4 Ways to Increase Social Selling Effectiveness

Have you ever felt the excitement about social selling at the beginning of a new quarter, only for it to trail off a few weeks later? Do you have a hard time keeping that fire alive? If so, you’ll love this post. A social selling strategy doesn’t offer immediate results. In a world of instant gratification, this can cause some frustration. You may deal with discouraged salespeople that don’t appreciate the lack of short-term closing power.But if you can just get them to stick with it, it’ll pay off. Here are a few ideas to increase your social selling effectiveness..

1. Develop a Training Program

Gather a room of sales representatives and give them one initiative: do social selling. I’d feel shocked if you didn’t find yourself in a room full of confused professionals. You’ve got to set up a proper training system. It’s the only way to really succeed. Develop a system for executing proper social selling. Outline processes for Twitter, LinkedIn groups, blogging, and any other platform you expect them to use. If you don’t train, your initiative will fail. Here are a few things to get you started:

• Flight Media's Crushing Twitter for Small Business (Stop reading, buy it.)
• Social Prospecting Blueprint – B2B Social Selling System (Udemy)
• Social Selling With LinkedIn (Lynda.com)
• The Mini-Guide to Social Selling (Salesforce)

2. Set Clear Guidelines and Policies

News flash: social media is terrifying. One misstep and it can destroy an entire brand. Poor choices lead to brand nightmares, PR disasters and the loss of your job. Smart salespeople will always err on the side of caution. That’s why you need to have clear guidelines and policies in place. If people don’t understand what’s acceptable (or not), they’ll stay quiet instead of risk it.Don’t make this more complicated than needed. As a rule of thumb, larger organizations will need more complex social media policies than smaller ones. If you need some help getting started, check out these ten tips on creating a social media policy for your business.

3. Align Your Sales and Marketing Departments

Your salespeople should actively post, comment, like and share both branded and third-party content. Not only will it help establish credibility, but it can also build trust when done strategically. Unfortunately, even the strongest sales team has limitations. And that’s where marketing comes in. Creating, curating and sharing valuable content should lie at the heart of your content-driven marketing anyway. That’s a pretty small jump from your sales team’s goals. There’s quite a bit of ways you can join marketing and sales forces. Here are a few: [checklist]

• Identify professional groups and communities of target markets.
• Provide thought leadership content that propels educated social media discourse.
• Offer sales assets like templates that always stay up-to-date.
• Suggest social media post ideas based on platform expertise (e.g. What types of posts work best on Twitter vs. Facebook).
• Recommend complementary content that can support sales efforts.
• Track conversations, prospects and content that will assist the sales team.

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4. Launch a Competitive Contest

Ah, gamification. The golden ticket that makes people do tedious tasks while making them think they had the idea. It’s genius, really. And when that gamification taps into the competitive nature of sales reps? Magical things can happen, my friends. Magical. Like Disney World. Because salespeople have a natural competitive spirit, it’s not hard to get them competing. Add in the promise of a reward and you have the makings of a great contest. Not only does this provide endless entertainment for you, but it also ingrains the habit of social selling deep into your representatives’ DNA. Some ideas of KPIs for the contest: [starlist]

• Whoever creates the most optimized social profiles.
• Quantity of new appointments gained through social selling.
• The ability to answer random questions about your social selling process.

[/starlist] And those are just a few. With a bit of creativity, you can come up with a great system that encourages your sales representatives to perform. Read about how this company used social selling and gamification methods to land a $100K contract for their client. It’s pretty rad.

Conclusion

Many businesses depend on an effective social selling team. And if that applies to your business, then you need to do everything possible to accomplish that goal. Which of these tips will you apply first? Share your thoughts in the comments below! I’d love to hear what strategy you plan to take.