The Social Selling Era!

Social selling is the process of developing relationships as part of the sales process via social media, and with companies aghast of falling behind their competitors, I am already seeing huge mistakes being made online with CEO’s and Directors quickly jumping on the social selling bandwagon instead of looking to change company culture.

This now seems to be where most sales people start their process. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts are surfacing with different employee names every day of the week. Sales teams begin posting what they believe to be relevant content, looking to start conversations and hunting for prospects with little or no support from the marketing teams, all this activity drives is companywide inconsistency.

As always with sales there will be top performers who will see success from this but without proper process and support, results will be limited.

According to a recent report by Aberdeen Group 72.6% of salespeople using social selling as part of their sales process outperformed their sales peers and exceeded quota 23% more often than their colleagues. This amazing statistic shows the importance for companies worldwide to turn their sales teams into social selling machines.

“Now more than ever Marketing and Sales need to be united in strategy and consistent in execution”

The same content will not work across all channels, you need to be smart and tailor your content, not only to your market but to single prospects. Publish valuable, helpful information that will bring significance to the online relationships you make.

Most importantly listen to the voice of the customer, 33% of customers trust what a seller tells them, however 92% trust what another customer tells them!

Social Selling is not the way of the future, it’s the way of the now and it is only companies who have a well-structured social selling strategy in place will be successful in this vast digital space.