Traditional sales approaches start with push marketing – essentially, this calls for using interruptive media to push your products at as many people as possible, hoping to persuade buyers. It's what advertising relies on, and it’s outdated. Social selling, on the other hand, uses social media to develop relationships with people as part of the sales process.
Although it takes a bit more time to execute – and requires more effort in certain areas, because the customer journey is vastly different from traditional selling methods – it can pay dividends in brand awareness and customer loyalty.
Some of the biggest challenges with social selling lie in finding the right connections, or getting introduced to prospects. Then, once the connection is made, finding time to keep the conversation going without simply blasting people with sales pitches right off the bat can be difficult for many marketers. Plus, there's always knowing the right way to handle social selling from one social network to another.
Luckily, there are tools available to help throughout the entire sales process. Let's dig in.
1. Attract/Prospect: Connect with Target Audience Members
Before you can drive any revenue with social selling, you need to develop an engaged, relevant audience of social media followers. Of course, not just any social media followers will do. Therein lies the challenge. You have to find people who are likely to be interested in your message, and possibly interested in the products or services you're offering.
That means spending money on ads and taking time to research your social platforms for potential connections that fit the bill.
With AdEspresso, you can maximize your ad spend and ROI with easy split-testing. With this platform, you can create thousands of variants of your ads in just a few clicks, to save time. Focus your efforts on the ads that people respond to the best, even if you have multiple target audiences. Stop wasting money on ads that aren't converting, so you can build a targeted audience of people who are actively paying attention to what you share.
Image source: https://publicate.it/twitter-rss-feed-generator/
Publicate is a curation tool that also offers a powerful Twitter RSS feed generator. This that makes it easier to organize your prospecting efforts, allowing you to be more productive with the limited time you have for engaging with people looking for help. Use the platform to aggregate content suited to your audience from a variety of trusted sources with Twitter lists, searches, or hashtags. This makes it easy to read the latest tweets in the news reader app of your choice, or add the Twitter RSS feed to your marketing platforms so you have a steady stream of fresh content for your followers.
2. Qualify/Nurture: Get the Right Ones Thinking About You
On social media, you can get a decent idea of who you need to connect with further, just by paying attention to who's talking to you, sharing your content and commenting on it. But \ that doesn't tell you who has actually taken the time to visit your website, and Google Analytics won’t show you much information on individual site visitors.
You may have a few friendly followers who like you as a person or want to help you out, but aren't really all that interested in your offer. That means you could be wasting time with the wrong connections, while ignoring ones that are warm.
Leadfeeder connects with your Google Analytics account and matches IP addresses to LinkedIn profiles. This way, you can see which companies are taking the time to check out your content. If you already have a connection on LinkedIn with the company, you know whom to nurture. If not, you know where to start for getting an introduction to the right person at the company.
Image source: https://www.leadfeeder.com/
Crunchbase helps you qualify your prospects by learning more about their companies. See who works there, how many employees they have, how much funding they’ve landed to date and see company news at a glance. Learn more about their investors, so you can be sure they have the necessary capital to conduct business with your company.
3. Pitch/Follow Up: Keep the Conversation Going
When it’s time to take the conversation from social media to email, for pitching or following up on proposals, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Do you have the right email address? Are you saying the right things?
Make one snafu at this stage, and you can take that lead and send them right out the door – especially if you try to move things along too quickly.
Norbert is a tool that allows you to find anyone's corporate email address. It can integrate with hundreds of marketing platforms to fit your workflow using Zapier. It's also possible to search people in bulk with a .CSV file. Plans start at $49 per month, for 1,000 leads. There's also a prepaid plan for 10 cents per lead, paid as you go. Each new account gets 50 free leads to start.
Image source: https://www.voilanorbert.com/
Mailshake is a killer solution for cold emailing. It connects to your Gmail account, and comes with a number of email content templates with dynamic fields for personalization at scale. The tool can even send automatic follow-ups for you, so that no one slips through the cracks.
4. Close: Seal the Deal
It's finally time to close. But the work isn't done after someone becomes a customer. It can be hard to stay on top of invoicing and collections for initial down payments, especially while you're working with clients in other stages of the pipeline at the same time. Organization is paramount, but without the right tools in your workflow, you could be working harder than you need to be.
PandaDoc is a document platform that makes it easy to handle everything you may need to close your deals. Send quick and easy quotes, more in-depth proposals and electronically signable documents. There are templates to help you save more time in the document creation process, and analytics show you who’s been prompted to sign off on what, when.
Image source: https://help.pandadoc.com/faqs/signature-field-can-use/
Due is a billing and processing platform that makes it easy to accept payments online. You can use it to reduce friction when your new customers want to pay a deposit as part of their onboarding experiences for your services.
With the Right Tools, You Can Stack the Deck
Using these tools, you can overcome many of the roadblocks associated with social selling. Sure, you still need to focus on creating content with appropriate messaging for each segment of the pipeline, but these tools will give you more time to do that.
