Social Selling -The Route for Building Sales Effectiveness
Inherent in the term ‘Social Selling’ is relationship building, lead nurturing, lead farming. The way these are termed may differ as per different individuals, but they mean one and the same thing. Using and leveraging social media platforms to identify prospects, connect with them, engage with them in conversations and then build a relationship mapping with them before taking it offline as well. Social media has totally revolutionized the way we sell – yes, even in the more complex B2B industry. It has changed the dynamics of demand and supply in a way that has not been imagined before. In this whole new yet not-so-new world, ‘Who Blinks First’ has also changed – it could be the buyer who hunts the seller or vice versa. A lot indeed can happen over Social Media! You can also use the best SMM panel for more efficient and streamlined social media management. Let’s do a quick sprint on how the Social Media Selling Process works and what one needs to do, to be good at it. Identify the right Social Media Platforms for your product. One quick way of picking the right platforms is to find out – Where is your customer present, online? What are his favorite haunts online when he is wearing his professional hat? It is also important to be aware of his favorite haunts beyond his 9 to 5 garb. Once you know this, you will be able to pick the top 3 social media channels/platforms he frequents. That’s where you connect with him. For instance, for a majority of B2B companies, a professional platform works better – such as LinkedIn. Work on your profile on that platform. Build a good profile. A profile on any Social Media platform needs a lot of working upon. Your profile is the face you show to the public. So while you need to be careful you are not shouting from the rooftops about your accomplishments, you must note all your accomplishments accurately. Being honest and transparent while working on your profile, has its own merits. Do not forget to have a nice formal, professional photograph uploaded. Research your prospects Do some research on the people you would like to connect with. See their profiles, take your time researching, be professional, yet creative and original when you send out that request for a connect. Among the millions on that platform, you need to give him a strong reason to want to accept your request to connect. Keep your connections engaged Keep your connections engaged in conversations. Be regular in updates – this helps your contacts stay updated with the happenings in your company and life Listen, acknowledge and applaud. Do all of these, as the case may be. Do read your contact’s updates. Comment on those acknowledges his accomplishments as you read about them, share an article that may be of interest to him and applaud when the situation demands. These things help you stay visible in his mind and ensure recall at a later stage when you may need it. This also sets the stage for your prospect to develop a ‘liking’ towards you – the first building block of trust and a long-term relationship Take it offline, too. When you have developed a fair engagement mutually, seek a meeting or a phone call with him. This is when you move your purely online relationship to offline. Keep it going. From here onwards, keep up the engagement online and offline. Social Media Selling has made it very convenient to ensure that we skip the cold calling or legwork of the old days and connect with our prospects in no time at all and is now being recognized as a route for building sales effectiveness. It has made it very convenient to form a connect and build a relationship. And if we were to go by Social Media Analytics, these are relationships that have greater chances of converting into hardcore sales. Explore the complete guide to Cross-selling and Up-selling to identify unexplored opportunities for your business as well as your clients’ business and grow better in 2021.
Measuring Sales Effectiveness for Social Selling
Social Selling is quite becoming the norm for many organizations. While most are quick to adopt newer ways of selling through the new age media like Social Media in the hope of bettering the sales targets, many may not be aware of whether these new techniques are even effective. Many are not aware of how to measure the sales effectiveness of these techniques for their sales force. Social Selling involves a more personal mode of selling, it involves the building of relationships, one-on-one through Social Media. It means measurement takes on a new meaning entirely. It takes into account the fact that sales is not merely about a number of calls and emails sent, meeting scheduled, but about lead farming and nurturing. Here, we give you ways to measure the Sales Effectiveness of your sales force for these sales techniques. These techniques will measure your sales team’s ability to build a quality relationship mapping by tracking these skills and activities. Since most Social Media has both, a qualitative and quantitative angle to them, we need to consider both, as we move through the ways of measurement, below: Let’s begin. Establishing your online professional brand: What is the effort that your salespeople are putting in to build their profiles on Social Media? What are they doing, sharing, discussing there that keeps the prospects engaged with your products and services? Are they writing blogs in the domain, which establish your company as a thought leader? Are their blogs read, followed and commented on? It is found that salespeople who display a willingness to talk about what value their company offers to a prospect, with equal enthusiasm time and again, is an indicator of their ability to connect with prospects better. What are the salespeople publishing about your brand online? Are they well prepared with their elevator pitch as well as their nurturing methods? Do they know what differentiates their product from the competitors? What the salespeople post online and how it is received by their online audience