In this weeks episode I introduce a very important subject – Social Selling.
This is a subject that we will return to on many occasions as social selling is the cornerstone of using LinkedIn successfully as a business development tool.
There are five key elements to social selling;
- What is social selling?
- The most important thing (MIT)
- Why social selling?
- How to sell on social
- Measure your performance
What is social selling?
The Wikipedia definition is as follows;
“social selling is the process of developing relationships as part of the sales process”
This is a pretty good description although my version would be;
Assisting and enhancing the sales process through effective use of social media
The MIT
Social selling does not involve actual selling at all!
The aim of social selling is to serve rather than sell as well as researching your prospects and markets.
Why?
The buying process has changed dramatically over the last 5 to 10 years.
Today’s buyer is socially connected, digitally driven, mobile and empowered by unlimited access to information on the Internet.
Millennials are even more socially connected and by 2020 50% of the workforce will be millennials and by 2025 that will have increased to 75%!
How?
- Produce a buyer centric LinkedIn profile
- Identify and surround buyers
- Be part of their community
- Always be connecting – the ABC of social selling (quote by Jill Rowley)
- Share content
- OPC – Other peoples content
- Original content – find your voice!
- Content is the currency of a modern salesperson
- Visually appealing
- Engaging
- Listen to your market. Learn, understand, relate and amplify what your see.
Measure
This is the hardest bit!
Try to use systems to record where your business is coming from.
Social CRM products such as Nimble can be useful or to a lesser degree LinkedIn Contacts or even just a good old spreadsheet.
No matter how sophisticated your tools, you still need the discipline to use them correctly!
Useful links
The ABCs of Social Selling. Always Be Connecting – Jill Rowley (video)
Social selling blog – Tim Hughes
Social4sales website – Darrel Griffin
So there you have it, social selling is here to stay and it’s time you started to get to grips with it.
I’m here to help so please feel free to get in touch at info@winbusinessin.com or if you have a question that you feel others will benefit from, why not leave a voicemail by clicking on the link you can see on the right hand edge of this page.
That’s it for this week.
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