3 SOCIAL SELLING TIPS: FROM CRM PLATFORMS TO MEASURING SOCIAL ROI
“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social or mobile. The choice is how well we do it.” -Erik Qualman
Because buyers are numb to spammy emails and cold-call campaigns, sales folks need to step up their game and engage prospects on more channels if they want to rise above the noise. But we all know, the glitz and glam of retweets, follows and favorites are all useless if we don’t turn them into money. In this post, I’d like to share tips I’ve learned from experts in the social selling space that measure the return on social engagements.
Tip #1: Track all social activities on a CRM platform to measure social ROI
If risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing, HireVue’s Social Selling Director, Gabe Villamizar, recommends due diligence in measuring social output in Salesforce CRM. In addition to tracking calls and emails, the modern sales rep should also track LinkedIn and Twitter actions.
To include social tracking in your workflow, ask your salesforce admin to add social activities. If you are a Salesforce admin and want to add tracking, simply complete the following for a basic setup:
Login to Salesforce → Top right-hand corner, click Setup — › Left tab, click Customize — › Below you this tab, click Activities → Below activities, click Task Fields → On the right, under ‘Task Standard Fields’ click on Type
From here add “Social Selling” and include the types of activities you want to track similar to the image below:
Tip #2 : To increase social ROI, cross out the boring
The next tip is a little more risque yet it makes so much sense — it’s from Jack Kosakowsky who believes that as social sellers, we must “quit boring everyone on social media.”
Try 3 different styles of follow-ups.
- A meet-n-greet hello + value add + CTA.
- A silly toned value-add backed by research on your prospect’s Twitter context + CTA
- Surface the objection, overcome with one sentence + CTA
Here’s my strategy in action. Before showing the whole Twitter world, I thought I’d test it out for you guys over email. This is a prospect that had gone dark — he hadn’t responded to the last seven follow-up attempts.
The result is an in-person meeting and the possibility of adding the rest of his team.
As an actionable item, use Twitter to overcome objections. Test ridiculously fun content and always tag at least 2 prospects. Log the activity on Salesforce under your new ‘log a call’ activity type. Now answer these 5 questions in your notes:
- What is the response ratio of your tweets?
- Did you get favorited, retweeted or did your prospect respond?
- Did you move the needle by updating the opportunity stage status from demo completed, to negotiation, to verbal agreement, to closed won?
- Are you struggling to re-engage your prospect?
- Have you tried other channels like LinkedIn?
#3: Incorporate Social channels in your storytelling and track in CRM
The beauty of social selling is that reps are now able to use the right side of their brain to provide value. We are free to use other channels like Linkedin or Twitter. The more social activities are tracked in Salesforce, the more insight we will have about our critical path to acquiring a new client.
As soon as you get an appointment with a potential buyer, immediately connect on LinkedIn. Use this channel to understand the hierarchy and the political landscape of the company you’re selling into. If your emails do not get a response, nudge in a different channel by showing and educating without telling. You can do this by illustrating a powerful value proposition with the combination of an image with startling numbers.
As In this example, it took 10 days of active selling to acquire a client. Specific activities included 3 30-minute conversations, 20 email exchanges (approx. 120 minutes) and 3 social activities (5 minutes) to return $5,000. That is time very well spent!
Re-imagine your own sales process from a buyer’s point of view! It is not enough to deliver the value of products. With all the noise, we must learn to be diligent in tracking our activities, learn to be un-boring and most of all, learn to be socially resourceful.
With both our ears plugged into social channels, our job is to listen for triggers that allow us to re-engage buyers in the most intelligent way. But, what about you? Do you have tips for managing your sales pipeline that measure social ROI? I’d love to learn more about how you incorporate social selling in your strategy!
Comments are welcome below.
