At a minimum, social media is the new phone. It’s both an inbound and outbound way to contact and communicate with sales prospects. Is it the best phone for all your prospects? Certainly not, but it does allow you to do more sales prospecting in a single day than you’d likely complete in a week using a standard phone. But scale is only the beginning. Social Selling delivers a host of additional benefits unattainable with traditional outbound selling techniques.
Social Selling is like cold calling, except the calls are warm and welcome.
When your prospect is on a social platform, they are inviting conversation. They are there to interact, to learn from others and to engage in conversations and mutually beneficial information sharing. As long as you consistently present (in the words of my friend Jay Baer) Youtility by providing helpful content that answer questions, they’ll continue to welcome your engagement.
They may even look forward to that engagement. Now when is the last time you actually wished a sales person would call you?
Social Selling helps you hear the voice of the sales prospect.
By engaging in online conversations and social networks, you create the opportunity to hear the voice of the prospect. And the more intimate relationship you can establish, the more loudly you’ll hear that voice. You’ll be the first to hear the pain or problem that sends a clear buying signal you can note and ultimately begin converting.
Every social media platform provides some level of platform conversation search capability. By leveraging those platform search engines, you can cast a long, wide antenna that helps you painlessly prospect for business each and every day by simply listening for prospective customer problems.
Social Selling creates a sense of attachment.
The single biggest benefit of social selling over traditional sales prospecting is the sense of attachment social selling can create. No one likes being interrupted by an unplanned phone call from a sales person that just wants to meet a quota.
But everyone welcomes a social friend that has a link to the a perfect piece of content, a helpful video or just a great podcast that either informs or delights the listener. Traditional selling is all about trying to close a transaction. Done well, social selling is all about creating B2B sales seduction with the goal of drawing the prospect closer to you so that you can convince them that you or your solution is the most desirable option available to them.
Get Started With Social Selling
Here are three easy ways to get started with social selling.
Pick up a copy of my book, The Invisible Sale, a field guide for any salesperson or company that wants to augment their current sales process with more effective and efficient social selling techniques.
Subscribe to our weekly Painless Prospecting sales prospecting newsletter. It’s one simple, actionable idea or tip delivered to your inbox every Sunday so you can find and win more business on Monday.
Schedule a Social Selling Workshop for your sales & marketing team.
Or if you just have a question about Social Selling that you’d like answered – just drop it in the comments and I’ll answer each and every one of them.
Really good article, Tom!
Straightforward and well-thought-out. These days social selling is way more better method than just cold calling prospects out of the blue. Additionally, thanks to social media activity we don’t have to waste time blindly looking for leads. We can be really accurate when it comes to addressing the right type of clients with whom we want to cooperate. We can better understand their needs, identify their painpoints and thus be better prepared for the talk, which in the end may help us convert our prospects into customers. I think everyone should try social media in the process of lead gen, even if it’s a totally new world for someone. Ideally I would see such a sequence: 1. finding prospects and warming them up via social media, 2. dropping them a cold email to check if they’d be interested in a talk, 3. a phone call. Do you think such a sequence would work fine?
Hi Cathy,
The sequence sounds fine but I’ve always found it’s the timing that get’s tricky. Calling to fast or even emailing too fast is where sales often trips themselves up.
Tom