Sales professionals are some of the earliest adopters and most annoying users of social networking. The problem is that they use LinkedIn as a cold calling database, when it should be treated like an opportunity to build relationships with potential clients.
The first four posts in this series covered how to make the most of social media by thinking about it as a networking opportunity. The final post will be more specific and cover ten ways that you can turn your social networking into an effective lead generation machine for your business.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #1 | Activate Every Social Sales Network
With the lack of social networking in B2B, it is important to have a strong presence. You can motivate your employees and customers by being active on sites like LinkedIn or Twitter.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #2 | Capture Your Social Sales Contact Profiles
When you are upgrading your CRM, be sure to include social media profiles like Twitter handles and LinkedIn profiles. Use these in lead capture forms on your website or use data appending services for this information.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #3 | Train Your Sales Reps in the Art of Referrals
The most common social sales mistake is to treat it like a prospecting tool when in reality networking requires more effort than just posting on Facebook. Sales reps need to understand the importance of referrals and relationships because they’re trained as hunters rather than farmers. Networking means gathering information from people – not trying to take what you want for yourself.
Social Business Right #2 advises that you build your social sales community by being helpful. Sharing referrals are not selfless acts of kindness, because reciprocity creates a cycle of giving and receiving help from others in the network. In order to get something out of it, networking requires some investment on our part too-its more than just going once every few months or so.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #4 | Train Sales Reps on Using Social Networking Tools
Networking is one of the most important skills for salespeople.
Social networking sites like LinkedIn are a great way to get in touch with potential customers, but they can also be used more creatively. Click To Tweet
Instead of looking up contacts and trying to pitch them on your product, you should focus on finding ways that people might do business together.
When using social networking tools, it is important to pick the ones that are best for your business needs and professional style. However, you need to be aware of all the features and know how they work in order for them to be successful.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #5 | Create Useful and Shareable Content
The third social business right is to increase information sharing within your sales network. Having a library of useful, industry-specific tidbits in easy-to-share packages like PDFs and Web links can be helpful because when opportunity knocks you need to answer quickly with relevant content.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #6 | Give importance to Digital Media Monitoring
It’s important to keep up with industry trends and news in order for information not to be lost. Tools like social media make it easier, but only if you know how they work.
Social media has become a critical factor in the sale process.
The social business bill of rights is a great way to empower your employees and create an atmosphere where they feel comfortable sharing their best ideas. It’s all about giving them the freedom to share with one another, while still having enough structure in place that you don’t get into trouble.
- Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions.
- Mavens are information specialists or people we rely upon to connect us with new information.
- Salesmen are persuaders, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.
To become a top-performing salesperson, it is important to be able to connect with others and share knowledge. Being the connector between people in your company will help you grow as an individual while also helping out those around you.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #7 | Having a Referral Reward Program is Needed
Hiring for social sales is not easy. You need to make sure that your team knows how to ask customers for referrals and you must provide them with a way of doing so by introducing an incentive program.
In order to get the most referrals, you have to ask at just the right time. Click To Tweet
You can’t wait until they’re done with your service and gone before asking for a referral because by then it’s too late.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #8| Increase Your Social Sales Productivity
Salespeople can’t keep up with all of their prospects and customers on social media, so they need to start investing in systems that will help them. There was a time when sales managers would have thought it impossible for people to manage multiple conversations at once or maintain pipeline information without an enterprise CRM system; today those things are normal because we rely on these kinds of programs. Social CRM software is the next step: as long as you know how your network works (which might be different from other networks), then this kind of software could make managing one-on-one communications easier.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #9 | Make Online Networking Opportunities
To encourage social networking, find more ways for your reps to interact online. For example, you could create a LinkedIn group or launch an industry blog forum and make these opportunities available at offline events too.
Social Sales Leadership Tip #10 | Have some Offline Networking Opportunities
To build stronger ties with social sales, it is important to take networking offline. All the tweets in the world are not a substitute for thirty minutes over coffee. To do this, you should have your reps attend meetups and industry conferences.