is a good indicator of sales effectiveness in Social Selling. Finding the right people. Building the right network: Social Media Channels have various tools, many of them free for a certain limited number, that help in identifying prospects. Are your salespeople using these tools or if not, doing things manually – making lists of people they would like to be connected with? Are they increasing their sales pipeline? Do they know who the decision-makers are? Do they have a strategy and a calendar plan to connect with these prospects? How networked is your sales team? Salespeople should leverage their first level contacts on their network to seek an introduction to their second or third level contacts; unless they do that, or they personalize their invite while sending out a request to connect, it may be seen as a cold call and may die a premature death. Sales effectiveness can be measured by analyzing the strategy your sales team uses to build a network and a strong pipeline. Insight knowledge and insight mining: As we have already seen in one of our earlier blogs, insights into the domain of the customer is a strong skill set every salesperson needs to possess. In Social Selling, this domain knowledge and insight into what exactly the customer may be looking for is seen through how your salesperson authors content. Is he writing like a thought leader, thinking like one and connecting with prospects through his content? Has he been able to hit the pain points and offer a solution for those? The fastest way to connect with a prospect is to be able to precisely identify his pain point and take the time and effort to provide information to solve it. Another way of measuring effectiveness is to measure the open rates of InMails sent by your salespeople. This is a LinkedIn tool that measures the open rates. It depends on how you craft your sales messages. You have to have a method that is more nurturing than pushy. Who are the people that matter? Who should you connect with? Social selling is not about the number of connections you tote on your profile. It is about the right kind of connections. Are you connecting with the decision-makers? This can be tracked by measuring the accepted requests vis-à-vis the sent requests. Another way of measuring is to find out how many key connections does your salesperson has in each of his Key Accounts. It is important to have multiple good contacts and key contacts into a single Key Account. A merging of your CRM contacts with the building of contacts on Social Media could make all the difference to your customer relationships and your Key Account management relationships. Social Media marketing Tools built into Social Media can pretty much measure Sales Effectiveness, effectively. However, there are going to be missing links in these tool measurements, which with time will be filled. Until then, Social Selling measurement for impact can be used as a complement to more traditional ways of measuring sales effectiveness. Explore our blog on cross-selling and up-selling in which we’ve elaborated how it can be used to grow business in 2021.
You have got Leads. Now make them 4X More Effective.
There are 4 simple yet highly effective strategies for improving sales effectiveness and improving your chances of converting a lead to a deal. Speed: Strike when the iron is hot Shocking truth: In a survey done across 350 companies, 38% took more than a full day to respond. In the fast-paced world today, the speed of response is of the essence; this is succinctly explained through the adage ‘Strike when the iron is hot.’ The lead is open to being nurtured and led further in the funnel if your response time is quicker. The more you let the dust settle down on the lead, the more difficult it gets to convert him. Even the difference between 5 minutes and 30 minutes could mean death in the form of a dead lead. So make sure you set and communicate your response time and follow it through. Persevere: Never say die Shocking truth: 53% made no more than two attempts at contact and gave up after that. There are reams written about how if you hang in there and keep trying, success can be all yours. All of it is every bit true. A sale or a deal is lost not because it was dead, but because the salesperson did not try enough times or gave up far too soon, especially when he was far too close to closing it. The 2-word mantra for every sales person to convert a lead should be persisted and persevere. Even if you have to try for the 8th time or beyond, do so, as this will get you a higher response rate Embrace personalizing Shocking truth: 30% had no element of personalization in their emails. Messages, emails, professional calls tend to impact the personal touch, often making the sales call impersonal and cold. Personalizing the message, call or email makes all the difference in the world as it immediately puts the recipient in an open, receiving mode. Well begun is half done, as they say. The more elements of personalization you add in your communication, the more likely the recipient will click through and open and read the email. The content of the email should also be carefully tailored to suit the recipient as much as possible to garner more responses. It has been proven that personalizing messages make it 137 percent more likely that the recipient will open the email and respond. Perform or perish Shocking Truth: 58% were likely to miss the email at least 10 percent of the time. Checking how the email or your communication works and correcting course to make it work better, is very important. The effort deserves its dues, but so do the results. Performance needs to be the objective and the checkpoints of all your communication. Just as it is true in every aspect of business, it is true here – perform or perish! The truth, as we clearly can see above is that companies are nowhere close to the ideal strategies of follow-up; but they need to get there soon. Else the chasm between a lead and a deal will keep widening. “Act now!” should be the anthem and the action.
