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Social Selling

Social Selling: Why It’s a MUST

It’s no secret that sellers have difficulty generating fresh leads these days. Gone are the days when a few cold calls eventually lead to a sale. If you attempt cold calling today, you’ll find that it takes at least eight calls to reach a prospect.

And do you know what happens when you get to them?  They don’t want to communicate with you! In reality, almost all executives never reply to cold calls or buy from them. It’s reasonable to say that we have our job cut out for us as sellers.

How can we stick out in the face of these obstacles? We can do this through social selling.

What is social selling?

Social selling uses social media to communicate with potential clients, build a connection, and connect with prospects. This method may be used by businesses to assist them in fulfilling their sales targets.

Consider this to be a new way to establish B2B relationships. Engaging with potential clients on social media may assist you to be the first business that immediately springs to mind when a lead is ready to purchase.

Note that this is not about spamming people with unwanted Tweets and DMs. That is not a good idea. When it comes to social selling, it’s not just about adding new people to your network. It’s all about making those engagements matter and promoting your company as a solution provider. You’ll be more likely to receive brand loyalty and trust if you do so.

Why should you consider social selling?

social selling

If you’re still not convinced, here are some reasons why you should consider social selling.

Social selling is effective.

Leaders in social selling generate more sales opportunities than companies that don’t have a social media presence. Furthermore, companies that prioritize social selling have a better likelihood of fulfilling sales goals.

Social selling aids in the development of genuine relationships.

As a result of the pandemic, building relationships with clients and prospects and networking have gone online. This makes ‘now’ the ideal moment to focus on social selling. Social selling allows you to engage with prospects on social media, who are already active and joining in discussions.

Your top rivals are already selling on social media.

Using social selling to stay competitive is a must. Other businesses are active on social media, communicating with potential clients on well-known sites. An estimated 25% of e-commerce brands globally planned to sell their items on social media in 2020. This is according to Statista.

What are the best ways to make the most of social selling?

social selling

Make sure you follow social selling best practices no matter which platform you choose to reach your target audience. Here are a few to remember.

Develop your brand by giving value to your clients.

It’s crucial not to be overly salesy while communicating with prospects and consumers on social media. Also, if your company is new to a social media site, don’t go immediately into social selling. Establish your status as an industry authority before jumping into sales presentations.

Sharing fascinating, valuable, and engaging material is one approach to establishing your brand online for social selling. This might involve sharing material created by others that resonates with your brand for B2B companies and business influencers. 

It might also mean creating and distributing unique material that others will find valuable to position your company as a thought leader in your sector. 

This assures your prospects that you are not just looking for a quick buck. You are also there to contribute.

Develop strategic listening skills and cultivate relationships with the appropriate individuals.

Paying attention is an essential part of effective social selling. To put it another way, make sure you are socially aware.

Observe what others are saying about you, your brand, industry, and rivals using social lists. Keep an eye out for requests and pain spots since both present a natural opportunity for you to supply solutions.

When feasible, you should also make use of your current network. Inspect their following and follower lists before reaching out to any prospects you’ve identified to see if you have any shared connections. If you do, request an introduction from your mutual acquaintance.

Stay true to yourself.

Take the effort to customize your social selling messages rather than producing a generic message and delivering it to many potential consumers.

To put it another way, be yourself. Start a real, honest chat to establish a relationship!

You may opt to utilize automatic like and commenting technologies, but they won’t help you create relationships. They have the potential to harm your personal and professional brand seriously. Nothing beats dealing with a natural person when it comes to selling.

Maintain a level of consistency.

Finally, don’t expect to see results right away. Don’t give up if your relationship-building efforts don’t deliver immediate benefits. Keep in touch with any contacts who aren’t ready to buy what you’re selling just yet.

Make contact with fresh leads. Make contact with people you’ve previously interacted with but haven’t heard from in a long time. Maintain genuine ties by congratulating them on new jobs or companies or participating with the information they post on social media. Even if it doesn’t directly advertise your product, be ready to give advice or assistance.

Conclusion

Building relationships, creating trust, and giving the correct answers to the right prospects at the right time have always been central to sales. That’s how social selling works as well. It simply uses social media to aid in the development of connections, the expansion of your network, the streamlining of lead creation, and the achievement of your sales objectives!

