Welcome to 2023! AI is on the rise, ad costs are increasing, and while the effectiveness of some B2B sales techniques may be waning, other B2B strategies and processes continue to drive more and more B2B sales success – chief among these is social selling. This blog post will discuss six powerful secrets to help you make the most out of incorporating social selling into your sales efforts. 

The Impact of Social Selling on the Pipeline

Social selling is not a new concept. HubSpot has found that 50.1% of 

sales reps are already actively engaged in social selling. According to reports from the Social Media and Sales Quota Survey, those reps spend 5-10% of their time on social media.

These sales reps use social media to identify new opportunities, build their professional networks, and close deals more quickly. Now we just need to get the other 49.9% of sales reps bought in. 

With the proper techniques and a clear understanding of how to apply them, social selling can equip your company with all they need to crush the competition and secure top ROIs in 2023. 

6 Secrets of an Effective Social Selling Strategy

 Social selling is about leveraging social media channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) to build relationships with potential new clients and nurture existing customers. As a sales professional, utilizing the power of social media can help you increase sales and cost-effectively grow your business. 

However, effectively knowing how to use social media for social selling can be challenging. Here are six secrets to successful social selling:

1. You Have to Know Your Audience: 

It’s critical for your sales team to understand who their audience is on social media. This will help them focus on engaging with the “right” audience. It’ll also help ensure that the content being produced and shared through the sales team aligns with the target audience. 

2. Target Your Content: 

After you’ve identified your audience, it’s time to start creating content specifically for this audience. To give your sales team a bit more fodder, focus more on middle-of-the-funnel content including:

• Product Use Cases
• Case Studies
• Industry Assessments
• Best Practices

This will ensure that your posts are seen by the right people and increase engagement from those who are most likely to make a purchase from you within a shorter period of time.

3. Engage With Your Audience

As your employees start sharing content, it’s vital that they actively engage with their audience. Be sure to take the time and effort to train your team on how to best respond to comments, reactions, and new followers to encourage further engagement with the rep. 

4. Keep Track of Conversations: 

As your team’s engagements start picking up steam, it’s critical to measure and track those conversations. If you’re not receiving any comments, it may be a sign that your content is missing the mark. Likewise, if your content is generating a ton of interest, it may be time to double down and create more content on that subject. 

5. Monitor Performance Metrics: 

As with any investment, be sure your team is tracking the success of the program and associate the efforts with current deals, closed/won opportunities, and generated revenue. 

It is also important to track softer KPIS (likes, shares, impressions) so that you can adjust strategies where necessary or continue optimizing those which have proven successful already!

6. Use Technology to Streamline Your Social Selling Efforts

Implementing the right toolset is critical to executing a successful social selling initiative. As much as we hate to say it, if you rely on your team to source and share content on their own, it isn’t going to happen. 

Not only is this work something they’ll have to take on in addition to their daily tasks, it’s also not the highest and best use of their time. Even more so, by asking them to source and create their own social posts, you may introduce additional risks – especially if you’re in a regulated industry. 

Instead, we recommend creating/sharing the posts using a tool like SocialToaster. With SocialToaster, one person on your team can set up the content that will be shared (post copy, content link, etc.) and then send it out to everyone on the sales team. 

Once shared, that salesperson can click on the post to share it with their network. This eliminates the friction point of finding the content to share and creating the copy for the social post. 

Even better, SocialToaster calculates the impact of these posts (impressions, shares, etc.) to help your team define the ROI of its efforts. You can learn more about SocialToaster by scheduling a demo.  

Harnessing the Power of Social Selling in 2023 and Beyond

Social selling is a powerful tool that your B2B sales and marketing professionals can harness to boost leads, sales, and ROI. So, what is holding you back? Put these techniques into practice now and see how social selling can help your business grow in 2023 and beyond.