B2B Social Selling. What is It and How to Use

Business is actively using digital tools to promote goods and services. According to Smallbizgenius, 75% of B2B customers are driven by social networks when making decisions on purchasing.

As for salesmen, 70% of them claim to use social selling tools for lead generation. So, if you have not faced this channel to attract an audience before, this article may be the sign you were waiting for. Here, I will neither talk about the mechanisms of work nor discuss narrow issues. Instead, I will try to reveal the perspectives that social selling offers to the B2B segment.

Social selling: Explaining Concept

Social selling implies the use of social networks to directly interact with potential customers. This format helps to increase the effectiveness of the sales cycle.

Social selling involves such fundamental elements as:

• Social search. Monitoring of social networks to find the audience interested in purchasing.
• Personalized branding. The use of social networks to maintain trust, authority, and reputation of a product or service.
• Advocacy of employees. Encourage employees to use social networks to exchange valuable content about their company in social networks.
• Managing social relations. The use of digital networks to build and develop firm relations with potential and current customers.
• Focus on separate groups of consumers. Search and analysis of valuable potential clients to focus directly on these people.

Why B2B Should Pay Attention to Social Selling

Those who had experience in dealing with cold calling find it easy to answer. If you escaped this, here’s the statistic from Baylor: 72% of cold calling get no response. And if you do get the answer, it is not always positive.

Accordingly, social selling becomes a more organic channel for communication, that allows recognizing the audience and creating an up-to-date and relevant offer.

People easier make contact on social platforms and sometimes look for it themselves. Moreover, social networks offer a chance to build trust-based and long-term relations with customers.

The FinancesOnline platform publishes the statistics that prove the advantages of social selling over traditional methods:

• 78% of B2B companies that use social networks for selling outperform their colleagues.
• 40% more often, companies that use the social selling strategy achieve their goals on a company’s profit.
• More than 70% of salesmen use social selling tools.

The statistic shows that social selling tools are actively used by specialists and bring practical value to business. This method helps B2B companies gain more deals and outperform competitors, thus making social selling an indispensable part of brand presence on social networks.

How to Sell on Social Media

The effectiveness of the sales department depends on the relations between a company and their customers. The more digital noise and commercial contacts the audience gets daily, hourly, and minutely, the higher the individual value of your offer becomes. Interaction is not limited to forced marketing and the “buying-selling” approach.

The first step to make is to establish contact and reveal the need. Social media are perfect if you want to make it non-formally, casual, and without too much commerce.

Align Marketing and Sales Efforts

The interaction between the marketing and sales departments often happens to have problems, resulting in different arguments used by the team, different portraits of target audiences used by employees, the lack of a working mechanism for the qualification and disqualification of leads.

In the end, we get customers who face inconsistency and the loss of leads at various stages of the decision-making process.

Synchronize, strengthen each other, and then diversified activities will transform into a monolith chain of actions, where every link is visible and can be enhanced.

Involve and Get Involved

In the term ‘social selling’ stress is on the first word. Moreover, it is not about answering the comment or first message.

Simply put, if you appear on social networks to promote a new item or send info about it to customers, you do not do social selling. Building relations with the audience implies a much bigger spectre of communication.

You must answer the questions, ask them yourself, work with objections, wonder what you can enhance and more.

Use Account-based marketing (ABM)

The faster and more quality you outline potential clients, the fewer resources you will spend on those who will not accept your offer. Account-based marketing is called to help you with it.

ABM is not just a strategy that implies the combination of marketing and sales to personalize the experience for selected companies-customers. This approach regards separate consumers as a whole market, thus allowing to get higher ROI and increase loyalty.

Social Media are perfect for ABM: here you can discover selected accounts, update CRM data, and interact directly.

There are many more ways to enhance your social selling. Today, social networks encourage this method. For example, LinkedIn offers the SSI indicator that assesses the quality of social selling and communication. Companies can thus monitor the effectiveness of their activity on the channel.

There is a high probability that other platforms will introduce similar tools that will contribute to social selling, offering new opportunities to companies.

Social Selling Benefit

Social selling is about the chance to build a strong connection with the consumers: both current and potential. You will have a space for cold sales, up-sell, cross-sell, reactivation, and other commercial interactions in a harmonious, natural, and fruitful social environment.

You do not need to neglect traditional methods. However, the era of social communication suggests trying to build relations with customers in an environment convenient for them.