One of the toughest parts of in sales is qualifying interest of buyers. Most of us become excited at even the littlest sign of interest from a prospect. Go on, you can admit it. It happens to me, too.
If someone makes a nice comment about what I do, tweets, sends a LinkedIn message, leaves a voicemail, sends an e-mail, etc. it gets me excited. I know I’m not alone in this. Let’s face it – we confuse conversation with red-hot interest.
However, qualifying buyers is something we’re not doing enough.
When things get better, change is easy. Nobody with a smartphone longs for the days of desk phones. You don’t hear people complaining that they can’t find low-definition TVs anymore.
Many of us in the Social Selling circles talk about a stat that CEB has researched that reveals that 57% of a B2B buyer’s journey is now done online without a sales person. In fact, this data point has been out for some time now.
It’s not you, it’s me
In today’s competitive business environment, it is critical that salespeople leverage all available channels to connect with prospects. One often overlooked sales tool is email pitching. Despite commonly quoted statistics indicating around 99 percent of email campaigns are unsuccessful, this channel can be a powerful technique to initiate a mutually beneficial dialogue — but only if done correctly.
As a sales professional, you’re probably used to hearing objections from clients about why they can’t or don’t want to use your solutions. But did you know that Social Selling can help you to get past those objections and close the deal? Here are some of the most common sales objections, and how Social Selling can tackle them.
Is your pipeline full? It should be. There are 255 people born every minute, so you could have over 1,275 new leads by the time you finish this blog. The problem is qualifying them adequately. If you want to become a Social Selling rock star, you’ve got to qualify as you search. In the days before LinkedIn, you had to be lucky or charming. Now, you just have to be smart. It all starts with this magic 8-ball of clever ways to locate your best leads on LinkedIn. 
