Social Selling

What is social selling?

Social selling is the process of connecting with prospects on social media platforms in order to affect sales. Sharing, commenting on, or even liking your prospects’ social media posts helps your brand connect with a potential customer. Social selling requires the persistent effort of engaging with your prospects and nurturing them into customers.

Though there’s some overlap between social selling and social media marketing, they are two different things. The fundamental difference is that social media marketing aids your marketing and branding goals while social selling supports your sales and revenue generation activities.

What are the benefits of social selling?

Social selling can benefit your brand in the following ways:

1. Quality lead and sales generation

Social media selling involves turning your prospects into customers through consistent interactions on social media channels. Unlike cold calls or emails, your sales reps can discover your customers' pain points and offer solutions by interacting with them via social posts and comments. Over time, such interactions mature into mutually beneficial relationships providing social sellers with 45% more sales opportunities.

Learn more: How Social Selling Can Help Build Your B2B Sales Pipeline

2. Improved brand visibility

As your sales reps and prospects connect via DMs and more and more prospects share and reshare your social media posts, your brand appears more frequently in your target audience’s social feed, thereby raising your brand’s reach and awareness.

3. Providing a human touch

Social selling will reduce your dependence on cold calling as the primary method of reaching prospective clients. Sales reps can connect with your customers, understand their problems, and provide value to them over several interactions through social media. This helps your sales reps establish themselves as a credible authority on the subject which, in turn, helps build rapport with prospects, giving you an added advantage when it’s time to close the deal.

Distributed Social Selling

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Who uses social selling?

Social selling is fast becoming the go-to sales model for most brands and is primarily used by sales teams in favor of cold calls and product demos. Sales reps are 51% more likely to meet their sales quota through social media selling. In fact, 78% of social sellers succeed in outselling their peers who don't use social media.

While both B2B and B2C businesses employ social selling to increase sales, their approach can sometimes be different. For instance, B2B brands usually adopt a one-on-one approach wherein identifying the right prospects and establishing solid relationships take precedence over quick wins such as increased sales. B2C brands, on the other hand, generally follow a one-to-many approach and focus on short-term but specific goals such as maximizing engagement and conversions.

What are the best networks for social selling?

Choosing the best networks for social selling depends on where your target audience is and what your business goals are. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are excellent for casual interactions with prospects to gauge their interests and concerns. LinkedIn, by contrast, is more suitable for developing professional B2B relationships and selling to enterprises or executives.

Bottom line: Leverage social networks that are popular among your target audiences.

Unlocking More From Your Sales Team: Social Selling for B2B Brands

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Social selling through Sprinklr turns social into a revenue driver

When there are 3.6 billion active social media users around the globe scattered across multiple digital channels, engaging with prospects at scale may seem challenging without modern social selling technology. With Sprinklr's AI-based conversation suggestions and integrated bots across 30+ digital channels, you can transform your social conversations into revenue drivers.

Renowned brands such as Sonos, HP, SAP, Marriott International, and more use Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform to drive sales through social channels.

Here’s how Sprinklr helps boost your social selling strategy:

• Categorize social conversations by intent and identify the ones worth engaging with to improve your sales while saving considerable time and effort.

• Manage interactions across 30+ digital channels, including chat and messaging from a single, unified platform.

• Eliminate risk by sharing approved brand communications with sales reps from a central auditable source.