also prepare communication and a place where content for salespeople will be published. In addition to publications on company profiles, it is worth having a resource of content available only to salespeople. This can be an internal intranet or a service such as Slack, Teams, Trello, etc.
Content that sells
If you can convince your salespeople to become more involved in using social media to sell, they’ll need your help with content they can use. The success of your social selling strategy will depend on a good content pool. If you’re already producing content for your blog, you may find that a lot of the work has already been done. In most cases, I advise clients to build on existing content in their social selling strategy, as long as it meets the basic requirements of B2B content marketing:
They are tailored to different stages of the decision-making process. They help you gain knowledge not only about the product, but also about the problems and challenges that usually draw customers' attention to our products. If, for example, you sell CRM systems, do not limit yourself to functionality, but advise on how to deal with sales forecasting, etc. Diversifying content in this respect will allow you to reach customers who are not yet thinking about buying, but are analyzing potential solutions to the problems they have encountered
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They are tailored to the profile of the decision-maker. It is a truism, but a sales manager analyzing a potential CRM implementation will expect different information than a financial director. Since in social selling, salespeople contact people they know by name and surname (at least they should if they use Sales Navigator), it is their responsibility to select content that is interesting from their point of view.
They are expert content – i.e. they are created to convey valuable, useful knowledge, and not just to present an offer. Such materials often take the form of analyses, case studies, Witepage, etc. The name is not important. What is important is that the expert material can be a basis for establishing relationships, or at least discussion, unlike an offer that will probably end up in the trash.
They are easy to send and view. Another truism, but choosing the right formats, shortening or dividing too extensive materials is a tactic that can make it easier for us to distribute content. Currently, it is worth taking care of the readability of materials on mobile devices, because about half of our customers will watch this content on smartphones.
They are synchronized with marketing campaigns. If you run a campaign on LinkedIn aimed at a specific target group, it is worth equipping salespeople with materials that are related to it. This way you achieve a synergy effect. I usually suggest that the materials used by salespeople should be more detached from the product, but connected through links to the product materials promoted in the campaigns.
