Benefits of Social Selling That You’re Missing Out On

By thought-horizon | Jun 17, 2019

Social media for business is an ongoing debate that has been around for decades. However, the arguments in favor of it have tremendously increased as organizations change their points of view. After all, considering that there are more than 3 million social media users worldwide, ignoring social to reach buyers is not a good idea. Another thing that rolls the ball to social media’s favor is the fact that users are more willing to follow brands rather than celebrities.

Clearly, if you are not leveraging social, you are missing out on a fast, inexpensive, and effective way to interact with almost half the world’s population. But that’s not all of it.

Let’s find out some of these aspects that you may be missing out on by ignoring social media.

1. Wealth of Leads

No matter who you are, leads are the most important aspect of your business. For many of us, marketing teams do a terrific job in this arena, but most of us rely on our sales team’s heavy lifting for lead generation. Further, in some cases, it can be a combination of both. That said, do you think traditional prospecting yields you the expected results? We’re concerned that it doesn’t.

Studies by leaders like LinkedIn and others have time and again emphasized that teams who embrace a social routine fill their sales pipeline faster. Not only this, but companies with formalized social selling processes are more likely to hit revenue goals. The numbers make it clear that integrating modern tools in the name of social selling can help you propel your business to new heights.

2. Brand Recognition: A Challenge for Companies and Sales Reps

Researchers have provided enough evidence to support that consumers are more inclined to buy from people, rather than companies. And mind you, the share of these buyers is as huge as 92%. It therefore makes complete sense for you to allow your sales reps to take charge and influence potential customers.

However, there is another aspect to it. People are not fond of talking to sales executives. They want to interact with experts. Your team may be an expert at what they do, but they don’t really have a chance to demonstrate their expertise.

If you sell furniture, advanced manufacturing equipment, or software solutions, it is next to impossible to convey your expertise in a 30-second cold call or a 30-minute sales appointment. You may have the zeal to perform above and beyond, but the clock is the biggest enemy.

That’s where social media comes in. By building your brand online and sharing informative articles and content, you can brand yourself as an expert and leverage the benefits.

3. Promotions to make your brand stand out

As a business owner, you must be well aware of the importance that branding and promotions hold. However, you may not have a clear idea of where to get started. Most of the businesses today resort to a cookie cutter technique used by other brands – perhaps if it works for others, it may work for them, too.

While this may have an element of success to some extent, the strategy fizzles out in the long run. And in most of the cases, failure attributes to the fact that we don’t leverage the power of the internet.

In a nutshell: it’s all about your social profile. Go for consistent presence across digital channels that your customers are on. Social media is now the foundation of interaction between buyers and sellers. Promote your brand by publishing informative content that talks about your expertise and also acts as a promotional element for you.

4. Competitor differentiation

Even though it has a separate mention, this aspect is intricately tied to all the three points mentioned above. Once you practice each of these concepts actively, the natural byproduct will separate you from your competitors.

The idea here is to use the lack of marketing and sales creativity of competitors to your advantage. For most of these instances, brands generally focus on core expertise, ignoring the crucial aspect of sales and marketing. You can combine all the elements here and promote your brand effectively using the expertise-sales-marketing mix.

The Bottom Line

Everything boils down to the question of whether or not your buyers research before they buy. If you have a massive community of buyers on social media, you are a lucky entrepreneur. But given the difficulty of this, we doubt that’s the case. And missing an opportunity to tap this reservoir of success is not really a smart choice.