How to implement a social selling plan that really works

Social selling, what's all the fuss about? Has social media really ripped up the rulebook on marketing so that we need to rethink everything? Is broadcast marketing dead? Is it all about communication, involvement and feedback – a place for people to talk about things they care about?

YES!

In a world that’s disconnected, we now seek to belong and build communities. So we follow, like, link, subscribe and make friends. We work at speed – networking, connecting, sharing, contributing and supporting.

As a result business is changing. It's becoming more transparent, agile and authentic than ever and social is the catalyst.

So, as someone who’s required to sell your tactics have to change.

In order to win in business now you have to understand exactly what motivates your prospects so you can add value. You need more influence in your market and you have be more engaging so you can cut through the Internet “noise” and connect with your buyers.

Welcome to the digital era!

Here's the fact.

Right now, there are buyers all over the world who want what you sell. They've a need (problem), a time-frame to buy (key driver), and they’ve even got a budget.

It sounds like a dream scenario. However, there's a problem. You're struggling to get in front of them.

You've tried to find out who they are, where they are and contact them. But, contrary to what many told you (or even what you believe yourself) it's not easy. To top it all, even when you know who they are and have their contact details most of the time they don't respond. In fact, current statistics report that if you attempt to make your first contact via the phone 90% (of IT Managers and CEOs) won’t.

So how do you solve this challenge?

The age of social selling has come about

To date, much of the conversation around social media has been focused on marketing and ways to support the brand – to get prospects and clients to see and to listen. As a consequence, businesses have used marketing to create content for blogs and social media. They push out tweets and posts but rarely do they have conversations. It's clear that they haven’t thought about how to get more out of the social platforms by joining them up with the sales departments.

Regrettably a trick has been missed for in a socially connected world using the social platforms to sell is the way to maximize opportunities. With Forrester reporting that 50-70% of the buying process happens before you get the chance to sell and Inside View claiming that 89% of consumers are searching for products and services using a search engine it makes sense. If you can meet your buyers where they are at and have meaningful conversations with them then, then you can reap the benefits.

Studies back this up too. 72.6% of sales people who use social media to sell outperform their colleagues who aren't using it.

So you'd have to be daft not to learn how to leverage from it.

Remember selling is a social occupation. At its core it’s a people business. People buy from people that they know, like and trust and no matter what era you live in it will always be this way. In the digital age all you have to do is to update your approach and learn some new tools o you can benefit. It couldn't be easier for someone who's used to selling.

The stages of social selling

There are 3 levels of social selling and it's vital to understand that it fits into the sales process as a layer.

Most companies are at the Level 1 which means that their sales teams are operating as individual units or silos – trying to figure it all out by themselves. Some forward thinking companies are getting it at Level 2. They’ve got a strategy in place, are joining up the dots, working their sales and marketing departments as a team and have invested in social selling training. At Level 3 you’ll find the early adopters. They’re way ahead of the curve and have embraced it fully despite previous failures. Through persistence they now have it sussed. These are the IBMs of the world, who are seeing a 400% return on their investment.

Key areas and action plans for social selling

The key to social selling is to identify some relatively simple, easy to implement first steps. So let’s focus on 6 key areas.

Key area 1: Who the Google are you?

Before you get started on social networks and social selling you have to ensure your profile is professional and up to the job it’s now going to have to perform for you. Your profile and headshot has now become a tool. It has to represent you well for it will be working for you 24/7. Investing in a professional headshot is one of the smartest investments you can make when it comes to selling on the social platforms.

Many miss this and it’s a pity for you have to look the part. Your photograph will open doors for you and when combined properly with a social media and social selling strategy will earn you more money.

So never have a faceless headshot. Always smile and be dressed for your market. If you’re selling to a corporate market, that means wearing business attire. Don’t try to be artistic with your photos either. Keep it simple.

Key area 2: Discover sales opportunities via social media

The first step in sales is to find your market – your prospects. In the past your company would have bought in data and you’d have contacted your prospects by using a list/database of suspects. You’d then have canvassed/cold called, emailed or sent a direct mailshot in the post. And perhaps you’re still doing that now. After that you’d have qualified them into prospects and then gone on to meet them, propose a solution and close the sale.

However, there are better ways to do this and they exist through the social platforms. One of the great things about using social as a tool to support your sales activity is that your buyers are far more open about their intentions than in the pre-social age. For example, many signal them by posting comments on Facebook, asking their followers on Twitter for their opinion and updating their status on LinkedIn.

Of course, to gain opportunities in this way, you need to be listening to your prospects. Using tools such as Hootsuite, Followerwonk, Tweetdeck, Linkedin and Google Alerts can gain you real-time insight into what your prospects and clients are discussing online. You’ll be able to understand their needs at both the personal level and at the business level. Remember, you’ll always have the advantage if you know both. And, you’ll be able to engage them with useful, timely information to help make their life and job easier and more rewarding.

Cue story

I was recently coaching a client who was looking to sell business consulting to professional services firms. From experience, he knew that she’d won business from companies who were going through significant changes – sudden expansion or contraction, a merger or consolidation and that they were mid-sized – 500 to 1,000 employees.

However, he was not socially savvy. He was still prospecting in person at events, calling from a list and using her network to gain referrals. Whilst these are good tactics, I knew he was missing out. He did too. So we addressed this through some social media and social selling training.

From the get-go, a strategy was formed. He set up his social media sites and social selling tools after that. He then worked on implementing the strategy by organizing a series of on-going searches to look for trigger phrases in social media. He followed key target companies on LinkedIn and looked for new job postings and breaking news. He also started commenting on industry blogs when he had insight to offer.

