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10 Traits Shared by Successful Social Selling Teams

You’ve read the headlines: 78% of salespeople using social media outsell their peers. Those headlines make social selling sound so easy, don’t they?

But there’s a catch: Your salespeople on social media won’t outsell their peers unless you have the right people on your team.

But who are the right people? What skill sets should you look for? Below, you’ll find 10 essential qualities for your social sellers.

1. Avid Researchers of Buyers

Your marketing team can give you general information on your buyers, as a whole. But before your salespeople contact an individual buyer, they should do some research.

Is she on Twitter? What does she tweet about? Is he on LinkedIn? If so, what’s his role? How will your product or service make his job easier?

2. Interpreters of Digital Body Language

Your salespeople in the field are accustomed to reading someone’s physical voice and body language. Similarly, a good social seller will be able to read someone’s digital body language.

When your prospects post on social media, they share their personality, and they share information about the topics they care about. Interpreting those digital signs is a must-have skill for any social salesperson.

3. Eager Learners

Social media changes as quickly as the weather. If your salespeople want to be effective on social media, they need to keep up with the latest trends.

Moreover, social selling is going to take some trial and error. They need to take your company’s best practices, test them, and adjust them accordingly.

4. Concise

There isn’t a lot of room for long, flowery sentences on social media. Salespeople need to get to the point.

5. Remarkable

At the same time that you have to be concise, you need to have some kind of personality. Every minute, Twitter users tweet 277,000 times, and every minute, Facebook users share 2,460,000 pieces of content.

It’s easy to blend in on social media, so salespeople need to find ways to be remarkable – to stand out. Great content, cool images, exclamation points, emoticons, and emoji help you sound less digitally monotone.

6. Engaging

Are you doing social selling if you’re simply broadcasting a couple tweets a day?

No. You’re on social media, but you’re not really doing social selling.

For your sales team’s efforts to be effective, your salespeople have to strike up conversations with other people. They have to listen to what other people are saying and respond. In short, they have to engage.

7. Cultivators of Relationships

A typical marketing team will supply Sales with 15% of the leads they need to meet quota. That means your salespeople need to generate 85% of their own leads.

To get that many leads, they need to constantly form new relationships, looking for business opportunities along the way.

8. Fluent in Multiple Social Networks

How you communicate on LinkedIn is not the same as how you communicate on Twitter. (Twitter hashtags, for instance, don’t work on LinkedIn.) A good social salesperson will understand the grammar of each network.

9. Digitally Appropriate (A.K.A. Not Creepy)

In face-to-face interactions, we have certain rules of conduct. We don’t run up to a stranger and give them a big, wet kiss on the lips.

On social media, there are unwritten rules, as well. HubSpot has done some initial research into the subject.

10. Harmony between Online and Offline Personas

It’s naive to think that you’ll conduct an enterprise software sale on Twitter or LinkedIn. Sure, you may use social media to research buyers, to break the ice with new ones, and to stay in touch with current ones.

But eventually, you’ll have to jump on a phone call or meet in person. During that interaction, you’re going to need a personality that is equally as charming as your online persona.

What do you think?

These are 10 traits that we think make for great social sellers. What other characteristics would you add to the list?

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