Social Selling: What It Is and How to Enhance It (Part 2)
Last week, I talked a bit about what social selling is and how it can help your sales team become more successful. In part two of this blog, I am sharing how having a complete picture of an account relationship in SalesWise has enabled me to be even more successful in my social selling efforts.
As a quick reminder, “Social selling is when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects,” according to HubSpot. Though, social selling is not using social media as additional channels for spamming prospects. A successful social selling approach enables salespeople to provide valuable insights to their customers and prospects by paying attention to and understanding their interests.
Once a sale is in progress, sellers know that understanding each person who gets pulled into a buying decision is paramount. Unfortunately, not every sales conversation ends as a Closed Won opportunity. When trying to revive those deals, every salesperson is familiar with the challenges of bringing an old opportunity back to life, specifically if it belonged to a rep that is no longer with the organization. These situations lend themselves well to social selling, and since joining SalesWise, my efforts doing just that have been enhanced thanks to the context the SalesWise platform provides.
Deal Revivals
Reviving old Closed Lost opportunities is a common, and often fruitful, technique for many sales organizations — especially during onboarding of new reps. But anybody who has ever tried to revive a deal knows this story well: a sales rep opens several Salesforce tasks hoping there are good activity notes, gives up, and then, essentially, cold calls the or emails the former prospect. This is particularly true if the sales rep is trying to revive a deal that belonged to a salesperson no longer with the company.
Having visibility into the content of emails that have been sent between my company and a prospect organization in SalesWise gives me far more detail than I would have otherwise and makes that initial interaction with a customer more valuable for them. SalesWise captures all the historical interaction with a prospect that exists on your email server, giving a picture of the complete relationship. Our connection to the email server also means that every action and contact is represented, regardless of how diligent (or not) reps have been about logging data in CRM. Being able to see exactly who was involved gives also gives me information on who I need to “socially surround” as I am trying to get reconnected with a prospect.
Once the Selling Begins
As you get deeper into a B2B sales cycle with a prospective customer, more and more people typically get involved. Whether that involvement is coming from within the seller’s organization or the prospect’s, the phrase “buying by committee” starts to come to mind. Fortunately, SalesWise organizes every contact in a relationship, merely by virtue of them sending or receiving an email or calendar invite. This enables the sales professional to know precisely who is involved in their deals – on both sides of the table.
The benefit of seeing the people my champion is bringing into the deal is fairly obvious — I can research those folks and come to future meetings and demos with a better awareness of their interests. Having visibility into everything that’s happening with my accounts outside of my workflow, even if I am not cc’d on the emails my technical team and their technical team are exchanging for example, helps me target my sales efforts within an prospect company strategically. It is also a great reminder to leverage the social connections of the people within my organization – something that’s often overlooked. As with most sales techniques in today’s environment, being able to successfully implement them with an account-based focus is crucial to success.
As tools like LinkedIn and Twitter become increasingly indispensable for conducting business, it’s unlikely that social selling is going away anytime soon. Being able to use these tools to provide more valuable information to your prospects will make you a partner in your buyer’s journey as opposed to just another salesperson. However, as with most things, social selling is improved when you have more context – exactly what SalesWise can provide you about your business relationships.