The world is more social than ever—and selling is no exception. But as Salesforce.com points out, the conversation around social media has been focused on marketing instead of making the sale. However, salespeople can and should take advantage of social selling to drive more wins and increase revenue.
But where to begin? The insights are out there, but where do you look for the most actionable and strategic, and then draw them out? Personal business analytics enable salespeople to use social selling techniques to reach prospects and win sales by not only showing them exactly the information they need to understand their customer’s business and their own market, but by allowing them to share critical insights as well.
To excel at social selling, there are a few key steps.
- Get to know your customers. In order to most effectively position your solution to them, you need to know their specific business challenges and what, exactly, they care about. What are their key market drivers? What makes them successful, and what keeps them up at night? Having the answers to all of these questions will help you foster a productive and effective relationship with your customer, making it easier for you to help them, and making them more likely to buy from you.
- Listen to what the people are saying. Twitter has an estimated 500 million tweets per day—including the unrestrained thoughts of thought leaders and executives. It’s essential to have your ear to the ground and understand what people are saying about your solution, your market and/or their needs. With business twitter solutions like FirstTweets you’ll be able to sift through the noise to find the gold nuggets of information you need to identify more opportunities.
- Sharing with your own team. Not every sale is straightforward, and many times you’ll need the help of a lot of different people (why do you think it’s a sales team?). You can keep everyone on the same page and updated with the latest developments with the prospect by sharing breaking news and valuable insights right through your CRM or enterprise collaboration platform.
Salespeople are usually very social people by nature, and by equipping them with the right tools, you can harness and direct their sociability to improving sales.
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