Social Selling Training for Your Sales Team - Tips for Success

1. Social media presence should be maintained by reps.

The use of social media by your salespeople is essential to social selling's effectiveness. Imagine this scenario: what kind of customer would trust someone who hasn't posted anything recent or interacted with anyone recently? Leads and followers will remain interested in reps if they interact, post, and engage on social media.

Potential customers need highly-valuable content on rep profiles. If a rep has information that's useful to them, customers are more likely to engage with them. In addition, rep profiles should match the social profiles of the larger brand. Additionally, this consistency facilitates a seamless UX, as well as a more trustworthy and professional experience for customers.

2. Teach social selling's three C's.

The sales team should be educated about social selling's three C's when they are given sessions on social selling training. These three key elements are essential for social selling success.

Context: Representatives need to contextualize what they do within social media by maintaining their profiles, engaging with qualified prospects, and developing strong relationships.

Content: Sales representatives need to share useful content with their followers and prospects on social media. A variety of content formats are available, including videos, images, ebooks, blogs, and infographics.

Collaborate: Make sure social sales reps communicate effectively so prospects feel that they are being treated professionally, thoughtfully, and as valuable as possible.

3. Goals should be set for social selling by reps.

A social selling strategy should have goals, just like any other business strategy. Perhaps a rep wants to spend six hours prospecting on LinkedIn and Instagram over the next month, so they can set a goal for how much time they're going to spend on social selling.

You might also want to set a quarterly target for how many qualified leads you find and contact. No matter what the goal is, reps will be motivated to cut into social selling and measure their success accordingly if they set a (or multiple) target.

4. Connect reps with prospects on social media and encourage interaction.

Building relationships with prospects is an important part of the sales process - it helps them establish trust and familiarity with them. The rep cares about prospects and values their opinion when they interact with them on social media.

Connect with prospects on social media to strengthen and deepen your bonds. The fact is, today prospects can interact with you in a variety of ways on social media such as liking, tweeting, retweeting, re-posting, mentioning, sharing, direct messaging, posting, stories, videos, and living.

By doing the following, reps can foster deeper connections and engagement on social media instead of simply posting updates and stories regularly:

Reacting to prospects' posts and answering their comments.

Providing prospects with valuable content through posts, comments, or direct messages.

You can share or reshare the content of a prospect.

Offering prospects the opportunity to ask an expert a question about something they're passionate about or struggling with.

Offering prospects the chance to have a deeper conversation with you through a different medium (e.g. Zoom or telephone).

5. Ensure that Sales and Marketing are aligned and communicating effectively.

Integrated Sales and Marketing strategies are the key to success in social selling. We are all in this together, not just department heads. By working together and collaborating, Sales and Marketing will be able to better meet the needs of your leads and customers.

Social selling requires alignment between Sales and Marketing on the following points:

How reps will prospect and make connections on social media by incorporating and sharing content.

Content planning, creation, and consistent production for your social personas.

Social selling success can be measured across teams and overall.

It will be easier to make sure that these things happen if Sales and Marketing have Service Level Agreements, or SLAs (a quantified analysis that keeps both departments accountable).

It is also a good idea to create a central point of collaboration where members of each team can submit content, ideas, and plans for social selling and social media. In this case, both teams can participate by dumping their ideas in a Google Doc. After that, hold monthly meetings between the teams to discuss the best ideas. As a result, Sales and Marketing can discuss how to share content and boost connections on social media so that reps can share it with prospects. Sharing editorial calendars can also help Sales and Marketing coordinate content releases and marketing campaigns - this way, sales reps will never miss the chance to refer prospects for ebooks, podcasts, or blog posts.

6. Content that is educational and relevant should be provided for reps to share on social media.

Comments, posts, and content representatives share on social media are bound to engage prospects. Likewise, they'll want to share articles from your knowledge base and demos from your marketing and product teams.

Reps will be able to deliver prospects more value by providing them with these resources, resulting in a streamlined social selling process.

Here are some ways you can achieve this:

For team collaboration and content sharing, create a content engine.

The creation and sharing of content should be carried out regularly by a thought-leadership committee.

Content should be made available in a knowledge base to customers and reps.