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win rates by 75% on your documents.
Social selling offers opportunities for everyone from individual sales reps and contributors to C-Suite executives. Creating an authentic presence on LinkedIn and other social media channels helps you connect with more potential partners and buyers.
In fact, almost half of all businesses use social selling to expand their message to new buyers.
But despite social selling’s popularity, many brands aren’t getting a great ROI for their social selling efforts. In this article, I’ll walk you through eight reasons your social selling efforts fail and how to avoid those mistakes.
Training your sales personnel is crucial for driving traffic to your social content, increasing engagement, and building deeper connections. In fact, the best sales training is likely to improve sales reps’ performance by 20%.
Suppose your sales personnel are not trained adequately in social selling. In that case, they won’t be able to engage new and existing prospects properly, discuss their needs, and offer the right solutions.
Sales reps that are equipped with good training will also be confident in their sales tactics and product features and providing the results needed to acquire and retain loyal customers.
Simply put, the better your sales personnel are trained, the more effective your social selling efforts are going to be.
Here are a few tips to give your sales reps a better shot at social selling success:
When it comes to social selling, building relationships is always going to be more effective than cold selling. Buyers don’t want to feel like they’re being sold a product at all times.
Even if you feel your product is the best, have a strong pitch, or are skilled at countering sales objections, your sales reps need to create a relationship with the customer before making a sale. Sales reps must provide value to prospects before they are going to trust what's being said.
Not doing so can make the customers feel they have fallen prey to the sales rep's tactics.
Anyone can generate a one-time sale but if you don't foster real relationships with your prospects, it’ll be hard to develop lasting customer relationships.
Above all, be genuine, be relatable, set the right price, and take time to understand who your customers are and what they might need from you.
Every social selling expert should follow a content schedule to ensure they consistently post the right content.
A content calendar helps social sellers:
Without a content calendar, you won’t be able to focus on your long-term goals and understand what’s working and what’s not.
Additionally, randomly picked topics that don't resonate with your brand or audience can adversely impact your engagement.
Creating a social media calendar is not an uphill task if you follow these tips:
Once you gather all the information, start crafting your posts. Invite your team members to provide feedback and make changes if required.
Customer pain points are problems your customers experience in the marketplace along their buying journey.
Not being aware of these pain points can make social selling difficult as you create posts and content that shows you are trustworthy and authoritative in your space.
Sales and marketing teams need to work together to discover and understand the prospects’ pain points. This will enable them to present the product or service in an appealing way.
However, understanding customer pain points isn’t as easy as it seems. Here’s how you can do it:
First, group customers’ pain points into four broad categories:
Some other ways to better understand customer pain points include:
Trying new things is good. But learning from tried and tested methods is a great way to maximize ROI with social selling.
Without tracking metrics, you won’t be able to figure out what’s working in your social selling strategy and what’s not.
It’ll be challenging to measure how your social selling strategy is performing, how successful your social campaign is, and ultimately if you will have an impact on your overall business.
While the right tool can improve and streamline your social selling efforts, the wrong ones can make things worse for your business — such as more wastage of time and efforts, inaccurate insights, difficulty to use, and so on.
This leads to inconsistency in posting and interacting with your followers, resulting in unhappy followers and loss of potential sales.
When it comes to picking a social media tool for your business, there are so many options out there. However, before you choose a tool, answer the following questions:
Choosing constantly adapting tools will give you a better chance to stay up-to-date with the latest social media trends without having to change or add tools at an additional cost.
Your personal social media profile is the place where prospects can find more information about your business, products, and services.
A fully updated profile makes a good impression on the customers and makes you look more approachable and professional.
Not optimizing your profile means customers leave your social media profile without getting the information they need. Profiles that haven’t been optimized fail to drive traffic, increase email subscribers, and boost sales.
Creating an engaging, informative social media profile is crucial to converting your visitors into paying customers. The best part? It’s easy and doesn’t take much time.
Here’s how you can do it:
Above all, make sure you update your profile frequently and make it look clear and crisp to get more exposure online and create an everlasting impression on your customers.
Even with beautiful graphics, helpful content, and advanced metrics, building and maintaining a valuable relationship with your customers takes time. Sure, these can help you know what’s working and what’s not. But, consistency is crucial when it comes to expert social selling.
Posting consistently on social media strengthens your brand and helps you build loyal followers who will share and talk about your business]. If you go weeks between posts, it’s likely your posts will not be memorable and you’ll fail to make an impact.
Adopting social selling techniques takes time and patience. If you’re not guided and careful, you can make tons of costly mistakes, such as not providing proper training to sales reps, being inconsistent, not keeping your social profiles updated, selling before building relationships, and so on.
We hope the above tips help you succeed in social selling. Keep these in mind and you’ll be on the right track to grow your business in no time.
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