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Many sales and marketing professionals today have been delighted and persuaded to believe that success in today’s hyper-competitive business climate is based on the number of digitized B2B or B2C contacts you have. Successful sales and marketing simply isn’t defined by how many Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook likes, and Instagram followers one has. Feeding these so-called “must update” social channels and checking them 12 times a day can be overwhelming, boring, and counterproductive.
But you can improve the “social selling experience” with people by following some of the suggestions I present in this article. I have been using various social media channels for the last decade to leverage my sales and marketing footprint, but doing so to create a genuine and rich experience for the individual.
How sales professionals think about, use, and execute social selling strategies to gain a competitive advantage will ultimately determine their success. The future of sales today depends on one’s ability to interact with qualified people (human to human) in an authentic and personal way. We want to build these relationships more human, more real and more valuable.
Every business and working professional is hungry for time and should not waste time on unproductive sales and marketing practices. Before you start with a social marketing/selling initiative, you need to define what is the goal of using these social media channels. Part of any good business plan is a well-developed, practical, and creative marketing plan. This includes digital marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), content management, reputation management, and video optimization. These are the main areas to consider in your digital marketing plan. The old business adage, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” is even more relevant today.
These key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be linked to key business, sales, and marketing metrics to ensure success and proper ROI for senior management to make well-informed business decisions.
The real challenges for salespeople in social marketing/selling are:
– Marketing automation and having the right technology stack in place
– Seamless integration of existing and future technologies into the “technology stack”
– Align compelling content that will resonate with each constituency group and facilitate a conversion to a goal, for example, filling out a contact form, email, or phone call.
– Align content with business and revenue goals.
– Understand how content strategy can scale to meet the needs of businesses over time.
I submit to you and invite you to consider that the power and reach of a well-developed and executed social selling plan can pay huge dividends. Initially, it will take more time and effort as you launch your plan/campaign, but after launch, it shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes per day to manage and nurture. And before you know it, you’ll connect more effectively and easily with an H2H (human-to-human) social selling approach.