In a previous article, we explained what Social Selling is, and how you can Social sell. Social Selling is gradually kicking out the traditional methods of selling, such as cold calling and others. Now you can log into your social media account and strike a conversation with a potential customer or client.

Social selling now helps small businesses, and even bigger enterprises generate leads, conversion, brand awareness, and long term relationships. There are now lots of social media platforms salespeople can leverage on to target buyers and turn them to customers. The best example of such a platform is LinkedIn, which has slightly shifted from being a professional platform to a social one.

Salespeople who are active on social media, especially LinkedIn, Facebook groups, Quora, have more sale success than those who are not using social networks. As a sales manager, it is your responsibility to ensure your team is making sales, especially on social media. And to achieve this, there needs to be a framework and a strategy that every team member works from rather than trying any random social acts.

Here are some techniques to get your team to succeed at social selling:

Draft a strategy

What are your goals and objectives for using social media to sell? You need to set the goals and ensure it is measurable, too, so that at the end of a specific period, you can sit with your team members and evaluate the strategy that worked and the one to change.

And while drafting a social marketing selling strategy, do include a content strategy that your team can make use of when trying to communicate with the potential buyer. Ensure that the content focuses on creating a scenario where the buyers see your products and services as a solution to their problem rather than telling them upfront that it is a solution.

Define your target audience

If you want your salesforce to know whom to connect with on social media and those to ignore, you’ll need to define your audience either through demographics, business types and so on.

Look at it from the traditional marketing method; there are places marketers do not even bother visiting or people they don’t walk up to because they know they will never be a buyer.

It becomes easy to social sell when team members know where to find people they need to converse and convert.

Craft a typical sales book

Every salesperson has a sales book where they’ve written down their best lines or lines they say to prospects daily. If your team is yet to have one, then take the step to create it.

The sales handbook should contain contents that would move a conversation between a salesperson and the prospective buyer forward. It should include step by step discussion lines as well as responses to typical questions.

This book will help your team members when discussing with prospects as they will know what to say and the exact time to make the statement. If they get faced with numerous emails and voice mails, which can be overwhelming to anyone, they can easily reference the book to know the right responses to give almost immediately. It’s the right way to increase productivity and of course, conversion.

Optimize LinkedIn profile

Your team members should ensure that they optimize their profiles to show what they intend to offer to buyers. They should be able to show whom they’ve helped in the past and how they went about it.

If you are using an official company account, the profile should provide answers to questions which prospects would want to know when they come across your page.

Writing about the history of the business, vision, mission, etc doesn’t interest a typical consumer. All they need to learn is how your business can help with theirs or provide them with the solution they badly need. Prospects should see from your company profile that it’s customer-centric and ready to provide real value to them.

Your company and team’s LinkedIn profile should be able to incite curiosity about your brand to motivate the prospects to learn more by reaching out to you through messages or scheduling a call. Avoid concentrating on making connections on LinkedIn when your profile doesn’t look credible.

Try social listening

Get to know your audience and learn about your prospects’ needs and want through social listening to know about their pain points and tailor messages in a way to showcase your products and services as the solution to their problem.

Social listening also helps you create a unique experience for your customers and prospects that will have them coming back. You also see what competitors, as well as influencers, are doing right to include it to your strategy.

There are various social listening tools you can use to track prospects and social mentions. Some of them are. And if you have enough funds, you can hire a separate team dedicated to social listening like Amazon.

Respond to customer’s complaint

Treating your customers right will bring in more customers through words of the mouth. So, ensure you are not missing out on an opportunity to increase sales and boost brand awareness.

Always respond to their complaints promptly. And even when they have a negative review about your product, respond and let them know how you’ll make amends. Your customers should be your top priority.

Train your sales team

If you want to see desired results on their sales effort, then you’ll need to put them through a series of training to show them how to social sell effectively.

Get them trained on how to use social selling techniques such as striking conversations with prospects and sharing relevant content with their connects. An organization that invests in training its workforce is a learning organization that will last for years.

You can decide to make it an online or offline training depending on the convenience of the team. And then there is also the importance of on the job training with live instructions to make what they’ve learned stick.

Measure performance

Using the goals and objectives set for social selling, you can easily measure the key performance index (KPI) of your sales team to see where they are performing well and where to improve. If it’s necessary, you can include some coaching sessions for the least performing member.