5 Signs Your Startup Needs Social Selling

by Startacus Admin

The business world is constantly evolving, and one rapidly changing area is in the way purchases are being completed. While the standard purchasing methods remain an option, many consumers are moving into the realm of purchasing through social media. Your business must adapt to changes in purchasing if it is going to be successful in the future.

Social selling may be a relatively new concept, but it is rapidly transforming the way businesses sell their goods and services. These are a few of the leading signs that your business needs to take advantage of social selling.

1. A Lack of Leads

The traditional methods for lead generation are phone calls, online advertising and emails, but this is no longer the case. Social selling gives you the ability to directly target specific customers and engage in a two-way communication. Through social selling, you can personalize your messages to each consumer. This can raise interest in your business and engage with your customers so that they are more likely to make that important step of contacting your company directly about a purchase.

LinkedIn indicates that sales professionals who engage in social selling have 45 percent more sales opportunities. Remember to actively listen to and interact with customers in an engaging way. In addition, your sales team can use social media to monitor what is being said about your products or services. This gives you some control over the conversation, or it lets you steer the direction of the conversation.

2. Poor Customer Relationships

To effectively sell to your customers, your sales team needs to develop an excellent relationship with them. This is a relationship where they actively listen to what your customers need and want, and they act accordingly. Social selling gives your team a great opportunity to develop deeper relationships that are based on genuine concern for the customer’s needs and interests.

When your customers and salespeople are connected, each transaction builds familiarity and loyalty. As you might imagine, this is essential for long-term business success. Your sales team should use social selling as a way to have meaningful conversations and to establish relationships. They should not approach social selling with the primary goal to make a direct sale.

3. Low Brand Awareness

In order to be successful, your target audience needs to be fully aware of your brand, and they need to have a positive impression of it. Social media gives you an excellent way to develop your brand image in a cost-effective way, and it also gives you a direct way to foster a positive image.

One of the best ways to create positive sentiment about your company is to create an image based on expertise. Many people prefer to work with experts rather than salespeople. Experts indicate a helpful, knowledgeable approach, and salespeople indicate a revenue-based motivation that is based on self-interest. Using social media to raise brand awareness as an expert can pay off tremendously.

4. A Lengthy Sales Cycle

A lengthy sales cycle can be costly to your business, and it could mean that your target audience has more time to research alternatives. Social media can speed the process up considerably.

Many of today’s customers conduct considerable research online as part of the pre-purchasing process and most of the sales process is completed before a lead even contacts your business. With this in mind, using social media during the pre-sale step is essential.

Keep in mind that 80 to 95 percent of buyers are strongly influenced by online reviews. Your sales team needs to monitor the conversations about your business. When possible, they need to respond to comments in a positive and value-added way. Your business also needs to improve the content that your customers see on social media sites so that they can make a faster decision to contact your business with legitimate and solid interest.

5. Repeat Business Is Lagging

Your startup can spend an ample amount of time and money trying to generate new leads and converting those leads into buying customers. It is generally easier to retain a customer who is truly satisfied than to continue to find new leads to support your growing company. Social selling can help your business to establish loyalty from existing customers. Some research indicates that social sharing could generate a 55 percent customer renewal rate.

To take advantage of social media and social selling in this way, your sales team needs to provide value-added service through social media platforms. They must share helpful insight, answer questions and otherwise remain in touch with your customers in a low-key way. They can even present information about specials that they may be interested in. Remember that your team can post direct comments, use direct messaging, share comments and more to maximize the benefit of social media.

As you can see, social selling can truly benefit your startup throughout the sales cycle. If you can relate to any of these signs, it may be time to start engaging with your customers through social selling. However, keep in mind that using a hard sales approach is not usually effective in this type of environment. Your sales team’s approach should be one of legitimate interest, concern and helpfulness. They should have a legitimate desire to build solid relationships with your customers if your company is going to maximize the benefits of social selling.

Bio

Eric Gordon is a business-focused marketing professional based in Houston. His mission in life is to help his clients get quality and consistent leads using the latest online marketing and SEO strategies. In his spare time, he enjoys playing golf and watching sports. Follow him on Twitter @ericdavidgordon

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• #social media
• #social selling
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• #business development

Published on: 16th March 2018