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Don’t Worry, Be Happy as a Social Seller

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

Social Selling Quotes

Social selling is your new secret weapon for reaching your sales targets.

If you currently hold a quota-carrying sales position or had one in the past, then you’ve likely worried about reaching your targets at one point in time or another. This stress simply comes with the territory. Everyone in sales has months or quarters where, regardless of their effort, the monetary value of their closed deals did not reach their level of expectations.

Not reaching your goal could happen for a number of external reasons, such as summer vacations, long sales cycles, economic conditions and so on. It could also be a result of internal factors like poor forecasting, improper qualifying or a small sales pipeline of prospects.

Fortunately for all of you sales professionals out there, the technology age has brought about an entirely new set of tools that can alleviate the stress of reaching quota by helping you exceed your targets and transforming you into a social seller.

How is Social Selling different?

As Social Sellers, we learn to use things like LinkedIn, Twitter and content curation to overcome these fluctuations in performance. For starters, regularly sharing content with our networks and starting conversations with buyers via social media platforms helps us build a much larger pipeline of opportunities. Secondly, by fundamentally changing the way we communicate with our buyers, we are able to gain additional insights from them along their buying journey, which is very helpful with forecasting.

If, for example, you send out a proposal to a prospective client and then follow the traditional sales methodology to call and email them constantly for an answer without any reply, you’re not gaining any intelligence on their position and as such cannot accurately predict a closing date.

If, however, you send the proposal and then use Social Selling tactics to follow up with them regularly by sharing valuable information, it gives you another reason to start a conversation and in turn ask them about the pending deal.
Client Triggers

Why does Social Selling work?

Social selling methods have proven to be effective countless times. Buyers will always appreciate you delivering them value and typically reciprocate your efforts with insights on their current position. Buyers will not typically respond well to sales professionals harassing them for an answer though, especially when there is no immediate pressure to do so. And NO, price protection dates do not build a sense of urgency. Buyers see right through them.

The next time you find yourself in between communications with a potential customer, try sharing a valuable piece of content with them. I can guarantee that 8 times out of 10 you will receive a positive response and have a new opportunity to spark up a conversation with them.

Supporting data

But don’t take my word for it, check out some of these supporting stats:

  • 78% of salespeople using social media outsell their peers (source: Social Media and Sales Quota Survey)
  • 75% of customers say they use social media as part of the buying process (source: IBM)
  • 55% of B2B buyers search for information on social media (source: MediaBistro)

Click here for more supporting stats on the power of Social Selling.

Let me know if you have any feedback on this post via the comment box provided or feel free to schedule a call with me by clicking the “Let’s Talk Social Selling” button below.

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The Ultimate Guide to Social Selling