Social media is the newest sales tool of many companies today, and for good reasons. For one, users are growing by the day on social. With their large following, these sites are working hard to keep users engaged on their platform by constantly offering new and improved features and functions.
That said, your business might very well be one of the first to benefit from social media marketing. By bringing your business online, people’s awareness of your brand can grow, and your profits might increase as well.
There’s the challenge, however, of making your sales team understand how the workings of social media can offer both direct and indirect benefits to your sales programs. This blog will uncover the ways to convince your sales team to support your social media initiatives.
How to Convince Sales to be More Social
1- Present data and ways on how they can maximize the potential impact of using social media.
- Competitor Research – If you want your social media strategies to really take off and boost your sales, look closely at your competition. Monitor and analyze their social media stats and watch their social media activities. Observe their posting habits or methods of user engagement.
Since social tends to evolve quickly, you should always be on the lookout for the tools being leveraged by major players in your industry. You could even use tools that not only measure your online performance but also that of your competitors. With such information, you have better chances of stepping up your game in the department of social media marketing.
- Lead Generation – There are skeptics who contend that there is no ROI on social media only because they lack insights on which metrics to focus (i.e. revenue-generating metrics vs. vanity metrics such as number of social media likes or followers) and because the social media strategies they’re using are not driven toward lead generation.
The following statistics may encourage your sales team about the power of social media for better marketing and especially for B2B lead generation techniques.
- With social media marketing, 45% of businesses save on marketing costs.
- About 24% of businesses recorded increased revenues by using social media to generate leads.
2- Give guidelines and materials to make it easier for your salespeople to create their professional social profiles and ensure that they don’t violate any company policy.
Creating a social media profile is similar to creating a landing page for your brand. Both are among the first things that someone engaging with you will take notice, so make sure to pay attention to the following details:
- Name
- Username
- Profile picture or avatar (preferably your company logo)
- Social media link
- Bio briefly describing your brand
- Interests
- Background (focusing on how your business can provide solutions to your prospects’ needs)
- Privacy settings (ideally set to public)
- Activity with friends, groups, or communities
- Promotion tools (e.g. website, videos, PDFs)
3- Organize contests to network with potential clients.
Contests draw social media users’ attention a great deal—increasing your number of leads exponentially. The contests should be fun, creative, easy to join, and appeal to your audience’s passion or lifestyle to give you higher levels of engagement with your prospects.
Among social sites, Facebook appears to be the runaway winner when it comes to setting up contests for your target market.
4- Provide incentives whenever they close a sale that started with a social media connection.
It goes without saying that you should be monitoring whether your social media campaigns are contributing to your business’s revenue. If so, be ready to reward the employees involved with one or more of these suggested incentives:
- A special office event dedicated for, say, the employee of the month
- A party to celebrate a quota hit
- A mention on social media (where it all started)
- Paid days off
- Access to company events exclusive for C-suites
5- Organize training that will help improve their personal marketing as modern sales professionals.
Research has shown that in a group of four sales people, only one of them knows how to capitalize on the potential of social media to bring in sales for the company. Even with the awareness that social selling is valuable for their business, the majority of sales people are not equipped with the proper know-how.
What sales leaders need to do, then, is to mentor their members on integrating the use of social network tools into their selling process.
6- Produce content that they can use to promote the product in a buyer-centric approach.
Creating content is neither the beginning nor the end of social media or content marketing. Without moving forward with content syndication, you may find that your business becomes restricted when it comes to promoting your brand or generating leads.
The 80/20 rule is the general rule that content marketers live by. The idea is with the 20% promotional content; people will be drawn to your brand because you are doing a great service of educating them with the rest of your content. As you build your audience’s trust over time, you can then increase your promotions.
Indeed, social media marketing is here to stay, and the sooner you have your sales team go this route, the better it is for your company’s branding and sales goals.
