How to Coach Your Partners On Social Selling
Across many industries, networking — both traditional and digital — as a sales strategy is on the rise. For example, while crowd funding was unheard of 10 years ago, with the evolution of digital communication, it’s now a viable opportunity for small start-ups to find success without traditional investors. How customers are acquired and retained by indirect sales channels is a new game, and savvy channel sales teams have found that they needed to create and lead a robust social media strategy in order to sell more. They know the core buyer profile has shifted towards Millennial buyers, and so has the way these buyers educate themselves — in their social media circle.
Social media for business means more than a corporate brand posting motivational tweets or updating your LinkedIn profile and liking your connections’ posts. I’m describing a purpose-driven, sales-focused social media plan. As a vendor, my teams are using this trend to offer benefits to our indirect sales channel to help make a sales driven social media strategy easier to execute. We offer packaged marketing development funds (MDF) that include developing, launching, and running a program for social sales — where you have real tools to demonstrate measurable impact. We encourage our channel firms to take advantage of MDF to better educate potential customers. Quality content inspires peer-to-peer sharing.
Incorporating social selling into your strategy goes far beyond simply knowing who switched jobs on LinkedIn. Think of it as a value-added enhancement — and know that not exploring it can negatively impact your business. It knits into the very fabric of demand generation for our channel providers, and is the difference moving forward between thriving versus just surviving in sales. Here are a just a few simple examples I have seen recently work:
- Yelp review: “No Wi-Fi in this restaurant chain — skip it.”
- Opportunity: Partner sales for guest Wi-Fi solution.
- FB post: “If you are in a hurry, don’t go here — lines are out the door.
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