Steps to your success: A salesperson's take on social selling
Zac Wood is a seasoned sales professional with 15 years of experience in sales and sales management and a record of surpassing sales quotas, increasing revenue, and growing market share. While his primary focuses are on the IT and technology sector, he is also very efficient in the real estate and medical device industry. His sales approach is building relationships and understanding what jobs need to get done for the client. Utilizing good social selling tactics, Zac has already used LinkedIn for about ten years to advance his business success and has seen some incredible results. Below, you can read the highlights of our Straight to Business interview about how social selling impacts and improves a salesperson's business.
What does social selling mean for a salesperson?
Sales work has evolved in the last couple of years due to COVID and technological advancements. Prospecting new customers has become much more difficult. You must be more forward than ever and use multiple channels. Wood explains, "83% of typical purchasing decisions, including researching solutions, ranking options, benchmarking, pricing, etc., happen before a buyer engages directly with the provider." While this used to be done by cold calling, many buyers have forgone that route and rely more on social media and the internet to make these decisions. "So, if you're not on your social media game, you're not out in front of your buyers and potential prospects, you're going to be left in the dust, and your competitors are going to win more deals than you."
How have you developed your social selling routine?
Salespeople will do five main things as a part of social selling:
Have a good profile, which should include topics you stand for and how you can help.
Build your network while focusing on connecting with clients and prospects.
Share a diverse range of relevant content. Wood explains, "It's really important to not just be on social but also to get the right messaging out to folks, not only about your products and services, but also a good mix of industry-related topics— things that engage your audience, that they want to click on and that will make you, the salesperson, be viewed as a thought leader."
Interact through likes and comments with your network, which sends people signals of interest and starts conversations.
Send and interact with personal messages, which is a terrific way to reach decision-makers as an additional or alternative channel to phone or email.
The key is to find a routine that works for you. Wood advises, "set aside that time every morning to get on LinkedIn and engage with people. It's crazy. In the last eight or nine months, I've been really taking social selling to the next level, and my network has grown exponentially." Make it a habit to either check your LinkedIn messages and notifications right after checking your email in the morning or browse your LinkedIn feed on your lunch break and share interesting content with your network.
How has social selling impacted your daily workload?
Social media seems complicated and overwhelming at first. Adding the task of creating content to a salesperson's routine of appointments and calls can be a lot on one's plate. Wood states that the companies should "take a two-pronged approach to allow marketing and sales to align, to create content that's approved by marketing and automate the process to make it as easy as possible for salespeople. That's what is going to keep salespeople engaged and ultimately drive revenue and results for the salespeople and drive results for the marketing people." This way, the workload for a single salesperson is manageable, and social selling remains an easy-to-tackle task.
What elements belong to a well-balanced social selling approach besides sharing content?
A crucial aspect of social selling is commenting. Commenting is fantastic for engaging and showing interest in something a prospect or client cares about, which helps forge lasting relationships. Wood advises, "If you could try it out for a month, taking 10 or 15 minutes daily to comment on people's things, I guarantee you'll see results." One recommendation is to focus on the top five or ten people that matter to your business at that moment and make sure you read their content and interact with it. Take time to leave comments that appreciate the content they have shared. Add your insights to it or ask questions. Many social media users don't get too many comments, so interacting is a way to stand out.
What do you do in the rare event of internet troubles?
The amazing thing about the internet is that it still works, even when you are not. If something goes wrong and the internet goes out, the world still comments, likes, and interacts with posts. If you are in a bind, you can open the app and interact there. However, you can also wait until you are back online to see what others have commented on and follow up.
What daily challenges do you face when it comes to social selling?
"The biggest challenge is to connect with the right people," Wood states. Getting the right message to the right people is essential, which means that you must post relevant and intriguing content that will allow others to notice you and then engage and stay on top. Many times, a person's content can be incredible, but it is not valued as such because it is not reaching the right audience.
Another big challenge is staying on top. One way to do so is to get profile-specific notifications. Every LinkedIn profile has a little bell icon that notifies users about their connections' posts. Say that you want to talk to your prospect that you are going after hardcore. If you get a notification whenever they post, you can get right on it and engage with them.
Timing is also a crucial part of social selling. It is not just important to feed people the right amount of information. It is also essential to give it to them at the right time. Ask yourself if your prospects are in the middle of rebranding, a website relaunch, or recruiting season. How might this impact what you have to offer? Remember these details when sharing your content, whether in posts or a personalized message. Also, ask yourself how you communicate. Do you push out generic content and messages, or do you tailor your communication to your connections' unique challenges and interests? If you approach social selling from this angle, it takes longer but will get you much better results.
How can sales and marketing leaders help sellers like you succeed at social selling?
It is no secret that sales and marketing should align with each other to create the most revenue with the most success. The problem is, however, that this rarely ever happens. "Marketing people think salespeople are lazy, and the salespeople think the marketing people aren't doing their job. I think now it's more important than ever to break down the barriers—it truly takes a combined effort these days," Wood states. Collaboration is beneficial in many ways because salespeople need help from marketing to create the right kind of content.
Salespeople only sometimes create content, while marketing teams are very adept at it. And while salespeople get sales commissions, marketing teams are getting the deals. By sending out marketing-approved messages through salespeople and then working together to make the deal, it is easy to see how successful combined social selling efforts can be.
What is the main point of miscommunication between marketing and sales concerning social selling?
Marketers often ask what kind of data they can get from social selling. They wonder how this data justifies their social selling program investment. Yet, it's important to remember that social selling differs from a company website or paid marketing campaigns. Instead of being able to access analytics directly, marketing needs to understand that the data lives in their salespeople's accounts and can be challenging to track. An easy solution would be an intelligent content distribution platform allowing you to aggregate analytics from the content your sales team has shared. But the truth is that only a few companies have systematically integrated social selling into their CRM system. What you can do in the interim is talk to the salespeople. For instance, you can do simple surveys in which your salespeople provide you with feedback on whether they see clients and prospects engaging with their content, what accounts are engaging with the content, and what conversations and leads come out of the activities to demonstrate the ROI of a social selling program.
What should new salespeople's first steps toward successful social selling be?
The first step is connecting with the right people, not just online but also in your company. Start talking to your higher-ups and marketing team about how to get some platform in place. Wood states, "Most salespeople got into sales because they want to make higher commissions. They want to make more money. Seventy-eight percent of social sellers outsell their peers. So, my advice to salespeople is 'do it, put in the effort'".
In turn, it is paramount to have a person on your marketing team dedicated to helping the salespeople succeed. That could be a social media savvy intern, a junior person, or somebody external from an agency, who the salespeople can email or call with any questions they have, whether about social selling etiquette, content, or the LinkedIn algorithm.
Another important thing is the buy-in of the sales leadership team. Of course, many sales leaders understand social selling, but it is still frequently heard from social sellers that they must justify to their managers why they spend time on social media. If the sales leaders can understand it, or even better, act as role models for their organization, that can benefit both their company and their colleagues.
You can listen to the complete interview with Zac at the Straight to Business Podcast.