The buzz around “social selling” for B2B sales has been building throughout the year, and now even Harvard Business Review has just embraced the concept. Two marketing professors – Laurence Minsky and Keith A. Quesenberry – make the case that social selling is the future of B2B sales. It’s part of a broader trend, they say, towards full self-service e-commerce.
They start off by making the case that outbound B2B sales calls are becoming less and less effective. It now takes as many as 18 phone calls to line up a meeting with a prospect. And callback rates are lower than 1 percent, which means you can basically forget about ever having a sales call returned. Even worse, even email is now coming under pressure, with only 24 percent of emails opened that are coming from B2B sales professionals.
The solution is “social selling.” To understand what it is, it’s first important to understand what it’s not. It’s not just more social media marketing, flooding the channels with more content for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s not about brand awareness or even brand affinity.
Instead, social selling is the creation of very focused content for social platforms that enable B2B sales professionals to carry on effective, 1-on-1 conversations with prospects. Part of building the sales relationship is answering questions and making suggestions via social media. And it turns out that social selling is extremely effective. Consider just some of the following statistics:
84 percent of B2B sales start with a referral, not a salesperson
Peer recommendations influence more than 90 percent of all B2B buying decisions
75 percent of B2B buyers rely on social media to engage with peers about buying decisions
53 percent of B2B buyers say that social media plays a role in assessing tools and technologies during the selection process
82 percent of B2B buyers said the winning vendor’s social content had a significant impact on their buying decision
B2B buyers are 5 times more likely to engage with sales professionals providing new insights about their business or industry
72 percent of B2B salespersons who use social say that they outperform their sales peers
More than one-half of B2B salespersons say they closed deals as the direct result of social media
Skilled social media professionals are 6 times more likely to exceed quotes than peers with basic or no social media skills
The key idea here is that referrals and recommendations from social media are becoming an important tool to sway B2B buyers. In today’s digital media environment, content that appears within a Facebook newsfeed is viewed as being just as credible as content that might appear from an expert elsewhere on the web. If your friends, co-workers and colleagues are talking about a product, it has to be worth checking out.
The good news is that social selling doesn’t have to be a major time commitment. In fact, the two Harvard Business Review authors say that B2B sales professionals only need to commit 5-10 percent of their time to social media to be successful. They even recommend that organizations create a central repository of social content via a portal that employees can tap into whenever needed.
You could just as easily use a software tool like AtomicReach, which can analyze content from just about any website and platform and determine what’s resonating with the audience. The better your insights here, the better you would be able to implement a social selling strategy.
Ultimately, social selling is about researching, prospecting and networking by sharing content via social media. Social media is inherently ‘social’ – and that’s what enables buyer-seller relationships to flourish.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.