As salespeople, we’re constantly looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve: new strategies for networking, new avenues for prospecting, new ways to sell. And that drive toward the new helps us stay competitive, and, when meeting quotas is the name of the game, that’s a good way to be.
Of course, the problem with newness is that it’s uncharted. As we’re seeing with social selling, yes, the space is ripe for the picking, but no, we have no idea which direction to go in, how best to get what we need.
And all of this is due to one thing: the social space is enormous. Think about it: there are dozens of prominent channels featuring billions of conversations and, unless you’re part of an enormous organization willing to pay for social listening tools, you’re probably having a hard time honing in on what you need.[Tweet “Here are some tips for using your professional network for targeted social selling!”]
Between searching hashtags and keywords on Facebook and Twitter, accessing “the right” LinkedIn groups, and attempting to grab whatever you can from complaints lodged on competitors’ social pages, prospecting for social sales is more than messy. It’s downright unproductive.
But it doesn’t have to be. Rather than starting from the outside – finding people we don’t know in places we just discovered – and working our ways in, we can switch it up. By leveraging our own professional networks – the ones we’ve already spent our careers building – we can enjoy a more targeted, more successful social selling experience.
How Professional Networks Can Drive Targeted Social Sales
To approach selling to your network, you need to begin by considering the who’s that makes up your network. You can’t sell to everyone and really shouldn’t try, so narrowing your scope is key. Fortunately, all professional networks holds a bounty of incredibly useful, actionable information that makes it simple to sort out who’s worth selling to and how you should approach them. This includes:
- Whether your connection is professional or personal (which will determine how it’s appropriate to contact them)
- Where your connections work and what they do (which will determine whether it’s appropriate to contact them)
- Notifications when people change titles, jobs, companies, and careers (which will determine when it’s appropriate to contact them).
Armed with the “whether,” the “how, and the “when,” you’ll have everything you need to pinpoint key connections and begin the social sales process with them.
But sometimes, that’s easier said than done.
LinkedIn, for example, typically offers the most “complete” contact info, but it’s rarely as up-to-date as the info on Facebook which, in and of itself, is geared toward the personal and may offer limited details for contacting. Add to that that all of this requires that you watch constantly for relevant changes among the people you know, and the whole process can begin to feel a bit unruly.
So forget the major networks – at least as “go-to” places to get information from. What you need is the sum of their knowledge, tools capable of pulling and distilling all the info you have there into something more useful.
3 Easy Tools for Leveraging Your Professional Network for Social Selling
Hootsuite Uncovers Relevant Prospects: A seasoned favorite of social media managers, Hootsuite is a great, free tool that allows you to connect all of your social networks into one dashboard and see what they’re talking about. In addition to being able to watch their conversations in real time, Hootsuite allows you to create keyword-specific “streams” to track mentions and keywords across everyone you’re connected to.
CircleBack Consolidates Your Address Book and Surfaces Relevant Events: With CircleBack you’ll have the ability to consolidate all your contacts (from your address book, Exchange, Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) into a single list and have that list managed and updated automatically and in real time. As a bonus, CircleBack offers notifications about what’s recently changed in your network, making it easy to sell based on event triggers (like job change).
Nudge Makes It Easier to Grow the Most Advantageous Relationships: Nudge highlights the relationships you have across social media, email, etc. and identifies who might be worth a bit more effort. Then, once you’ve chosen which relationships to pursue, Nudge analyzes their social posting habits and recommends content and conversation topics you can use to have the best chance at building a great relationship and closing a sale.
The Bottom Line
With the right tools in place, social selling within your network will become one of the most valuable things you do each quarter. In addition to the list of “usual suspects” you’re always chasing down, leveraging your network will offer a constantly replenishing source of qualified prospects that you know and, more importantly, know how to talk to.
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Austin Duck is Content Marketing Manager for CircleBack and regularly contributes to StartupGrind, Business 2 Community, and elsewhere. He lives in DC with his army of cats.
Austin Duck
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- Using Your Professional Network for Targeted Social Selling - October 22, 2015