Social Selling: why it should be part of your daily routine
John C. Maxwell, an internationally renowned leadership expert, lecturer and author who has sold more than 19 million books, said, “You will never change your life if you don’t change something you do every day. The secret to your success is to develop your daily routine.
The same is true for social selling, a commercial prospecting approach on social networks: simply using tips, tricks, and good practices in a sporadic and disordered way does not bring any results and leads to failure, that is, does not produce the continuous flow of business opportunities that the company needs to develop.
By going to LinkedIn without knowing what to say, to whom to say it and how to say it, you risk spending hours and hours surfing the platform without any purpose and without getting results. You’ll get frustrated and finally give up.
Prospecting on social networks is not limited to mastering digital tools such as LinkedIn, of course, or others such as Twitter, Google Alert, Scoop It, Hootlet, etc. A minimum of technical mastery is necessary but not sufficient.
To build a continuous and sustainable flow of business opportunities, you will need to build a real daily routine of interaction with your potential buyers.
The main components are as follows.
1. Social selling means building trust every day
If you are just starting to prospect via professional social networks, don’t expect an avalanche of immediate results. They will come with time if, every day, you take the appropriate actions to enhance your reputation as an expert.
Why? Because success on social networks is based on trust, and building a relationship of trust with a buyer takes time and requires real continuity and authenticity in the exchange. It is therefore essential that you cultivate your visibility and image as a credible and trustworthy professional on a daily basis.
Identify at least one interesting prospect per day. Do not try to immediately engage in a commercial discussion with him/her: you would be exposed to a final rejection. Create trust by contacting them personally, either by referring to something you have in common (a school, a company, a relationship, etc.) or by referring to something new (a new position, a news in their sector of activity, a mention in the press, etc.).
2. Social selling means sharing content every day
To build your image as an expert in your market, daily content sharing with your prospects should be at the heart of your social media activity.
Why? Because your prospects come here to seek relevant and inspiring information on how to solve their problems or advice and good practices that can improve their professional performance or that of their company.
Identifying, creating and distributing quality content on a daily basis will make you appear to be a reliable source of information. You will thus build a committed audience, waiting for your subjects of reflection, your analyses and advice to make the right decisions.
3. Social selling means supporting prospects throughout their purchasing journey
Over informed buyers need your advice more than your information. Seventy percent of a buyer’s purchase cycle is already completed before he or she agrees to talk to a sales representative. So, your job is to deposit every day digital “little stones” allowing your prospects to follow you throughout their purchase process. So that, at the final stage of choosing the solution and supplier, your content will have led them to select your solution and your company.
4. Social selling means checking every day the level of commitment generated by its content
Check daily the social commitment generated by your activity on professional social networks, LinkedIn and Twitter. How many people like, comment, share your content? What are your most popular content? When you know the topics that drive your audience to interact on a massive scale, you can more easily find the relevant content to start engaging conversations with your prospects. The objective is to qualify prospects who are outside your first-level network, getting them to connect with you. Indeed, direct connections will then allow you to send them messages directly at the right time, so that they always keep you in mind during their purchase journey and when a need arises.
Change your habits!
Don’t worry about it. This is not about asking you to add time-consuming tasks to your already busy schedule, but to spend 30 minutes each day on your social selling routine.
Following the daily routine composed of these four fundamental principles will change your sales life and generate an inexhaustible source of sales opportunities.
The important thing is to take action, because as Tony Robbins, American coach and author of best-selling books on personal development translated into many languages, said: “The path to success is to take massive and determined action”.
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