Sales trends

Trending This Week: Social Selling 2017 Trends Report

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As the good folks at Sales for Life say, “To be more effective at social selling, you need to know what success looks like…”

To learn more about what social selling success looks like in the real world, Sales for Life interviewed hundreds of sales and marketing leaders and professionals. Read on for highlights from their Social Selling Trends Report so you can see how you stack up.

The ROI on Formal Programs

The research discovered five measurable impacts of a properly implemented and executed social selling program:

·        Pipeline is filled 28% faster

·        Companies drive 18% more pipeline

·        Sales reps convert leads at 15% higher rates

·        78% of social-selling companies hit their revenue goals (compared to 38% of non-social sellers)

·        Social sellers see a 57% higher return from social selling (versus 23% of those relying on traditional tactics)

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Get Social and Be Accountable

The majority of respondents with a formal process in place kicked off social selling by providing their sales teams with tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Twitter, and Feedly. It’s no surprise that sales organizations with formalized structure and processes in place do better. After all, a consistent approach always beats “random acts of social” (as Sales for Life puts it). Once sales reps make social selling part of their daily routine, they can drive more pipeline and revenue. It turns out that top performers track their own efforts, with 10% of them correlating it to pipeline and revenues.

While we’re all about individual accountability, we encourage sales leaders to get involved and coach their teams to better results. Because social selling is a fairly new concept for many reps, managers play an important role helping them make sense of the metrics and figure out ways to achieve higher win rates.

Make it Matter

Over the next 12 months, the top sales priorities for companies that responded are the following, in descending order of importance:

·        Converting Contacts / Leads to Customers

·        Increasing Revenue from Existing Customers

·        Accelerating the Sales Process

·        Establish Our Sales Professionals as Trusted Advisors

As the Sales for Life report proves, social selling can positively impact conversion rates, revenues, and average sales cycles. It’s interesting to see “establish our sales professionals as trusted advisors” lumped in with the more quantitative priorities. The fact is, though, that social selling enables sales professionals to achieve trusted advisor status.

The reps who are viewed as trusted advisors help their companies convert more leads to customers, drive higher revenues from existing customers, and move deals through the pipeline faster.

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