Social Selling defined. Social Selling is the process of using social media to identify new prospects, research their industries. It also implies engaging potential future clients, interact and collaborate with critical layers of staff and management to understand their wants, needs, gaps, and pains.  Followed by a customization and alignment of a business solution to fit the prospect needs to create a long-lasting value oriented relationship where the salesperson becomes a growth partner rather than a product vendor.

Nowadays, our clients are way more informed and empowered than the average salesperson. Information abounds, one can download a torrent of information related to any product, service or organization within seconds. Clients can easily find comparative analysis, reviews, complaints, ROIs on a product or services with few clicks.

“You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.” – Pam Moore

A few decades ago salespeople relied primarily on the fact that they had proprietary information that provided them with the opportunity to pitch their clients with features, advantages, and benefits. These times are history. What can today’s sales people do when deprived of their unique information competitive advantages?  We all know that today’s selling is based primarily on a consultative approach that emphasizes value selling rather than product focus. Social Media plays a vital role in finding information about decision makers, industry, competition, trends, critical internal/external forces that affect these organizations before any initial interaction with the prospect. Allowing both parties to be informed, educated and more in sync with each other.

 Few facts:

  1. Social media is important today, but even more tomorrow.
  2. 3 billion internet users globally, that’s nearly 45% of the world’s population. With 1.7 billion people being active social media users. demographics
  3. 89% of age groups ranging from (18-29), 82% of age groups ranging from (30-49) and 65% of age groups ranging from (50-65), uses Facebook 71%, LinkeIn 28%, Pinterest 28% and Twitter 23% of the time.

Social Media Effect on Sales

  • 74% of salespeople who exceed their 2014 quota by at least 10% or more say they have an excellent mastery of prospecting new potential clients, cultivating new relationships and closing deals using social media as an alternative sales platform. These social media users were 6x likely to exceed their quota than sales peers with minimal or no social media skills. (Forbes)
  • 64% of sales professionals using social media reported winning at least one deal in 2014 using this medium. (Forbes)
  • Salespeople use social media primarily for the following reasons. 1- Networking, 2- Research, 3- Prospecting, 4- Branding, 5- Lead Generation
  • Less than 50% of Salespeople know how to leverage the power of social media.
  • Social media is the second-most effective digital marketing method for client retention, behind email. (TNW News)
  • Developing a social media strategy is a more common challenge among small businesses (55%) than enterprises (34%) while securing enough internal resources is a more common problem in larger companies (47%) than in SMBs (33%). (Simply Measured)
  • The top three goals for SMB social media marketing programs are brand awareness (74%), website traffic (53%), and lead generation (41%). (Simply Measured)
  • 33% of millennials identify social media as one of their preferred channels for communicating with businesses. Less than 5% of those 55 and older agree. (MarketingSherpa)
  • Developing a social media strategy is a more common challenge among small businesses (55%) than enterprises (34%) while securing enough internal resources is a more common problem in larger companies (47%) than in SMBs (33%). (Simply Measured)

Social Belief

  • Many salespeople believe that social media is hard to follow and consumes tremendous time. The reality successful sales people uses less than 10% of their selling time managing their social media opportunities
  • Older sales people may resist adoption and usage, stating that they don’t see the value or they don’t understand it.
  • The majority of organizations are not providing any training on social media, either they don’t believe on its potency yet, their not sure about its business impact, its ROI or they just choose to adopt the wait and see mode. Millennials live by it, it’s in their DNA, and they are the future. Hence it’s a major mistake not to be training on what matter most to these vital demographics. There is a tremendous opportunity for sales organizations to integrate social media as part of the selling, reach, and retention process.

Social Reality

The traditional system of cold calling (emails and phone) is no longer effective, and its success rate is less than 10%. While Social media works, it’s hard to quantify with some degree of exactitude its rate of success. Many sales executives are not sold yet on its value, and they believe it’s not worth the effort and allocation of massive resources.

Social media is more embraced by sales people that specialized in a more complex, long cycle enterprise sales. The reason behind it is simple; social media provides valid information on senior executives personal and business lives. Holistic research among multiple social mediums allows the salesperson to acquire a level of understanding that is accurate, in-depth and relevant to the corporate officers. Furthermore, it allows these sophisticated sellers to understand the responsibilities of their corporate executives. Armed with these understanding, they can align the business solution with the executive corporate objectives.

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” – Jeff Bezos

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are still the dominate social media used by sales people. Social media is not a fad, and its adoption and usage will increase with time, resistors may find themselves quickly marginalize and out of time. Social media create value and relevance for most businesses. Sales organization should integrate this medium in their daily approach to reach existing and new clients otherwise they may find themselves with irrelevant, untrained salesforce.

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