How Does Social Media Fit In?

“People buy from people.” How many times have we heard that old adage?

No matter how many times, it is still true. The door-to-door salesman worked tirelessly to sell his goods – and he figured out pretty quickly that, if he could build trust and engage with his prospects, he would end his day with a lot less inventory than when he began.

We all are trying to engage our prospects and build trust. However, we face a different challenge today, and that is how to open the cyber door. “Knock, knock!” – link me in, follow me, friend me…all very familiar to us in the era of social everything.

There is a lot of excitement building around the practice of social selling, and it is important to sit back and think about what that means to your brand, your team, your prospects, and your results. Most of us know what we mean by social selling but here is a simple definition:

Social selling is the use of social media to increase sales revenue.

As we think about social selling, it is important to keep a few facts in mind:

• Americans spend more time on social media than any other major Internet activity, including e-mail (Business Insider)
• 100% of B2B decision-makers use social media for work purposes (Forrester)
• The majority (57%) of B2B IT buyers use social networks as part of their purchase process (IDG Connect).

All this adds up to an obvious conclusion that companies must adopt social selling as part of their selling motion.

How does content fit into social selling?

When embarking on a plan to begin social selling, one of the critical elements is to determine the type of content that your sales team will leverage in order to engage their prospects. It is the content that will capture the audience’s attention, generate interest, and provide relevant insight to help build relationships that will produce results.

We all create content and sales assets to support the sales team. Our content is filled with data sheets, white papers, power point presentations, battle cards, price lists, positioning PDFs, and endless documents about features and functions.

But what about the stuff that really starts a meaningful dialogue? Stuff like, industry trends, the latest news, your prospects’ competitive advantage, industry or legal insights, blogs on relevant topics, cool videos, podcasts, and your commentary associated with this content. This is what enables the sales team to be interesting while generating buyer attention.

Today’s buyers are smart. They leverage the Internet to determine the best-of-breed solution or services they need to drive their business. They are >60% down their sales cycle by the time you reach them.

So, in order to engage them, you need to have a different conversation with the prospective customer. They want a meaningful dialogue from a thought leader who is providing education and/or insight. If you want salespeople to sell using relevant insight, real-time information, and compelling, original stories, you had better source them.

It is the content that turns into sales currency, and a content management strategy is a critical element to maximizing the ROI of social selling.

You don’t want your sales team taking time out of their selling time to source their own content, and as a marketer you want to ensure the content that is being shared is consistent with your brand message, voice, and value.

We are building content management strategies for our marketing efforts. We now need to extend those strategies to our social selling activities.

Engaging with prospects on social media is not merely a fad. It actually works. Sales teams that use social selling tend to come closer to attaining their sales goals than sales teams that do not use social selling.

• 64% of sales teams that use social selling attain their sales quota (Aberdeen Group).
• 73% of salespeople who used social selling techniques met or exceeded quota in 2012 (Aberdeen Group).
• 54% of salespeople close business as a direct result of social media (McKinsey & Company).

How Trapit can help

There is a lot to think through, and at Trapit, we believe that we have the answer. Trapit allows you to easily discover the high-quality, unique content that you need for your social selling requirements. We allow you to curate the content, and you determine what to share and when to share it.

Because Trapit works 24/7, 365 days a year, you will have the volume of content you need, when you need it. And you will never have to worry about your sales teams social media channels going dry.

The marriage of relevant content and a push of a button social media publishing, makes Trapit a must-have for your social selling activities. We not only have the leading application for discovery, curation, publishing, and analytics, but we have also built some basic “getting started” best practices.

It’s time to make Trapit a household name for your company. “Knock knock!” – it is great to know that when the “door” opens you have something to share that will ensure that door stays open and that the relationship endures.

To learn about the best practices of social selling

Download our free social selling white paper: