social selling Managing Your Social Selling KURT SHAVER
Salespeople who do not use social media to generate leads, research prospects, connect with decision makers, and attract buyers through content are missing out on a whole new way to sell. Learning how to leverage such social networks as LinkedIn and Twitter can lead to better prospecting and higher closing ratios. While using social applications may be inherently an individual endeavor, smart companies achieve greater gains by taking a strategic approach to social selling. After all, without standards, training, and management, your company’s brand and social-selling process is whatever each sales rep wants it to be. You’d never take a similar approach to your customer relationship management (CRM) process or sales methodology. As with any new sales process, the key to high adop- tion is the understanding and guidance of first-line sales managers. So here are nine tips to help sales managers manage social-selling activities. 1. Does each of your sales reps have a business-appro- priate head shot to use as a LinkedIn photo? To find out, type each name into the LinkedIn search box, or search for people in your company using the appropriate title (for ex- ample, account executive). Make sure you are sitting down – you may be shocked at some of the more Facebook- appropriate photos you’ll see.
2. Do your team members have a LinkedIn headline that attracts buyers with a customer-oriented benefit? Just list- ing a title is a waste of the premium branding real estate. The headline should catch a prospect’s attention. Don’t let them list “Sales Development Rep” when customers are more likely to respond to a headline such as, “I help SaaS and Cloud app providers maximize subscription revenue.” 3. How many LinkedIn connections does each sales rep have? Five hundred is the recommended minimum for a business-to-business sales hunter who works full time and is responsible for generating most of his or her own leads. Go a little deeper by asking your reps to show you how many connections they have of a typical prospect title, industry, or target-company list. 4. Are all your sales reps connected to you on LinkedIn? How else can they leverage all the connections you’ve built over the years? 5. To how many groups does each sales rep belong? The maximum number of groups is 50. Are your reps in the right mix of prospect and peer groups? 6. Do they know to use LinkedIn’s Advanced Search fea-
ture to find and connect with the right decision makers? If so, they should also be using the Saved Search feature so that LinkedIn sends them alerts when a new person fits the
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search criteria. Inspect their saved searches. 7. Inspect what type of content they are posting to their network. It should be a blend of internal content from mar- keting and external content from the Websites of industry trade magazines, associations, and general news sources. To see their latest posts, hover your mouse over the tiny black arrow on their LinkedIn profile and select the first choice in the drop-down menu: “View recent activities.” 8. If your sales team uses the Premium Sales Naviga- tor version of LinkedIn, are you using the management reports to monitor the number of views, searches, and InMail messages sent? The ability to see your team’s activi- ties rolled up into a report makes this feature more like the CRM dashboards that sales managers are used to. 9. Are your sales reps are getting more appointments
from social-selling activities? To track it, include social activities such as LinkedIn Invitation or Twitter reply as lead sources in your CRM system. Sales managers’ centralized role allows them to identify social-selling best practices and share them across the en- tire team. Once the process is managed, it can be continu- ally improved.
Kurt Shaver speaks and trains corporate sales teams on advanced social-selling skills. He has appeared at such events as the Sales 2.0 Conference and LinkedIn’s Sales Connect. For more information, visit The Sales Foundry.
VIDEO: THE WHY, WHAT, AND HOW OF SOCIAL SELLING, WITH SANDY CARTER
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