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Blog Continuous Learning Marketing Management Sales Sales and Marketing sales organizations sales people sales performance sales professional Time Management

11 Ways on How to Show Appreciation to Your Sales Team

While most salespeople are self-motivated, it is nevertheless crucial to recognize their efforts. Proper appreciation is frequently what motivates your sales force to go far beyond. Apart from that, it’s just a lovely thing to do. It also contributes to the creation of a pleasant work atmosphere.

Different Ways to Motivate and Appreciate Your Sellers

Here are some excellent methods to thank or inspire your sales crew.

Give your sellers the necessary tools to succeed.

Sales professionals are frequently looking for tools to help them thrive independently. This can eat up critical sales time and resources. Providing sales teams with tools to help them succeed in sales, such as acquiring sales leads, is a beautiful method to inspire them.

Ways to Motivate and Appreciate Your Sellers

Encourage a level playing field.

What if the same member of the sales team continues receiving the rewards? This is a possibility, particularly with smaller businesses. It’s a good idea to establish a tiered reward system that supports varied skill levels to avoid any concerns. Junior sellers, for example, maybe in one subgroup and senior execs in another.

Congratulate your sales team for making successful sales.

Certainly, applaud your sales representatives on successful sales. It may be a long process with many peaks and troughs. Take the time to praise them on all sales, particularly tiny ones. While most of your B2B company’s revenue will most likely come from a few significant clients, modest transactions have worth and relevance. Small sales are a natural source of incentive. A seller will be motivated if they make a little transaction. They will feel appreciated and even driven to do it again if you congratulate them on short sales.

Ways to Motivate and Appreciate Your Sellers

Lunch on the house.

Who doesn’t enjoy getting free food? Food is always appreciated, whether you take your team out to lunch or order delivery. Snacks or sweets can be substituted for a complete meal if you don’t want to eat a full meal. If your company is now utilizing a remote setup owing to the epidemic, you might occasionally send free meals or even delightful sweets to your team members on their birthdays.

Organize an event for your team.

An event is a pleasant way to recognize your team’s accomplishments when they’ve been working very hard for you. It’s also a fantastic approach to foster teamwork. You may have a party at your workplace, a neighborhood restaurant, your house, or a rented venue.

Provide a flexible work schedule.

Don’t impose a rigorous timetable on your sellers as a sales rep. Instead, offer them the option of choosing their hours. Offering workers a flexible work schedule will drive them to achieve. They will value your confidence in them as their sales rep and go to great lengths to guarantee their success.

Allow for more vacation time.

While most businesses are unable to do so regularly, consider if you can offer members of your staff an additional day-off on occasion. Allow them to leave early on Fridays. Aside from feeling valued, an unexpected break is a great way to refresh and return to work feeling energized.

Motivate them with inspirational quotes.

Consider hanging banners or pictures with motivating slogans in the workplace of your B2B business. You don’t have to put them up on every single wall. Instead, post encouraging quotations in common areas of your office, such as the breakroom or meeting room. When your sales staff see these quotes, they’ll know you’re coming from a good place. This will assist them in remaining optimistic and maintaining a positive attitude in both good and bad situations.

Ways to Motivate and Appreciate Your Sellers

Incentivize.

Incentives are designed to encourage your team to achieve their objectives, including completing transactions and meeting sales targets. An incentive program may significantly improve their sales performance and bottom line, whether the incentive is cash, an expensive item, or a weekend trip.

Request feedback from your team.

Get feedback from your sellers to acquire insight into any issues or obstacles they face. A sales rep’s motivation may be harmed if they have met a difficulty they don’t disclose. You may fix and avoid problems by asking your sellers for input constantly, resulting in a highly driven sales force.

Show leadership.

Being a leader is perhaps the most crucial strategy for motivating your sales team. Sales staff can’t expect to succeed on their own. Instead, you must provide an example for others to follow for them to succeed. Put another way, demonstrate to your sales team what you demand of them by completing the same responsibilities.

It’s vital to have faith in yourself and your ability, too.  As the leader, your job is to hire, develop, teach, assist, and inspire sellers to perform better than you did in sales. Surround yourself with clever, driven sales reps if you want to be a great boss.

