Partner Article

A Guide to Understanding Social Sales and the Attached Significance

Social selling is the term given to the marketing technique that induces social buyers to turn into customers. The technique aims at convincing the prospective customer to know about a business, like, and also trust it. To accomplish this, I’d recommend sales persons to find new ways that reach out to the prospective customers via the social platforms and create valuable and shareable content, so they can see their brand grow in importance.

Social media sales are not confined to selling via social tools like Facebook or Twitter or the numerous other social networks. It concerns the creation of a strong and powerful brand presence. To make this possible, it is pertinent to understand the significance of content and its use in creating a powerful intact. This as a result allows you to grow strong social connections.

Heeding to Statistics for Better Sales

Though it is a given thing that social media influencers are great assets for businesses because of their immense following, statistics are quick to refute them. Nearly 91% of social media mentions are received from people who possess 500 followers or even less. This has revealed that businesses have been promoting the so called influencers with invites to exclusive celebrations, free products, and sponsored luxury trips, so they can advertise or refer their brand on social media in vain. Though I accept that such celebrities do have some importance, when you take the collective amount of the people with normal mentions, it is they who stand out as the dynamic and powerful mass that business should rely on and support.

Addressing Social Selling

Social businesses have opened up to the significance of customer focus and changing their traditional hub. Empathizing with the customer is according to me, the core of how businesses can succeed in the highly social global scenario present now. While customer focused social media sales is the need of the hour, there are certain issues that have to be addressed to make them drive businesses towards the profit summits.

• Monitoring the social networks gives salespeople potential leads. This is used by them to find the right decision makers inside prospective companies whom they should focus on and leverage the contacts found for introductions and referrals.

• Fostering insight via social media is the right way to increase the social selling. The insight can be gleaned from business purchasers who like customers express their business goals and requirements in the social media. This insight is, according to me, that changes the impersonal and distant calls to warm introductions and referrals. Valuable information exchange is thus enabled.

• Engaging customers is easy for sales people via social media. Keeping tabs on the social profiles of customers, their preferences and likes without using follow-up calls that irritate them is possible. If an opportunity to engage is present, it is easy for the seller to contact the customer via social media.

• Making the sale, which is the result of the above mentioned steps, is facilitated when the social sales is linked seamlessly with other business strategies, so a collaborative and innovative selling method is brought about.

Role of Sales Representatives

It is imperative for sales reps to build personal brands online and maintain social connections with customers. When they form a personal brand, they not only showcase their engaging and interesting characteristic, but also share their knowledge and expertise. This is effective in recruiting customers successfully. While using this new social media sales strategy, I’d strongly suggest that they should not abandon their traditional sales pitch, but add new tools to their existing pitch, so the product is displayed in a more valuable manner.

What businesses should aim at

Tasting success in social selling is accomplished only when sales people find the ideal way to strengthen the personal brand. I’d recommend making this possible by putting a halt to all the excessive content marketing promotional tactics that marketers use in the digital platform. Instead what I suggest is nurturing powerful social connections and become skilled story narrators. This gives them the edge they need to garner social influence in the various social networks.

Social media sales essentially comprises of forming new connections and also sharing exceptional content. The connection is established first with the target customers and their influencers in social media. With compelling content, you aim at mesmerizing target audience and their influences effectively. This is as far as I know a simple process that takes very little time, when compared to the other marketing techniques you employ for your business which are not as effective as the social selling process.

You can download this whitepaper to know more about social media sales and its impact on your business.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tata Business Support Services Limited .