Your company’s top priority should always be the relationship between your sellers and buyers. And despite taking the time to enable sellers to interact with buyers, you notice that your team isn’t hitting their targets as you would like. If this is the case for your organization, it might be time to embrace new tactics and strategies to improve buyer engagement. Enter social selling.
If you’re unfamiliar with social selling, examples include your sellers using their personal social media accounts to establish meaningful relationships with buyers. Organizations that use social selling correctly can build credibility, increase leads, and convert buyers into customers to ultimately improve the bottom line. Let’s take a close look at these benefits of social selling for you, your sellers, and your company.
1. Build your personal brand
A social selling strategy is not the same as regurgitating your company’s content on a rep’s personal social media accounts. Instead, sellers intentionally use social media to engage in conversations and share relevant and useful content with buyers. This is a chance for sellers to establish themselves as experts and connect with prospects on an individual level.
Any social media site can be used for social selling, and LinkedIn and Twitter are natural channels to establish professional relationships. Regardless of the channel you choose, your personal brand can flourish in any setting as long as you communicate the way your audience prefers.
2. Establish trust with buyers
Customers buy from sales reps and organizations they trust. Buyers are more inclined to trust a solution when sellers offer guidance that relates to their specific use case. It’s important to remember that buyers trust sellers who they know and relate to both personally and professionally.
Social selling for B2B organizations is no different. Using direct messages and comments to demonstrate your authenticity and understanding can make you seem more open and authoritative online and offline. While sharing relevant industry content is extremely important, talking about personal topics and interests can also make prospects feel more comfortable.
3. Add value to relevant communities
Chances are, your area of expertise already has a vibrant online community full of interesting conversations. An excellent social selling example can include listening to what is already being discussed and interacting when the opportunity arises. Commenting on posts that spark your interest or reposting ideas that resonate with you can be a great way to naturally contribute and add value to the conversation.
4. Listen to understand what your customers need
In many ways, your company’s buyers look like the average individual consumer. However, that doesn’t mean every buyer is the same. After all, every buyer has their own unique challenges, goals, and even communication preferences. They’ve also likely taken their own time to research your company before reaching out to your company.
76% of B2B buyers expect companies to understand their unique needs once they do reach out, so it’s important to deliver an experience that meets them where they are in the buying process. A social selling platform is a great place to contribute ideas and listen to buyers’ concerns and feedback. Actively listening to your buyers’ needs and addressing issues as they arise can add to your trustworthiness as a professional and as a seller.
5. Identify the right prospects faster
The positive effects of social selling do not strictly flow from sellers to buyers. As you create more connections and deepen your thought leadership and expertise in your industry, you’ll be able to cast your net wider to learn more about prospects.
Perhaps, you will be guided to lucrative ventures you would not have otherwise heard about. You also may be able to identify new leads from the organic conversations you start online. It could also be a great way to learn about new organizations or networking groups to build lasting relationships.
Never stop growing.
How Seismic can help
Personability and relatability are critical to building new relationships and deepening existing ones. That’s where Seismic comes in. Our comprehensive sales enablement platform includes buyer engagement, training, and social selling tools that can help sellers embrace and succeed in the virtual sales world. Get a demo and see how Seismic makes it easy to leverage the power of social media.
