5 Tips to Consider When Listening For B2B Sales Opportunities on Social Media
Good social selling can be broken down into several different components, and no matter who you talk to, social listening is a consistently vital component of the mix. Here are 5 questions to ask when considering your B2B social sales listening strategy:
What is social listening?
In sales, social listening should be viewed as a monitoring activity on applicable social channels with the intention of growing and advancing sales pipeline. The key to making social listening successful is using it efficiently and effectively as a strategic channel to listen to what their prospects are saying and doing.
Considerations when using social media to listen?
As a leader thinking about turning a team loose on social media, one of the first thoughts has to be to understand where online your prospects conversing. This is done by reverse engineering your buyer personas and mapping them to social network demographics. In B2B situations, Twitter and LinkedIn take priority. Next steps become finding the right networks, then finding the communities or feeds to listen to. For example, LinkedIn Groups or Twitter hashtags are ways to find prospects who might be active there.
How does social “stalking” help engage prospects in the buyer’s journey?
Never before has sales been more about relationships and adding value since today’s modern buyer is armed with more information than ever before. Listening to what your prospects are saying on social media presents an opportunity to remove dark periods between phone calls and emails. The modern buyer has shown a propensity to be attached to social via their mobile and offer multiple opportunities daily to listen and engage to build a relationship. Examples range from saying happy birthday on LinkedIn to giving a favorite on Twitter when one of your prospects tweet.
How will social media help uncover buying signals?
People are constantly giving away valuable information online that can be used to a salesperson’s advantage – especially when it’s linked with other information and/or various other contacts in the buying circle. Connecting with competitors, asking applicable questions, online discussions, job changes are all ways we’ve seen opportunities develop from social listening.
What obstacles will present themselves when adding social listening to the mix?
Proper training is going to be the foundation of any successful social selling initiative. Once people are trained it becomes a matter of understanding that it’s a closed loop of optimization. The process might yield different results for different people so testing and optimizing is essential. For example, you need to know which conferences your prospects are going to and be active on the hashtag identifying opportunities, or finding that one LinkedIn Group you are monitoring dropped in participation and swapping it out for one having more discussions will help bring success.
(Editor's Note: This post was originally posted on rFactr's blog. rFactr's social sales program provides sales organizations with an easy way to activate their team on social channels, enabling them to connect with prospects and begin the sales process earlier in the sales cycle. Learn more... )
