Social selling: how to influence buyers before they’ve even contacted you

The trend for ‘social selling’ can offer companies a valuable tool to boost their sales activities by educating, nurturing and communicating with potential customers way before the traditional sales process begins. But how can you ensure the right people are actually seeing your content so you can take advantage of this new sales channel? 

In his latest post, .rising leader Olivier Choron explores the possibilities, explaining how through savvy social media amplification, you can build a powerful network of advocates to help your content get seen in all the right places.

 

Social selling: how to influence buyers before they’ve even contacted you

‘Social selling’ is the current buzzword in sales circles. Whilst many do not believe the actual function of ‘selling’ has inherently changed, the advance of social media is affecting the sales cycle…and it’s all good news!

Savvy sales staff can now use social media as an additional tool to hook, educate, communicate with and nurture prospective buyers. This can potentially accelerate the sales cycle and provide customers with more confidence that they are buying the right product from the right company for the right reasons.

But is this the only thing social media can do for your organisation and sales teams? What about using social media before the ‘selling’ even starts?

Buyers, at all levels and across all industries, are increasingly leveraging social media to ‘do their research’ and find out about new solutions and companies.

So, this is where the first opportunity lies: you can influence these buyers before they’ve even thought about buying your products or contacting your organisation. And here’s the best bit: you don’t just have to do it on your own; you can also use other people’s contacts and networks too.

Add to this one of the current challenge brands have. When I talk about social selling, large organisations always say: “We produce great content, but nobody sees it”. In short, their reach on social media is fairly limited to their own followers or fans.

How to fix these problems?

Consider the potential reach of your sales employees and channel partners – distributors, resellers, retailers, dealers, brokers and advisors, whatever you call them. These people are spending a lot of their time networking, via social or face-to-face, and collecting contacts, friends and followers.

Imagine, then, empowering them with your social media content – the rich content which you as an organisation are spending good money and using talented resources to create, but possibly finding difficult to distribute.

Using social media amplification and syndication platforms, brands share content with third parties; their own sales teams and/or external channel partners, and let these parties re-post the content, as if it was their own, on their own social networks.

The benefits are clear and multiple.

For brands, amplification via advocates means that brand messages will reach new audiences previously inaccessible, i.e. the social audiences of all of their third parties, across the globe and in real time too. It also means that the interactions created by this content happen at the right place – between the potential buyers and the sellers (your sales staff or your channel partners), hence shortening and enhancing the sales cycle.

For advocates, amplification means that they finally have content they can share. Your sales staff and partners are not always good at marketing. Handing them fresh, original content they can easily re-post as their own will turn them into ‘active social heroes’.

If you share great content (and by that I mean content that goes beyond product news) such as thought-leadership, market research, and success stories, then amplification will also help your advocates become your trusted advisors and ensure that they are more closely engaged with your brand.

How do I know all this? We do it every day with our own social media amplification platform – socialondemand®, and it really works!  Companies like Microsoft, Adobe, McAfee, Norton, Xerox, Avnet, Trend Micro and Mountain Hardwear, part of Columbia Sports, are just a few of our clients using social media amplification through socialondemand. They are empowering their employees, partners and advocates with great content, collectively reaching a staggering 70 million new contacts every month.

As Chris Harges, Director of Global Marketing a Mountain Hardwear, confirmed: “Seeing a definable return on investment is obviously key, and returns for us include partner engagement, positive consumer behaviour as well as the content distribution. socialondemand has delivered on every KPI we monitored, and is now an integral part of our marketing strategy.”

It’s certainly worth considering.

Visit www.purechannelapps.com for more information or to request a demo.