The sales profession is undergoing its first radical change in perhaps thousands of years. Sales practices and techniques have been essentially unchanged since the 1890s, when the founder of National Cash Register, John Patterson, developed the concepts of territories, prospecting scripts, quotas and sales conventions.
Today, a new method of selling, called social selling, is revolutionizing the way sales is done. Social selling takes the old technique of the relationship sell and supercharges it using online social media. It’s no longer who you know that counts. It’s what you know about your prospects and how much they know about you that wins. This is especially important in business-to-business (B2B) sales.
The Social Selling Revolution
The revolution that is B2B social selling gives the salesperson new ways to find, reach, and influence prospects. We created The Infinite Pipeline Relationship Development Process™ to help salespeople adopt social selling. The goal is to develop a community that will sell for you by creating and growing relationships.
- Find people in target organizations
- Look them up on LinkedIn
- Join the groups they are in
- See if they’ve posted in the group discussions and then comment
- Try to engage them in a conversation on the group forum
- When the time is right, suggest that you connect on LinkedIn
- Once you are connected download their contact info
- Email them periodically (don’t spam) with a bit of news or other information that they will be interested in, and ask for their comments
- Watch their activity and comment as appropriate
- When the time is right, ask to have coffee—concentrate the conversation on them. Don’t pitch.
- Continue to offer solutions.
This process takes a fair amount of work, and a lot of technological savvy. Salespeople need to understand and use various social media tools to socially-surround the prospect and guide them toward the sale. But salespeople are typically not adept with complicated technologies. Their talents lie elsewhere, in relationship-building, persuasion, and negotiation.
The NextPhase Selling SalesMVP™ mobile app automates not only the social selling process but a good share of the lead capture, follow-up, tracking, and reporting. It makes the process simple, and as painless and easy to understand as possible.
If you’re new to these concepts, find out more about Sales Automation page. You can also learn more about our upcoming product on our Next Phase in Selling, Learn More and Demo pages, or sign up for our beta at our Sign Up page.