Can These Tools Start Increasing Your Social Selling Results?

How can technology help increase your social selling capabilities?How can technology help increase your social selling capabilities?

Last week I talked about how social selling is changing the selling landscape for Strategic and Key Accounts. Today, I share several tools that can help you get more out of the time you’re investing in social selling. I spend 45 minutes a day on social selling activities.

It has generated significant growth and exposure for my small business. Start using the three tools I use to help me track my clients more effectively on social media platforms.

The first tool I use for social selling is TweetDeck. I use it to track my clients and share different material with my communities.  The biggest benefit I get from TweetDeck is it allows me to monitor the many different topics and industries in which my clients are active.  I use hashtags to keep up with current information on many of the topics I’m discussing with clients.

TweetDeck also allows me to review different clients and what they are sharing with their partners and clients. One of the key elements to my just-in-time marketing strategies is I look for specific trigger events that get me to pick up the phone and call clients.

Finally, I use TweetDeck to see what content I share is popular with my target markets and clients. I try to share between 15-45 tweets per day from people within my communities. I also monitor lists to see who else I should be following and where they are in using social selling to increase sales.

The second tool I use in social selling is share buttons. All my social media platforms have an overabundance of share this buttons. Since I count on people to share my content, I make it easy for them to share. I’ve always been surprised when sites have limited ability to share their content with others on one of the major social platforms. My opinion is if you invest the time to create something great, why you wouldn’t want to make sure it gets shared?

I also review share numbers on others sites to see what social platform seems to be the best for a given topic. In my case, I’ve discovered having something shared on Facebook has a limited impact on how many people actually read the articles.

Actually, when shared on Facebook I see a decrease on overall site traffic. I don’t know how, but over seven tests my traffic seems to drop on the blog platform. So I don’t invest significant time on Facebook sharing content. Social selling is as much about what you do as what you choose not to do. Before you leave Facebook in droves, make sure you find out how it works for your business development efforts. I have several friends who make a great living using Facebook for all their lead generation efforts.

I believe too many social sellers try to be all things to all people. This is a formula for failure in social selling. I found the best social sellers know where to share their material to get the best response for their audience.  If you spend time reviewing where things are working, the better you get at developing successful relationships within your market.

The third tool I use in social selling is InsideView. This service allows me to monitor my clients and markets away from the many different social platforms. Since most of my clients are CXOs, I find InsideView helps me track what is being said about my clients and in what media. It provides me an opportunity to connect and nurture my relationships with clients and partners.

Social selling can help make good sales professionals great if they are taught how to use it. It can provide you the right information at the right time. Next week, I talk about how you use selling triggers to get an edge in your markets.

I have a client who was recently interviewed by the BBC. He forgot to tell me he was being interviewed. Thanks to InsideView I got a copy of several articles talking about some of his remarks from several different sources. I was able to provide advice on how he could move forward in real time. I was also able to provide significant follow up to his team members on what my client did and did not say.

When dealing with a publicly traded organization, it is critical that you implement a communication strategy that increases credibility in their industry publications. InsideView provides an incredible range of publications for you to review quickly to see what’s going on in your markets.

The other benefit I find with InsideView is that it provides a sales professional the ability to define the right triggers for the products and services you sell. With many purchasing and procurement professionals not calling on a sales professional until over 70% of the sales process is complete, it is critical for sales professionals to have a way to see inside the clients’ world to help create new sales opportunities.

I’ve given you three social selling tools today that can help increase your selling effectiveness. All of them have little or no cost associated with using them. When you consider that an average sales call is several hundred dollars and up, these tools are very inexpensive when you consider the value they have in helping you speed up the sales process, build stronger relationships with clients and potential customers, and increase the number of good opportunities you’re working on. It’s hard not to see why you wouldn’t begin using these tools in your business development efforts.

Over the next several weeks I’ll talk about social selling and LinkedIn. I’m just wrapping up a test of LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator service. I’m trying to decide how valuable it is to my social selling efforts.

If you missed the first article in the series you can find it at Market Leadership Journal. Its called Can Social Selling Improve Your Strategic Accounts’ Growth?

See you Friday, when Dennis shares his thoughts on one of the greatest challenges facing our organizations today: How do we create successful succession strategies in our organizations?  See you then.

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