Jasmine SandlerHow to Review What Proper B2B Social Selling Activites Really Work for the Growing B2B Sales Organization
As Social Media tools and networks multiply and advance and social advertising opportunities become more available and sophisticated, it is important to pause and review what truly is working now in Social Selling and what is expected to work in the future for any growing B2B sales organization.In this post on the subject, I will highlight 3 social selling techniques that work:
1. A Close Alignment between Social Media Marketing and Social Sales
Selling via Social Media is about a few things. It is about identifying proper social channels where your specific target audience lives. It is about analyzing and understanding how your target makes buying decisions online. It is about developing and delivering content that supports the research to buying process. It is about being visible and engaging along the buyer search. It is about creating and nurturing relationships – online to offline. All of these tasks require both marketing and sales efforts. This is why I choose an important social selling technique to first align properly marketing and sales inside the organization against a solid social media marketing and sales plan. In my work as a social sales consultant and trainer, the first place I start with any B2B organization is to analyze and develop an active Social Media Strategy that is tied to both social media and sales goals.
2. Using LinkedIn effectively to Create Client Relationships
LinkedIn provides advanced targeting capabilities and is comprised of a global network of close to 400 million business professionals, with over 25% of them as executive decision makers. On LinkedIn, you can find specific companies and people by title, location, alumni, interests, skills, associations, groups and much, much more. As a social network, you can use advanced subscriptions such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator as I do, to get alerts on company decision maker moves, connect directly with propsects and send Inmails and messages and create sales funnels which you can track daily. Sales organizations that use CRMs such as Salesforce can directly integrate their sales activity with LinkedIn to make a seamless connection between the two for better lead nurturing and sales reporting. As I discuss and share in my LinkedIn Sales book on Amazon, LinkedIn provides great opportunities for personal branding for sales professionals who can edge out their competition by creating a unique and compelling market position. In my private corporate LinkedIn training programs, we work through such important exercises as profile building for personal branding power, use of the LinkedIn writing platform to create a thought-leadership position, how to use Sales Navigator to create relationships directly with your target audience and more. LinkedIn, as many know, is my #1 B2B Selling tool. I shared some stats on this in a previous Search Engine Watch article on Social Selling which you may enjoy.
3. Elect a Social Superstar executive to lead the way in Social Selling
As I mentioned, Personal Branding Online , when executed correctly, can be instrumental in driving targeted media and audience attention to your B2B corporation. What works well is to identify and elicit a social branding superstar inside your organization. This would be someone or even a team of practice leaders or thought-leaders that can commit to supporting, growing and protecting their own social brands. Some keys to this working well is to identify someone who has already a solid success track record in your industry, is personable and is open to interviews, speaking engagements and the like. The person’s voice in social must be authentic and provide value for this to work well. In my Personal Branding Managed Programs and personal branding online training programs, I work with those who elect to invest in their personal brand to support the success of their businesses in creating and nurturing a brand that delivers target attention to their companies.
These are 3 advanced social selling techniques you can use inside of your B2B sales organization today.
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