With all of the mounting pressures that are being placed on SDRs, social selling can seem like the least logical way to allocate precious time and resources. Yet, despite its “slower” approach, social selling is becoming more and more prominent and therefore effective in reaching more leads and nurturing them through the sales funnel. Sure, social selling takes a good deal of work and an equal amount of patience. But there are certain tidbits of knowledge that can make the process a little easier. Let’s take a look.
Understand that there are two key components of social selling.
Before launching a social selling campaign, you must first understand that there are two main components to success. First, there is outbound prospecting, which involves researching, gathering intelligence and learning as much as possible about your target audience.
The second piece of the puzzle is inbound marketing, which involves building a pipeline of leads through creating, curating and sharing content. The type, quantity and frequency of that content will depend on your particular business needs and target audience, but the framework should be the same for all organizations.
You may need to redefine your goals.
While the ultimate goal is always to close more deals and generate more revenue, when it comes to social selling, the process isn’t quite so cut and dry. As such, you will probably need to redefine some of your goals as well as what you’re measuring to track success. For example, successful social sales campaigns track the following:
- Number of appointments booked
- Amount of engagement generated
- The ways in which participants are growing their accounts
Closing deals is always important, but with social selling, that starts with having more conversations, getting prospects more involved with content and improving social influencer score. Make sure you’re measuring the right things, otherwise you could be missing the big picture and your results will suffer.
It’s better to start small.
If you’re just introducing social selling to your organization, it’s probably better to select a few key SDR team members to pilot the project first. This enables a smaller, more focused group to define the process, become intimately familiar with that process and work out the kinks while implementing it.
Appoint a small group to serve as alpha testers and then beta testers. Collect ample feedback and smooth out any problem areas before rolling it out to the rest of the team.
You’ll want to choose the right tools.
One of the biggest challenges of implementing a social selling strategy is the time and effort it takes to see results. As an SDR, chances are you’re already juggling a jam-packed schedule, making it difficult and cumbersome to add social participation into the mix.
It can be helpful to leverage software programs and applications to help make the process a little less burdensome on yourself and your team. By automating a significant portion of tasks that come with successful social selling, reps are freed up to optimize their precious time on the activities that require a more human touch.
Patience is the key to success.
When it comes to social selling, one common mistake many organizations make is expecting immediate, high-level results. The fact is, social selling is a marathon, not a sprint. That’s because it’s based on building and nurturing relationships – something that cannot be done with one brief interaction.
As long as you remain committed, routinely measure results, track feedback and adjust your approach as needed, you’ll be rewarded for your efforts over time.
Social selling may seem like a far less glamorous sales technique, particularly since its missing that excitement that comes with instant gratification. But with the right strategy, a dedicated SDR team and lots of patience, social selling can deliver the kind of long-term, revenue-generating results you’re after. The five tips listed above should help your sales organization develop into a social selling success.
Whether you’re looking to hire top-notch SDRs or looking for your next SDR role, get in touch and let us make the process easy and painless.