What is social selling and how can it be applied?

Social Selling: What Is It?

Social selling isn't simply signing up for multiple social media platforms. It's also not just opening a LinkedIn page or getting maximum likes.

In commercial prospecting, social selling involves using social media platforms combined with other techniques, like an effective content strategy or inbound marketing, to convert and generate leads.

This "social" sales technique is a long process that requires patience, particularly for:

• Finding and identifying profiles that align with your target audience

• Taking time to listen to your professional network

• Sharing useful and relevant information to your audience

• Interacting with your prospects and guiding them toward purchase

Thanks to social selling, you can identify prospects, engage conversations, and develop your sales! How? By working on your prospects' pre-purchase phase.

💡 The pre-purchase phase is a more or less lengthy period (depending on the product or service) where prospects go information fishing to sort through options before deciding whether to request a demonstration, quote, appointment, etc.

If you haven't noticed yet, prospects today are very active online and use it for decision-making. They conduct maximum research, scrutinize every review, and dig through social media! So when you contact a prospect via email, phone, or carrier pigeon, they already know what they want, more or less.

They already know the characteristics of the product/service they want, the companies that meet their expectations, and may have even chosen the offer that corresponds to and interests them.

The goal of social selling is therefore to not leave your prospects without answers to their questions, and to be present throughout this pre-purchase stage: problem recognition, available solutions, and purchase decision.

However, be careful—social selling isn't about bombarding your prospects with unwanted messages and publications: that's called spam. And it's also not about collecting maximum contacts, but creating a trust relationship with your network by listening to them to successfully interact with them in the best way.

Social Selling: What Are the Advantages?

Today, more and more internet users form their own opinions about an offer through the internet and social media. By implementing a social selling strategy, you optimize your sales process, and can then:

• Listen to internet users' problems and needs

• Create relevant and interesting content showing your expertise

• Offer solutions to your prospects' problems

• Share them at the right time, in the right place, and with the right people

• Interact properly with your prospects

Thanks to social selling, you master your commercial prospecting on social media and successfully influence your audience skillfully. The more visible you are and seen as an expert in your field, the more likely you are to be contacted.

Key Statistics

20% of B2B decision-makers have already made a purchase following an exchange on social media.

87% of B2B buyers prefer to be contacted through social media.

55% of B2B decision-makers have already been influenced in a purchase decision via an article or publication on social media.

Social selling allows you to help your prospects advance in their reflection (problem recognition, available solutions, and purchase decision) to ultimately lead them to purchase. Its objective is to:

• Help you identify new sales opportunities. This is the active listening phase

• Distribute content, like white papers, to inform your prospects. The goal is to position yourself as an expert in your sector

• Build a trust relationship with your network. You gradually become a reference in your market

• Lead prospects to advance in their sales cycle, precisely thanks to the information you've provided them

• Sell! All your actions should lead to this final objective. Social selling allows you to sell via social media

Social selling is a major asset for winning your prospecting and sales. This technique perfectly suits the new way internet users consume—they build their own opinion about a product or service well before you've contacted them.

Bottom line: if you're absent from social media, you'll lose prospects as well as the amount of information you could gather about them (liked posts, shares, comments, subscriptions, interests, etc.).

Social Selling: Listening Is Key!

The common point between social selling and social media... It's the "social" part! Social means relationships. And relationships mean sharing.

You can't do social selling without social media—that's clear. And for your strategy to work, you must identify qualified prospects. We agree on that. However, what follows isn't obvious to everyone...

For a social selling strategy to work, it's essential to listen to these prospects to truly respond to their needs and problems. You must bring them real added value and guide them throughout the process.

Social selling will help you first and foremost evaluate your network's profiles and your prospects' reactions on your social media, thus allowing you to contact them in a personalized way, at the right moment.

Today, internet users share much more about their needs via social media. If you're sufficiently attentive, this information will allow you to engage conversation with your prospects through appropriate messages, avoiding intrusive and mundane solicitation.

You'll understand: with social selling, you guide your prospects toward purchase. Social media will allow you to listen to what's happening in your field of activity, identify internet users likely to be interested in your offer, follow their every movement, and identify the right moment to lead them to purchase.

Because most prospects you'll encounter on social media won't be mature enough for you to hook them with a message boasting your merits and expertise.

Most will only be at the starting point of their reflection—"problem recognition"—without having started looking for any solution. The challenge for you is then to create a relationship with your prospects and help them in this reflection phase to progressively influence them to choose you!

It's then up to you to show your sales talents and hope to sell your service or product to your potential clients.

Social Selling: How to Implement It?

