Sales trends

Social Selling Tips of the Week: Scaling Social Growth

scaling-social-growth

“If you’re not growing, you’re just closing one day at a time.”

You’ve no doubt heard this old sales mantra. While it’s undeniably true, the business of scaling up your sales operation is trickier than it sounds—especially when that growth involves new social selling programs.

How do you track the effectiveness of existing social selling channels? When is the right time to investigate and invest in new ones? Will a larger social selling strategy generate more leads? Better leads? How about both? Whatever your metric, scaling up any social selling strategy is ultimately about generating the kind of prospects that grow your business.

Read on for some tips, advice, and best practices for what it takes to successfully scale your social sales strategy to keep you growing into next quarter, next year, and beyond.

Scaling Beyond Quarterly Success

Sustainable growth is about balance. Scaling any sales strategy requires prioritizing long-term viability, but not at the expense of the quarterly goals that keep the lights on.

In their Harvard Business Review article, Northwestern professor Andy Zoltners and authors Sally Lorimer and PK Sinha argue for the long view when it comes to growth:

“Sales forces that are managed only to meet short-term needs can drift into mediocrity.” They continue, “Achieving a balance between today and tomorrow requires implementing a mix of sales-force decisions and programs to drive success in the short, medium, and long term.”

One hallmark of successful sales leaders is that they “encourage productive use of sales time by reducing ‘role pollution,’” something that social selling tools can do particularly well. Wasting less time on routine sales tasks is an effective and immediate way to scale your sales strategy.

Scaling Social: Going Beyond Tech in North America

Social selling scaling solutions (say that five times fast) have to be tailored to your specific business and your position in the marketplace. At LinkedIn Sales Connect 2016, a panel of experts shared their experiences on the importance and urgency of scaling social selling strategies across radically different verticals.

Former Silicon Valley executive and new VP Global Defense Public Sector Solutions at AT&T, Anthony Robbins stressed the fundamental importance of embracing social selling technology and tools for long-term success:

“My Social Selling Index Score (SSI) is 95. I share that because it relates to my belief system that the profession of selling has profoundly changed.” Robbins continues, “We are leading change and transformation, and for us to do that we have to know how the tool works.”

Robbins closed with a simple message: “Salespeople have to craft insights based on their own experience because that’s what customers want.”

That’s what scaling social is all about—selling the way the customer wants to buy. Selling has changed. Scaling your social strategy begins by adapting to that shift on a micro level. Every salesperson has to upgrade the way they find and interact with customers or their share of the market will shrink—period.

How a 27-Year Old Company Grew $1 Million Dollars of Sales in One Year

Even companies with finely tuned sales playbooks that have worked for decades are vulnerable when the market shifts (like it’s doing today). Here’s how one company updated their sales strategy with immediate results ($1 million in just one year).

Startup advisor, Pete Caputa pinpoints the impressive sales push of Tube Form Solutions (TFS) to two major factors—switching to inbound lead generation and adopting social selling technology to nurture and track demand.

Mike Thomas, co-owner of TFS describes the process. “The quantity and quality of our leads went up immediately. We closed numerous deals and landed new customers and the results made it easy for us to allocate more time and resources to inbound technology and services for 2016.”

Successfully scaling at a sustainable pace not only increases the bottom line; it allows for reinvesting in the technology that will continue to give you a competitive advantage. Plan for the future by reaping results today.

Growth Is Always the Goal

Growth is essential for the viability of any business, but growth for growth’s sake isn’t a long-term strategy. Expanding your social reach with valuable interactions, quality prospecting, and efficient sales procedures will grow your business year after year.

Sustainable sales growth is all about balancing present investments with future results—while always keeping your clients’ success as the true metric.

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