In B2B outreach, social media is one of those areas that people recognize as supposedly important, but who often push it to the sidelines or invest a halfhearted effort—and then wonder why they’re not seeing much ROI.
But the immediate effectiveness of social media sales strategies and implementation in your business doesn’t diminish the fact that social promotion and sales is increasingly vital to an organization’s growth and success. Social selling uses the reach and influence of your social network to connect with the best prospects, build relationships, and support your sales goals.
A few benefits of sales techniques that incorporate social selling can include:
- Better lead generation
- More efficient sales prospecting
- No need for cold calling
- Easier relationship building and maintaining
- Higher customer trust
Recent research speaks to this truth more directly. According to surveys done on B2B social selling:
- 73% of salespeople use social selling to outperform their sales peers1
- Salespeople who mix social selling into their sales process exceeded quota 23% more often1
- By using social selling techniques, 79% of salespeople achieve their quotas1
The average B2B deal now has 6.8 people involved in the decision-making process.4 How are those people primarily engaging? Via social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other popular sites. Social selling is essential because if your business isn’t active on these sites and their conversations, your sales team can be missing out on a majority of the dialogue and have no way to influence the perspectives of key budget wielders and decision makers.
Not only that, but the facts show that nowadays, 73% of purchasing decision makers in businesses are millennials5, who are highly influenced by social connection and engagement. The more you can effectively use social media for your brand and marketing outreach, the more you are empowered to get in front of and have positive interactions with the precise people you need to choose your services and solutions over the competition.
Social selling also is the perfect channel for adding value to B2B interactions, which is an excellent way to sway decision makers to pursue future relationships with your company.
Don’t let social selling be an afterthought for your B2B campaigns and marketing strategies. It should be central to your content development and customer relationship management. If not, there’s a whole world of valuable conversations that are going on via social platforms that you could be missing out on.
- https://www.ziffdavisb2b.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/The_Ultimate_Guide_To-Inbound_Follow_Up_ZDB2B_Skaled.pdf
- https://www-statista-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/statistics/1092819/global-influencer-market-size/
- https://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/183060.pdf#page=2
- https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/sales-solutions/resources/pdfs/linkedins-definitive-guide-to-selling-to-multiple-decision-makers.pdf
- https://www.b2binternational.com/2020/08/05/millennials-in-decision-making-roles/#:~:text=73%25%20of%20Millennials%20Are%20Now,It%20Comes%20to%20Digital%20Experiences!&text=73%25%20of%20millennials%20in%
20the,buying%20decisions%20for%20their%20companies