Organize Efficiently and Optimize Your Profiles

It's not simple to organize social media management, especially when you have multiple platforms. You generally have other tasks to handle. You must therefore structure, and for that, there's an effective tool: the communication plan.

It will help you plan your publications, create your content, and navigate more easily among your different professional social media platforms.

But that's not all! Your profile must also be optimized. Indeed, why miss several opportunities by leaving your LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook profile abandoned? You must therefore work on presenting your profiles. This way, you stand out and help your prospects find you more easily, thanks to:

• A professional portrait photo

• An impactful title

• Highlighting your values (in writing or images)

• A brief but attractive summary (background, achievements, skills)

• Relevant keywords

• Links leading to your website, for example

You can also start by following blogs, newsletters, setting up Google alerts, following influential people in your field, etc.

Target Your Audience Precisely

Be careful—the goal isn't to add countless contacts without trying to know if they might correspond to your target and become qualified prospects. Quantity doesn't necessarily rhyme with quality, so collecting maximum contacts won't help you win new clients.

To implement an effective social selling strategy, you must have a clear idea of who your ideal client is to know where to search and eliminate profiles that don't match you. You must therefore, if not already done, work on your buyer persona for your social selling strategy.

However, it's particularly interesting to have a very broad network with all your commercial targets in relationship, notably to have access to contact information, expand your contact base, and make your posts visible to a larger audience.

Once you know who you're addressing, you can offer interesting and relevant information to your network! A good content strategy will help you show your expertise and lead prospects to contact you.

Be careful though—managing multiple social media platforms can be demanding and time-consuming. Therefore choose those your target uses and focus on them. It's useless to publish everything that crosses your hands; your prospects are looking for content that will be useful to them.

Engage Discussion with Your Network

Once present on social media, start sharing content on them! And regularly, depending on the platform you're publishing on, to attract your prospects. If you've carefully defined your target, they'll necessarily be interested in the subjects and problems you address, because that's exactly what they must face.

Be careful: relevant, interesting, quality content, placed before the prospect's eyes at the right time and place. That's the foundation of social selling. By publishing content aligned with your target's needs, you show that you master the subject, you enhance your expertise, and you lead your prospects to trust you.

So when they have the desire or need for a solution to their problem, they'll instinctively think of you because you'll have proven your value to your audience!

Even more so if you manage to build a solid reputation quickly, word-of-mouth will bring you new qualified prospects.

Regularly interacting with your network is essential in a social selling strategy. You showcase your skills and professionalism. Also, the more active you are, the better you'll be remembered in case of needs.

So don't hesitate to engage conversation in groups, like, post comments, and share your prospects' publications. Because distributing content is good, but also interacting with your network's content is even better!

Partly because by reacting to others' publications and interacting with other users, you'll be favored by different platforms' algorithms. But also because the more entrepreneurial you are on your social media, the more visible you become to your prospects.

So don't hesitate to comment on competitors' and experts' posts in your field—you might manage to capture their audiences' attention.

Contact Your Prospects

After capturing your target's attention, and when they seem receptive to your advances, you can launch and contact them. You now have all the cards to send the right message at the right time.

But how do you approach contacting prospects? Adding contacts, we all know how to do that. Contacting them is a bit more subtle. Of course, generic messages without any personalization are banned!

Fortunately for you, there are some tricks and tips for writing a good message on LinkedIn—even if all social media can be used in a social selling strategy, LinkedIn remains the most adapted platform, especially in B2B.

One of our tips concerns the AIDA method. It will help you define a message template to follow to encourage a prospect to action.

First, you'll seek to attract your prospect's attention with a hook. Once captured, you'll generate your recipient's interest by explaining why you're contacting them, what problem you want to help them solve.

But for them to move from the "why not?" stage to the "I'm interested" stage, you must create desire to continue with strong arguments about you, your company, and your offer. Finally, you just need to incite them to take action, by offering a free trial, for example.

💡 Remember that social selling's objective is to build a trust relationship with your prospects. You must appear more human, more accessible.

Analyze Returns Through Performance Indicators

Once your strategy is launched, you'll need to analyze results to manage it optimally and improve it if needed. Use the following data to identify what works and what doesn't:

• Number of prospects collected over a given period

• Returns from your social media actions (likes, shares, comments)

• Engagement rate

• Publication reach

• Closing rate from opportunities

• Etc.

Thanks to these different statistics, you'll successfully use social selling technique to perfection and win new prospects!

However, some might be tempted to add everyone and anyone to have maximum contacts, for instance, to inflate numbers. But ultimately, this will have no impact on your conversion rate.

To help analyze your strategy, you can use the indicator LinkedIn offers: the Social Selling Index. It will give you improvement leads to follow regarding your actions, and thus boost your social selling strategy!