New Guide: Social Selling – Turning Relationships into Revenue

We know that the buyer process is changing.

We are now firmly entrenched in the age of the customer-led approach, moving from days of finding customers, to being found. From mass advertising, to 1:1 targeting.

Businesses now have to create demand, as customers have more choice and options available to them.

The pressure is firmly on marketing to ensure that brand awareness is being increased and to help nurture leads through this longer cycle, for both business to business, and business to consumer sales.

A significant shift in the sales process is that cold calling – a seemingly now archaic method of calling customers or businesses from a database list, calling out of the blue – is all but dead.

People want to be contacted through their channel of choice – moving away from telemarketing and onto social.

According to Forrester, buyers might be anywhere up to 90% of the way through their buying journey before they contact a vendor, making it difficult for sales to influence the buyers’ decisions – these buyers can now delay talking to sales until they are experts themselves.

So with this comes a new challenge for the CMO.

How to make sure that this intersection between sales and marketing is being serviced?

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Building, nurturing, qualifying

A Marketo study has showed that 58% of marketers who have been using social media for three years or longer state that it has helped plugged that gap, and assisted them in lifting sales, spending on average four to six hours on social media per week.

There is undeniably a struggle with measuring the ROI of generating leads on social.

But there’s absolutely no question that social media is a critical piece of the marketing mix and is firmly in the sights of every savvy CMO – allowing the creation of demand and allow marketing messages to be heard across multiple channels.

This tactic helps a company increase brand awareness, build demand, nurture relationships, generate qualified leads, and ultimately close deals.

Direct selling involves discovering opportunities, developing relationships, nurturing, offering advice, and ultimately closing deals. Social selling is exactly that – just on social.

Our latest Social Listening in Practice Guide, Social Selling, talks you through the challenges, gives real-world examples, and offers practical advice on how to ensure your business is making the most of this opportunity.

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Putting social selling into practice

In the Social Selling guide, as well as learning what it is, how it works, and why you need it, you’ll be given details on how to:

• Find discussions of your product category.
• Find buying indication terms within your product category.
• Look for recommendation requests within your product category.
• Uncover questions and conversations about your product category.
• Monitor target prospect personas to confirm accuracy.
• Discover topics for content.
• Discover competitive insights.
• Monitor for key phrases customers are using when seeking help.
• Spot and answer direct questions from prospects.
• Monitor industry trends.

Download the guide and make sure you’re in the sights of the 81% of consumers who are undertaking pre-purchase research, and turn relationships into revenue.

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