Social media is a tool that people can use for practically anything. The idea that social media can help meet your B2B sales quota has caught on. The latest studies reveal that 78% of B2B salespeople using social media outsell their peers.
This is a statistic that you should take note of. If you have yet to move your operations to take into account the power of social media, you are missing out. This article will demonstrate how you can use social media to meet this month’s B2B sales quota.
Establish Yourself as an Expert
As a salesperson, you need to be an expert if you are going to convince people to buy from you. Previously, you would have to prove yourself in the eyes of each individual person. However, this has changed because social media enables you to publish content on subjects your clients want to know about.
This immediately establishes you as an expert, even without speaking to a single person face-to-face. LinkedIn and Facebook are particularly useful for this purpose.
Find Out the Needs of Your Leads
A quick look at something like Twitter and it doesn’t take long for you to discover what the needs of your customers are. For a start, all you need to do is take a look at the feed of your lead and you can quickly realize the strategies they are using for B2C selling.
If you have a product that you believe can help with this, you already have a platform in which to seek from. It’s an easy way to spot potential mistakes and therefore potential educational opportunities.
Discover New Leads
The likes of Twitter make it easy for you to find prospects who may be interested in what you have to say because you can search via keywords and look through a complete list of businesses. Discovering new leads has never been easier.
Before you had to discover leads through word of mouth or via low-success methods like cold calling, but now you can do it via social media.
Discovering new leads will give you a larger database in which to target. The more people you have to work with the higher your success rates are likely to be.
Opportunities to Engage
Nevertheless, once you have started tracking people on social media you may find that there are opportunities to engage that you absolutely can’t pass up. You can do this through loading a list into a program like Hootsuite. This will allow you to follow what your potential leads are saying at all times.
Use this information to uncover opportunities to engage with them. This will give you a fantastic chance to easily slip into conversation with a business. It’s also ideal for dealing with people who are naturally hardened to the efforts of direct selling.
Humanizing Both Parties
One of the big disadvantages of doing business in the B2B world is the lack of a human touch. It’s your job to humanize both parties because you need to connect on a physical and emotional level. Salespeople who engage leads like this are far more likely to convert.
Humanization is easier than ever with social media. You are not just an employee from Company X. You are a living, breathing unique human being, and that’s what people engage with.
Can Social Media Become a Distraction?
You need to keep in mind that social media is just a platform for you to find new leads and to begin the first steps to engaging with them. Social media will not do the job for you, nor will it lead to a magical upturn in your sales even if you buy Instagram likes.
The restrictions of social media revolve around the lack of face-to-face conversations and platform-specific limits, such as Twitter’s character limits. Social media can easily become a distraction if you start to rely on it.
Should it Change Your Sales Approach?
Your actual sales approach has no reason to change at all because of social media. As already mentioned, social media is merely a way to research your customers and to find leads in the first place. Everything else should stay the same.
The only thing that should change is you should be on as many social media platforms as possible. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Twitter you can always extract value from any social media platform.
Last Word
This article has demonstrated the advantages of adding social media to your toolbox. While it won’t revolutionize the way you do business, it does have a lot of value. How will you bring together social media with your current B2B sales approach today?
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.