A blueprint for building a successful B2B social selling program

Social media, particularly LinkedIn, is used by businesses to connect with their clients, strengthen client relationships, and generate leads and business. Many organizations have successfully implemented social selling programs. Others are just beginning to give social selling a closer look or wish to update their current efforts to see what could be improved.

Whether you’re a social media vet looking to revise your strategy, or a novice, planning is crucial to social selling success. How do you implement and organize a social selling program across a business unit or organization? Before you get into the nuts and bolts, begin by asking yourself these broad questions:

1. Are your relevant decision makers on social media?

2. How big is your potential to reach them there?

3. What are your competitors doing on LinkedIn? 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you evaluate your target market and your competitors’ activity, so that you can get accurate answers to these questions. If you’re not familiar with Sales Navigator, you can learn more here.

Once you’ve discerned the answers to the big questions, newbies will know if it’s worthwhile for you to pursue social selling and vets will know whether you need to tweak your strategy. If you’re still onboard with social selling, here’s our plan for organizing and implementing your strategy.

1. Define your objectives

Determine your objectives for selling on social media, choose the KPIs you’ll use to measure your success, and decide upon your target audience.

2. Select a pilot group

A phased approach works best—try social selling with a specific business or sales unit first. Build a working program around them, collect data and feedback, improve and roll it out to a pilot group.

Your pilot group should be a coherent group of volunteers. Make sure they’re willing to track the success of their new activities and share them with you. Include more than just salespeople. Colleagues from your product, technology, project management and/or marketing teams often have in-depth expertise and can build an audience around their topic.    

3. Create your content strategy

Content is one of the most important factors in social selling. Content is one of the most important factors in social selling. Choose topics that are meaningful to your target audience and formats that offer value to them. Decide upon the tone you want to use in your writing and keep it consistent throughout your various content pieces. Determine which external sources suit your needs. About 80% should be third-party content. You can share content from industry sources such as industry websites. Put together a document summarizing all this information; this is your content strategy. 

4. Choose your KPIs

Which KPIs best measure social selling success will vary depending on your goals. Here are some ideas: activity level of your “social sellers”; rate of engagement on the content they share; ratio of website to landing pages traffic generated by the posts your social sellers are sharing; and leads generated and rate of closing on those leads. Be sure to share your chosen KPIs with your social sellers[6] . 

5. Gather your tools

Basic LinkedIn accounts for your social sellers are a must and they are free. One thing that you will need is a way of getting content to your social sellers. If you don’t want to invest in a tool right away, you could put together a simple email newsletter, put the content on a shared drive or co-working tool like Asana or Trello, or make it available via a specific intranet group. Keep it simple; you can always upgrade your toolkit later on.

6. Train your social sellers

Kick off your social selling pilot with a group training for the social sellers, where you teach them the principles of social selling, along with the basics of personal branding, social networking and engagement and sharing content. Make sure to have regular check-ins and further training throughout the pilot period.

7. Measure, improve, close and roll out

If you’ve done all of the above, you’re ready to go implement your social selling program! During the pilot, you will want to measure results on a regular basis (we recommend weekly on a broad level, and monthly in more depth). After about the first month, share preliminary results with your social sellers and gather their feedback so you can make improvements.  

Keep management posted about your progress and create a management report at the end of the pilot program. Share it with other business units who might also be interested in implementing the program. 

We hope this article has been useful for you. Please leave a comment with your feedback and other questions, ideas, or experiences you may have. It’s always great to learn from others!

Photos by Sven Mieke on Unsplash; Daniel McCullough on Unsplash; cocoparisienne on Pixabay; and BrooklynJohn on Pixabay