Behaviours that Enhance Sales Effectiveness
In one of our earlier blogs, we have argued a case where tech alone cannot help in selling and selling well. Selling is an art and a science and weaves together psychology, business learnings, and personal skills. If we are to base our five on science, there has been enough research in the last 5 decades or so, to arrive at some conclusive findings that help in hugely enhancing selling effectiveness. We are primarily going to talk about some specific behaviors, which are easy to follow and practice. You will see a difference and a hike in your sales effectiveness that will prove how effective these behaviors are in selling. 1. Label the prospects: Labeling the prospect is very simple. Here, the salesperson assigns a certain behavior to a prospect and by doing so, sets an expectation of similar behavior from the prospect. In this case, it is not so important what the prospect was thinking earlier. Research has proven that when you label your prospect, he is more likely to behave the way you want him to. For example – If a prospect is being elusive while answering some important questions to the salesperson, and the salesperson labels him by saying – “You are very open you’re your answers and thoughts, thank you!” The chances that the prospect stops being elusive and starts being more open are much more. In fact, going by research, he will be more open. Labeling the prospect is a wonderful thing that can be used in enhancing selling effectiveness. 2. Rebel. React: It is found and proven that prospects rebel when salespeople create a sense of urgency for them to respond. When the above was analyzed, we observed that prospects feel threatened that their personal freedom to decide is being restricted and threatened and the salesperson is taking over their freedom to choose and decide. These create a reactive behavior in a prospect and he rebels without even thinking. This kind of behavior is extremely human and the pushier one gets, the more the other person rebels. Instead, if the salesperson ends by saying to the prospect – “This product will help you improve your quality 3x. But of course, the decision is yours.” There are greater chances the prospect falls into a responsive mood and is more positively inclined to you, rather than saying – “You won’t get a better product than this and since we are running out of our special offer, you must make a decision fast.” The latter statement will put off the prospect for certain. Salespeople should say the right things and ensure they never end up pressuring the prospect. It calls for tremendous patience, but it is a great skill to master. Collaborating with top UI UX companies can also enhance this process, as a well-designed user experience can make prospects feel more comfortable and in control during their decision-making journey. 3. Turn value statements into value questions: Typically, prospects never understand your value statement easily. They take their time. But one easy and scientifically proven way to make them understand your value statement easily would be to convert the value statements into value questions. These questions help amplify the persuasiveness of sales messages because they guide prospects in mentally digesting the value you offer and give them a feeling that it is they, who are going to take the decision. It is simple to create a value question – you need to add a questioning phrase, a short one, to your value statement. Example – “This software would reduce your HR operational costs annually by $200,000, wouldn’t it?” You could even keep a set of value questions ready, based on your key value statements. If all the above sounds simple, it is. But it is proven to produce amazing results. We urge you to try these three selling behaviors to overcome sales effectiveness bottlenecks. Do share with us, your views and experiences. And get ready for a superlative increase in sales enablement, effectiveness and performance. Also, do read our other sales effectiveness blogs.
The #1 Bottleneck in Sales Effectiveness. What is it?
Some of the most common bottlenecks in Sales Effectiveness have been languishing in the Sales Problems folder in our Macs for quite some time now. If you ask any Sales Representative, he will nod his head in approval at us have been able to pinpoint a number of his concern areas. It is important to address each of these concerns one by one. But more important is to prioritize them. This will help us raise the Sales Effectiveness quotient a few notches higher. As it is said, a problem well identified is half done. So, topping the charts of the Sales Effectiveness Bottlenecks is a ‘Dearth of qualified leads.’ Problem #1: Dearth of total leads, which leads to a dearth of qualified leads Solution #1 To address the first, something needs to be done to increase the number of leads. The marketing team needs to focus on getting more leads, ramping up the pipeline by analyzing the current promotion mix, the spends, the spend to media ratio, the spend to lead generation ratio and so on. The team needs to do a thorough analysis on: Is our media mix right? Is our content right? Are we reaching the target audience at the right time in the right place? The analysis will throw up a lot of opportunities for improving the promotion process. This should then sort out the lead generation process for some time. OR Problem #2: Lack of a process that qualifies or disqualifies leads based on their quality. Lack of a Lead Quality Controller or a Lead Qualifier. Solution #2 This problem is more quality-based; it says that the leads that are going to sales from the marketing team are not qualified leads. This is a bigger problem and is disturbing many organizations. The leads may be good in numbers, but when measured for their ‘fit’ to the defined ‘lead’, they drastically fall short. Marketing and Sales are usually caught in a crossfire as to whose mandate this is. To resolve the issue, it is important to plant a person or a small team that acts as a Lead Qualifier. This team or person should go through the leads generated and qualify or disqualify them based on some predefined parameters. This will go a long way in helping the Sales team to save time spent on poor leads and invest time in nurturing the qualified leads, leading them closer to conversion. This will clearly help in boosting Sales Effectiveness for the organization. If you like this blog, do read about our sales transformation blog to drive business growth in 2021.