The efforts resulted in him being in the right place at the right time when sales opportunities came up. He was hooked into the conversation with his target market and demonstrating value. Furthermore, he wasn’t starting with cold leads, which gave him a head start over his competitors. He spent about 30 – 60 minutes a day interacting on the platforms. Before long he was increasing his meetings, had a consistent sales pipeline and able to convert more business.

Key area 3: Get to know your prospects (better)

When it comes to selling, you need it all – insight, empathy as well as a quality service offering. Champion sales performers know this and that’s why they research their prospects before meeting them for the first time.

Before social media came along you had to rely on their websites and searches (mostly for PR or news) on Google. Whilst this was useful, the problem with this approach was that it could only ever deliver surface-level information. Getting to know a prospect therefore had to begin from the first meeting.

Through social selling, the advantage you now have is that you can get to know your prospects much better prior. You’re able to determine the hooks you need in order to tailor your pitch to your prospect’s precise needs.

You can still perform the rudimentary research but you can support it by going deeper. With relatively little effort, you can discover:

Who the key individuals are within the organization
Who you or those you work with know
Whether you have any mutual contacts in common with them
What’s happening in near real-time
The level of engagement they have with their own clients
What those same clients are looking for from the business
What their prospect’s clients are complaining about

Armed with this information, you can move from a pitch that’s “me” centric to one that’s all “you.” You can show how your products and services will solve the issues your prospect’s are facing and you’ll have a far clearer picture of whose buy-in is critical in making the sale.

Now doesn’t that sound like a serious competitive advantage?

Key area 4: Get the right help to make the sale

Complex sales take time and are hard work. Prospects don’t simply walk into your shop and purchase an item off the shelf. If only! Complex, solution-led sales usually involve a number of people or “sponsors.” What’s more there are typically multiple buyers, each with a different role to play.

So, armed with great information, some of which will have been gathered through the social channels, you’ll need to bring together a range of expertize and knowledge to deliver a compelling response to a client’s or prospect’s needs.

Key area 5: Gain competitive insight

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.” – Sun Tzu

Selling is a competitive sport and in order to win at the game you have to know your competition well. This means knowing what your competitors are up to, so you can position yourself in the market, seize an advantage and win the business.

In many sales situations, the competitive differentiators are so small that any advantage can make the difference between success and failure. And whilst there were always ways to become aware of a competitor’s strategy pre social, most of the time your insight was gained when they unveiled their new advertising or public relations campaign. Nowadays though, these initiatives are publicized through social channels. The core themes are trialed in presentations and conference speeches, and often they’re tested out as pilots, on segments of the market first.

By using social media business tools you can get advanced notice of these shifts in positioning. By monitoring what your competitors are saying – especially what individuals within the company are saying, and the comments of those they’ve spoken to – you can spot competitive movement earlier and have an opportunity to react earlier.

Here are 4 things you can do to help you gain a competitive advantage:

Set up Google Alerts for competitor terms (brand names, products and even key stakeholders).
Join Groups on Linkedin where your competitors may be, and listen to what they’re saying.
Check Slideshare for any of your competitors' presentations or PDFs.
Follow your competitors on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Pay special attention to what they say and make sure to do the same when you follow their followers on Twitter.

Key area 6: Ensure client retention

Peer recommendations and testimonials are the number one trusted source of information for any business decision (and always have been). Today, however, the definition of ‘peers’ has widened considerably. It’s no longer simply those we work with or have worked with in the past. Today, peers covers a vast range of people connected to you in a wide variety of ways. In the social world we refer to them (peers) as “friends.”

Social networks have become the binding force that holds these connections together. They make it easier than ever for people to share information and solicit recommendations about services and suppliers. The good news – or bad news – is that they’re public. And this is something you need to be aware of.

I have to ask you. Do you know how much it costs you to win a client or even the cost of a lead? I’m betting you don’t (unless you’re a business owner). However, I bet you do know how costly it is to win a client. And, that it takes more effort to win a client than retain one. Right? Do you know that the lifespan of 50% of your clients is, on average 5 years? And, that few clients leave on a whim?

Yes, changing a supplier costs time and money (time = money). Typically, clients spend weeks or months attending client-supplier meetings, making calls and exchanging emails about what’s going wrong, and working to rectify the situation. Whilst they don’t especially want to change their supplier, during the process they’re busy hedging their bets and researching better solutions and other suppliers.

Pre-social, loosing a client would be, at best, the subject of a few rumours. These days’, however, just like it is with recommendations – everything’s a lot more public. Clients have the power to enact sweet revenge for any perceived failing. (As an experiment, stop reading this and search on Twitter for ‘#FAIL’ – see what we mean?)

So monitoring what your clients are saying is useful if you’re intent on keeping them for more than 5 years. By using a system for tracking your competitors via social channels you’ll gain precious insights into client-supplier issues you may be failing to spot by other means. From there, you can take action to address these issues before they lead to a costly break-up.

So to wrap this up…

The time to begin social selling is now. Whilst many worry about the threat of social media, if you’re in sales, it’s time to look more closely at the opportunities and embrace the change. There has never been a better time to use these social selling tools to find new clients, craft pitches that meet their specific needs and bring the right people together to make the sale.

I encourage you, as always to up your game and to seek out better ways to sell and market your business. Thank you, as always for reading. If you found this useful, tell your “friends” and get them to sign up to receive my information.

Now I want to hear from you…

Tell me in the comments below or in a private email:

How are you dealing with social media when it comes to sales?
What aspect of social media or social selling (if you're doing it) do you find the most challenging?

Please share your stories and experience here, and if you've got a question, just pop it down here.

Thanks for being a sport and participating!

P.S.

Finally, if you know someone who'd LOVE the insight from this how to implement a social selling plan that really works post, please send them a link. You’ll find solo entrepreneurs, consultants and yes, even sales and marketing managers who manage people who'll be interested to hear about this.