Preparing your sales team for social selling success in 2018

IN RECENT years there has been a huge buzz around social selling. Tipped as the future for sales professionals, its impact has been significant. Since its introduction, social selling has offered new innovative ways for sales people to research, approach and engage with prospects providing them with a 3x higher chance of meeting a decision maker. Digital selling has enormous potential to transform a team or organisation into a lean, mean selling machine, remaining relevant where their prospects are – online!

As consumers move online to research and purchase, e-commerce sales are growing, predicted to exceed $4 trillion globally by 2021, creating new challenges for Sales Directors and their teams. Digital channels now influence 92 percent of B2B buying decisions while half of B2B customers prefer to gather the information necessary to make these decisions on their own.

Why is Social Selling Key to a Sales Strategy?

Sixty one percent of organisations engaged in social selling report a positive impact on revenue growth compared to 41 percent of businesses who don’t use it as part of their sales strategy. With over 40 percent of salespeople identifying prospecting as the most difficult part of sales (closing ranked next at 36 percent, while qualifying came in third at 22 percent), social selling helps to create valuable interactions and build relationships that lead to conversions and sales.

In a recent study, 39 percent of B2B professionals said that social selling reduced the amount of time spent researching potential leads while a third said they earned more leads with the strategy, and 31 percent reported better relationships with clients because of it.

The 7 ways to improve Sales Team Digital & Social Selling Effectiveness:

1. Establish Clear Roles Any type of team works better when everyone knows and understands their individual roles. A sales team, from frontline managers to account managers and sales executives, can work seamlessly when each member knows exactly how they contribute to the whole. Therefore to ensure success, sales directors need to ensure the roles of their team is defined with clear objectives so they can collaborate effectively.

2. Provide the Right Tools Digital and social selling are more than just technology, but sellers do need the right tools in order to be effective online. While the most popular B2B social selling tool is LinkedIn, other platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, are also useful for customer engagement. Also of note are tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck as these help manage and optimize social media use across all channels. Above all, sellers who have their social marketing and social selling strategies aligned report a greater degree of penetration using social channels.

3. Don’t Assume Knowledge A seller can’t successfully sell online without the right training. Not all salespeople are digitally savvy, and some may not even know what a hashtag is. Even for sellers that use online tools successfully, only one in four knows how to integrate it properly into their sales process.

The key to providing the right training is to audit the digital skills of a team and then develop or outsource a social selling training programme that can meet the exact needs of the team. 69 percent of sales professionals are self-taught and have no active training program in place - Feedback Systems.

For many sellers, training is one of the most important elements tied to success. It includes education about sales processes, social selling skills, and crafting messaging. The right training can make all the difference.

4. Always Consider Customer Journey Aligning the customer’s journey with the sales approach is crucial for win rates. In fact, win rates improved by 15 percent when sellers aligned their process with the customer journey. The beauty of social selling is that it allows sellers to engage with customers at all points of the customer journey from the early stages of research to the point of purchase especially using listening tools such as HootSuite and BuzzSumo.

5. Encourage Collaboration According to research, nearly half of marketing and sales pros cite the key challenge as communication, followed by flawed processes (42 percent), use of different metrics (40 percent), lack of accurate data on target accounts (39 percent) and reporting challenges (27 percent). The benefits of aligning marketing and sales are numerous. One of the easiest ways to bridge the gap for collaboration is to involve sellers in content marketing, and social selling.

6. Know the Value of Content The right information at the right time to the right people can greatly improve a customer’s experience, give them value, and boost their trust in the seller. 74 per- cent of buyers gravitate towards salespeople who add value and insight to their overall sales experiences. The use of Links, Pulse post on LinkedIn provides solutions to challenges a customer may face. Ensuring your sales team know the best type of content to share and how best to leverage it can make a huge difference in the sales process. 7. Measure and Analyse Even with all the right tools, the right training, and the best content ready to share with prospects, there’s still a missing piece. If your team fails to measure the impact of the sales strategy, all of it will be for nothing.

Measurement can be one of the hardest parts of the digital selling process, because it can be challenging to connect social media success (number of shares and likes, for instance) with the number of successful sales.

It’s easier to measure and analyse selling strategies when a system is in place and all reps are trained on best practices for social media. Once a benchmark is set, sales leaders can measure the number of deals closed with the current system, then compare it with past data.

Sales teams who use the digital technologies outperform those who still use out-dated methods like cold calling. Additionally, a social strategy helps increase leads, improve relationships with customers, and close sales.

Sales Team transformation, remaining competitive and positioning for the next era of digital transformation, is critical for organisational survival.

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