BLOG

4 Expert Tips That Will Make You A Better Social Seller

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

Expert Tips

To stay ahead in today’s competitive market, you have to be creative. We’ve found that virtual events, which assemble a group of industry experts to share wisdom and best practices on certain topics, are highly effective and a lot of fun.

We thought it would be useful to share some of the best sales tips from the last Sales Acceleration Technology Summit, which featured notable sales leaders such as Art Sobczak, Neal Murphy, Ken Krogue, and Jamie Shanks.

Here are some tips from their presentations:

1. Ken Krogue: Respond immediately to web leads

Accelerate sales with inbound marketing. When we started using Google, social media and blogs to generate leads, it changed our whole world. We realized we didn’t need to cold call if we had tons of inbound leads. Our salespeople started telling us, “We seem to close the sale when we respond really fast to those leads.” That’s the beauty of immediate response. In fact, our research shows that if you respond to a lead within five minutes, you are 100 times more likely to contact that lead than if you wait 30 minutes to respond.

2. Art Sobczak: Gather sales intelligence

Art Sobczak says the best source for accurate, real-time intelligence is the people within your prospect’s company. Call into your prospect’s organization and ask questions of people other than your decision maker. Ask questions about their prospecting, how they do it, how they’re trained, quotas, if they’re successful, why they’re not and more. It provides some useful information you can use when you call into the decision maker. You’ll already know some of their problems and challenges.

3. Neal Murphy: Harness the power of projects

Neal Murphy says the key to accelerating revenue is tapping into the power of sales projects and initiatives. Deals close on time when you understand and shape the prospect’s priorities and project plans. But you must engage early. Trying to manufacture compelling events late in the sales cycle is an act of desperation. Block out a day a week in your calendar where you can make sales calls alongside your team. Challenge your sales reps to engage a key player in a 15-minute conversation that connects real customer priorities with successful projects.

4. Jamie Shanks: Use LinkedIn to monitor customers and prospects

The average American employee changes jobs every three years. You can set up alerts in LinkedIn that will give you a heads up when one of your contacts at an existing account changes jobs or a new employee is hired at a named account on your hot list. Jamie Shanks recommends that you use LinkedIn’s advanced search. Create saved searches for your existing contacts and the companies you are trying to engage in sales conversations.

If you enjoyed these sales tips, you won’t want to miss the Sales Acceleration Technology Summit this Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2014. Attendance is free.

Follow Us

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Get our latest blogs direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Subscribe to receive more sales insights, analysis, and perspectives from Sales For Life.

The Ultimate Guide to Social Selling