When you move your team to a social selling model, you may encounter some resistance. Change isn’t immediate and you can’t expect your team to instantly grasp a new methodology. Wherever you are in your adoption of social selling as a sales organization, these ideas for a weekly reset will keep you on track.
Take one or all of these to your next sales team meeting to guarantee a productive week in social selling.
1. Define Sales Territories by Social Proximity
Hopefully you’ve already moved from a geographic territory model to a social proximity model—if not, here’s some advice on how to get started [link to blog post on social proximity].
Start each week by refining your social territory, sharing and examining the connections and relationships that will open the door to meaningful relationships. Be open to possible changes, especially in the early stages.
2. Identify Spaces to Contribute
Share with your team what groups and influencers you plan on targeting this week. Brainstorm interesting conversations to start or identify existing conversations where you can contribute worthwhile insights and build your personal brand as a thought leader.
Remind your team that the strength of their personal profiles has a large impact on how their contributions will be seen—contributing to their overall social selling success.
3. Assess the Status of Your Relationships
Talk about whom you’ve reached out to, where you’ve found success, and how. Was it a call? An email? InMail? What was the title and position of the prospect you’ve successfully or unsuccessfully targeted?
While social selling is a proven strategy, you will need to fine-tune your team’s approach, particularly in the early stages. By fostering a culture of learning and sharing, you can avoid periods of stagnancy in their progress.
4. Touch Base with Buyer Needs
What buyer needs and concerns have you successfully identified in the previous weeks? Share the most interesting questions your prospects have posed, as well as the personalized information that has yielded a positive response from a prospect or prospects.
What information has been most helpful to your prospects in the education phase? How did you share it? While a sales environment is a competitive one, teams working on improving their social selling will benefit enormously from shared insights.
5. Experimental Outreach
Select prospects you would normally be cold calling and experiment with social outreach—whether it be commenting on their company’s latest content or asking for an introduction from a mutual connection.
You can try preparing a personalized presentation with Prezi or another free tool for prospects who are currently using a competing product. On the other hand, you might suggest your sales team spends an afternoon exclusively asking for introductions to prospects from connections in their existing network.
6. Stay Motivated
Refresh your team’s motivation to use social selling. Social selling is a different game and those sales professionals transitioning from a cold calling approach will need regular reminders that while social selling may not yield immediate results, it is proven to be more effective.
Share statistics that remind your reps that social media and relationships have become the gold standard. Here are two of our own to get you started:
· 75% of B2B buyers use social media in their decision-making process.
· 44% of buyers find potential vendors through shared LinkedIn connections
7. Talk KPIs
Report on who has been hitting their KPIs and where your team is falling short. While KPIs are more illuminating over a longer time period, when you’ve made the transition from the number of cold calls to the strength of your personal network, check-ins are important. Sales professionals are numbers-driven and you don’t want to mess with their tools for self-assessment without proper preparation.
Set a weekly or biweekly list of KPIs such as connection growth and relationship sharing. You might even ask your team to contribute to one conversation, start one conversation, and post one original piece of content.
Follow our advice and your team will start the week with a renewed motivation to capitalize on the tools and strategies social selling has to offer. Remember, growing as a social sales organization is an iterative process—it doesn’t happen all at once.
To check on the status of your efforts, compare your work to our Sales Leader’s Checklist.
Topics: Sales management
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