Conclusion

Boosting motivation and revenue is only the beginning. Successful motivational or appreciation programs may boost employee retention and recruit top talent. After all, they’re the ones in the trenches, answering phones, responding to internet inquiries, converting leads to sales, and assisting your business in achieving its goals. Showing your sales team some love and gratitude daily may go a long way toward keeping them motivated and on track to accomplish their sales goals.

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Sales Sales Advice Sales and Marketing

How Sales Automation Can Help Your Sales Team Be More Creative

Sales have gone a long way and taken on a new shape from the earlier years when they were overpowering and time-consuming. Selling has been more straightforward, precise, and fulfilling in recent years, thanks to the emergence of solutions that assist in streamlining the entire process.

The truth is, you will never be able to increase sales if you try to accomplish everything on your own. 

To compete at the top level, you must implement sales automation.

One huge misconception is that creativity and innovation suffer when a process is automated. But this isn’t the case. As you assign more difficult everyday activities to a sales automation tool, it stimulates creativity among your sales team. You’ll have more time to brainstorm, which means you’ll be able to develop more innovative methods to market your items and tailor your offers.

sales automation

What is the definition of sales automation?

A sales automation technology may increase efficiency, increase sales, and increase income by minimizing time-consuming and redundant work and saving you vast amounts of time. Then your sellers can focus on generating prospects and attempting to close deals instead.

Due to inventiveness and cutting-edge technology, nearly every company has exposure to automation tools and approaches that make marketing easier, smarter, and more efficient.

The advantages of sales automation

Never-ending improvement is one of the most significant traits of a successful entrepreneur. These businesses are always seeking new methods to maximize their profits. Spending money and effort in B2B sales automation is one of those investments that have the potential to transform a company for the better.

To help you get started, here are some ways your company may utilize sales automation to generate leads and increase revenue.

Improved client management

While some clients are concerned with product or service consistency, others choose a brand because of good relationship management, mainly when all stages of the buying process are appropriately managed. This is why businesses are increasingly using chatbots to manage client care.

AI-assisted support employees can manage customer service inquiries with ease. This allows you to free up your sellers to focus on more complex tasks and deal with more in-depth customer support issues.

Email marketing with a personal touch

Because they assist you in standing out from your rivals, personalization and customization are more crucial than ever. Personalization, however, can be pretty demanding. This is where email marketing automation can help you.

An auto-reply based on the data a sales automation tool has acquired can ensure that prospective clients receive a timely and tailored email response, resulting in a considerable increase in sales.

Artificial intelligence may also help you better understand your audience by analyzing your website visits. This will have an impact on judgments made in the future.

If you put up the correct automated procedures, you can maintain delivering personalized emails and answers even as your list grows. This sales automation saves you money and time and takes some pressure off your marketing team.

Faster document creation

Sales automation can assist you in generating the necessary documentation and contracts for your business. All terms and conditions and other details can be offered to the consumer and clarified on the spot without much effort. 

Contracts can also include electronic signatures. Quick data, such as periodic reminders, can be generated and provided to clients to notify them of any type of renewals.

Simpler client segmentation

It is possible for businesses to segment clients more simply with sales automation technology. The sales automation technology assists in identifying individual clients to cut marketing efforts and increase sales.

A more efficient lead generation process

The most significant advantage of sales automation is that it streamlines the lead creation process. Prospects and contacts are assigned to marketing automation software based on their selling readiness. It also boosts exposure, generates higher-quality leads, and automates follow-ups. 

When your business starts generating a consistent supply of qualified leads, a sales automation tool may update their sales-readiness ratings regularly and nurture the leads by sending out material targeted to their stage in the buyer’s journey, resulting in greater conversion rates.

Streamlined internal workflow

The ability to streamline internal processes benefits automation that is often overlooked in B2B selling. Internal workflows are created to improve the efficiency of current processes. For one, you may build up a workflow instead of having a seller constantly monitor the email every day after somebody completes a form on your webpage.  The system immediately tells the salesman when the form is completed, allowing for a quick response.

Conclusion

Before it’s too late, think about investing in sales automation technology to boost your sales and expand your company’s success. Sales automation will always aid in the development of more innovative brands. Many companies know positive outcomes within just the first six months of using automation effectively.

Remember: taking your company to the next level involves more than just putting in long hours at work. Sales automation will enable you to escape the drudgery and diversify your revenue streams. You’ll be able to build a long-lasting business with the efficiency that sales automation delivers.