Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As you'll see in the SlideShare embed, this guide is designed to share practical tips on how to get started in social selling:

-Avoiding silos and collaborating across teams to craft an organisation-wide approach;

-Identifying the individual roles and responsibilities for marketing and sales teams;

-Outlining a social selling content creation framework for marketing teams;

-Detailing a step-by-step social selling implementation plan for salespeople....

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know we regularly discuss social selling strategy, as do many others. But if you’re someone who learns best through visualization, you may find yourself frustrated by the lack of actual social selling examples on the web.

Read on to discover a wide variety of inspirational, real world examples of social selling best practices in action....

Social selling, or selling your products and services through social media, can be a tricky balancing act for B2B concepts. Sales and marketing teams must toe the line between persuasiveness and pushiness, and a little bit of social media know-how can facilitate enhanced positive interactions with potential clients.

After all, statistics point to social selling as one of the most effective tools in sales and marketing. Nearly 75% of buyers consult social media before making a purchase decision, and 77% of buyers don’t talk to a salesperson until performing independent research.

Here are four ways to master B2B social selling for your company....

As a B2B startup, we’ve found LinkedIn really powerful in pin-pointing new potential customers. Where LinkedIn falls down is actually connecting with those people (does anybody actually read their LinkedIn messages?… mine is just filled with InMail spam from recruiters). Fortunately we’ve worked out a couple of tricks.

Email Hunter and ReplyApp.io combo.

The Email Hunter Chrome extension will find anybody’s email address from their LinkedIn profile. Does it work 100% of the time?… no, but it’s pretty damn good.

Once we’ve identified the person we want to contact, at the touch of a button we’ll (almost always) have their email. That’s where  ReplyApp.io comes in.

ReplyApp.io automates your sales outreach. Essentially you can pre-write follow-up emails that are sent only if you don’t get a reply. With all the time you save not having to follow people up, it will feel like your sales team has been multiplied by 2 or 3. We love it and are very happy to have finally made the discovery after researching about 20 different competitors (in fact I’ll write a separate blog post on this if anybody is interested, because finding the right tool was painful — we were using our own custom solution for a while)...

According to Invesp, social commerce is expected to grow and will represent 5 percent of online retail revenue this year, resulting in an estimated $14 billion in sales by the end of 2015. Given those numbers, it’s no surprise that many large retailers are making significant investments in social media marketing, to offer millions of potential customers a seamless, flexible and more personalized shopping experience.

While these large businesses may have significant budgets to spend on social commerce and marketing, smaller-size companies too can leverage the new social trends to drive increased revenue. Consider these five strategies to boost sales in 2015...

If you’re a B2B salesperson, you’ve probably heard about SPIN Sales. It’s one of the most well-known -- not to mention oldest -- selling systems. SPIN gives reps a research-backed framework for working and closing complex deals with extended sales processes.

You can use SPIN principles along with your current sales methodology. The strategy focuses on asking good questions in the right order, using active listening, and translating the prospect’s needs into your product’s features. (Many of SPIN’s principles align well with inbound sales.)

To help you implement the most useful tips, aspects, and templates from SPIN Selling, we’ve put together the following guide:...

Social media is fast becoming the go-to channel for sales people to find new prospects and reach their sales targets. In fact, 90% of top performing sales people now use social media as part of their sales strategy.

And for sales reps that invest in social media, 64% of them hit their team quota  – compared to only 49% of reps hitting their team quota that don’t use social media.

Furthermore, more than 10% of social sales reps have closed 5 or more deals due to being active in social media.

If you want to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of modern day sales, then you need to rethink how you can use social media as part of your sales strategy. Unfortunately, two-thirds of companies have yet to create a social media strategy for their sales organization....

I’m not a fan of pop-ups. Like most of the Internet world, I find them at best a minor annoyance and at worst a reason to stop reading. I can’t recall a time that I ever signed up for someone’s email newsletter list as the result of a pop-up.

I abandon sites when I’m assiduously and repeatedly begged to sign up for an email list. I also get extremely impatient when I’m entirely prevented from reaching someone’s homepage (or content) without first being asked to sign up for an email list—when I’m forcefully diverted to a full-on sales pitch for someone’s whatever-it-is. That always strikes me as incredibly presumptuous—shouldn’t I get to experience you or your content for at least a few seconds before you ask for my email address?

See, I’ve already digressed into how annoying these tactics are! I hope it demonstrates how reticent I’ve been, in all my years of running this site, to place any kind of pop-up that would interrupt the reader’s experience. While I know from experience and reading case studies that pop-ups work, I rarely like how they work. They feel like a trick or a betrayal of some kind. I always figure: If people really like me, then they’ll end up on my list. I only want truly devoted people.

I’ve begun to change my mind, however....

Social selling continues to be one of the rising stars of the sales industry as large and small businesses continue to incorporate in into their existing processes.

But what results are they seeing? How do they go about implementing social tactics? What challenges do they face?

Here's an infographic from SalesForLife that looks at the current state of social selling, including trends, benchmarks and results.

Key Stats:

The importance of social selling will continue to increase in 2016 as (almost) 63 percent of respondents state that social selling is important to close more business.

61 percent of organizations that are actively engaged in social selling report a significant positive impact on their sales revenue growth....