Social selling tools are gaining popularity among modern sales professionals.No doubt, cold calling has been dead long back.Social calling / social selling is the new norm.Moreover, sales have evolved thanks to technology innovations and social selling is one effective method to impact the end customer’s path to purchase.
Especially for B2B sales experts, using social selling tools have become a necessity. Meanwhile, in a recent survey by CSO Insights and Seismic, key benefits of social selling has been highlighted by the survey respondents.
So, let’s first understand the concept of social selling.
What is Social Selling?.
In a nutshell, Social selling is the process of developing relationships as part of the sales process. Today this often takes place via social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, but can take place either online or offline.
Not clear yet? Let me simplify it for you.
For a layman, social sharing techniques include sharing relevant content, interacting directly with potential buyers and customers, personal branding, and social listening. Actually, some of you may confuse social selling with social media marketing. However, it’s not! First and foremost, social selling is primarily used by sales professionals and it has not much to do with marketing professionals.
First and foremost, social selling is primarily used by sales professionals and it has not much to do with marketing professionals.
Plus, social selling strives to nurture and cultivate one-on-one (personalized) relationships, rather than broadcast one-to-many (mass marketing) messages.
Gartner Report on Top Use Cases and Benefits of Social for CRM in 2017 says:
More than 50% of organisations are still failing to show the business impact of social on CRM, despite the fact that organisations who have embraced the challenge are seeing tangible benefits.
Be one of the 50% that succeed.
In addition, social selling tools enables sales professionals to interact with the potential leads during the live customer journey to purchase a product or service. This is THE MOMENT when a sales expert can initiate a contextual conversation with the prospect, help him find the relevant content / information and become ‘Go-to (Wo)Man’ for further interactions. Not just that, social selling tools allow sales team to do more in much less time and become a brand’s social advocates.
If you’re looking to improve you social selling efforts, you must start using social selling tools and platforms. The question isn’t if social selling works. It’s how.
To help get you started, in no particular order, I’ve handpicked five of the popular social selling tools to share today with you all. These social selling tools can enable your sales team with following up with leads, filling sales pipeline, and closing deals faster.
Cutting The Long Story Short, Here Is My List Of Top 5 Social Selling Tools To Meet Your Social Selling Stack Requirements.
1. Nimble
Take action, “anytime, anywhere”.
Nimble is one of the most complete CRMs and social selling tool available in the market today. Small businesses can leverage Nimble’s advanced high-end CRM features combined with the power of social media. Its ease of use and loads of advanced features work in its favor big time. Nimble covers all major social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, G+, Instagram, AngelList,Foursqaure etc.
You can keep track of all your engagement across all social channel e-mail, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.Not only you can extract data from any social profile within seconds but you can also pull data from all of a contact’s social channels into one lead record.Nimble’s rich relationship management features like contact and company details including automatic syncing of contacts, calendars, emails, social details, notifications and messages help you prepare for your client interactions.
Nimble automatically updates itself with relevant prospect and customer information from several social profiles.You can listen closely to the people that matter to your business while keeping tracks of your past social engagements within the social profile, instead of having to into the CRM.
Source: Nimble
Nimble saves you time by suggesting additional social profiles for your contacts and companies, making it easy to add new profiles from Twitter, AngelList, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Instagram and more.Nimble helps you automatically track your conversations wherever they happen – in email box or on Twitter or Facebook.You can easily import Twitter friends and followers to turn connections into conversations and relationships into revenue.
- Nimble Contacts App Integration
- Automatic Contact Profile Mapping
- Syncs DMs, Mentions, RTs to your contacts
- Status Updates
- Follow Contacts
- Import Lists
- Post Scheduling
Nimble knows if you’re in Gmail, Twitter, Facebook or even a Forbes article, and pulls details from emails and web pages with one click to create and enrich contact records.
Price:
$25 per month. Free Trial Available.
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Find leads and close deals with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you find the right prospects – that too fast.With LinkedIn’s sophisticated algorithm, this sales tool gives you lead recommendations that are tailored to you.
Easily save leads and follow updates of your prospects to turn cold calling into warm conversations. It is one of the most widely used B2B lead generation tool and has emerged as selling platform.
“Leverage social selling to build relationships with your buyers early-on; create trust and value before you have a dialogue about price.” – Koka Sexton, Social Selling Leader
LinkedIn Sales Navigator works perfectly in helping you find the right people with suggestions customized for you. It’s integrated with Salesforce CRM. So, you can automatically bring in your accounts and contacts by importing from Salesforce Moreover, data will sync daily from Salesforce to LinkedIn, keeping your data fresh.
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You can pursue smarter sales prospecting based on your preferences and browsing history. Besides, you can find real decision makers and influencers at the same company.
Also, use premium filters like seniority, company size, function, and much more.You can reach over 500 million members on LinkedIn, even if you’re not connected to them. Also, keep track of key contact moves and important company changes Moreover, you can package and share sales content in a way that’s better for both the buyer and seller. They can see content without downloading, and you get to track who has viewed what.
Download a Free E-book on How to Get Started with Social Selling on LinkedIn.
While LinkedIn membership is free, the Sales Navigator is not. Pricing for teams is set on a per seat basis. Pricing for individuals appears to begin with a 30-day free trial to start, followed by INR 3,900 per month when billed annually.
3. SocialPort
Push Button Social Selling Technology SocialPort is the tool that streamlines sales teams and improves leads all through optimising your social selling techniques.You can easily find and share content optimized to impact the buyers journey, attract new leads, and grow key accounts.
SocialPort is an ideal combination of marketing and sales to trackYour marketing team can share content with the sales team for them to share it seamlessly. SocialPort provides integrations with the world’s best CRM platforms and leverage rFactr’s social media content creation abilities for partners and clients.SocialPort is pretty strong on analytics side too. It provides great insights about prospects.
In simple words, you can easily eliminate the manual process of content sharing and get deeper insights into where and how your content performs best.Though it’s more suitable for enterprise class but SMBs can also leverage its social selling capabilities.
Pricing:
It starts with $10 monthly for starter plan that can be upgraded to Enterprise plan at $40 per month.
4. Trapit
Engage potential buyers at scale.
Trapit is the platform for authentic employee advocacy and social selling.If your marketing and sales revolves around content marketing then Trapit is the best solution for you.With Trapit, you can capture and curate content from over 100,000+ content sources easily. Not just that, you can share this curated content with your leads to nurture the client relations.
Trapit offers content discovery, curation, and publishing to web, iPad, and social channels through its web application. The application pulls from text and video sources and offers built-in analytics and social scheduling tools.
“With Trapit, our sales reps and executives are quickly becoming effective at reaching out to customers on social media. Even the people who were inexperienced using social media for business are getting significant engagement with their posts.” – Lisa Skinner, Senior Director, Demand Generation
The best part is – You can leverage deep analytics and reporting insights on your social selling performance and tweak your strategy based on how your customers engage with your content.
Price:
You can request for a customized demo.
5. Hootsuite
From finding prospects to serving customers – All Under One Roof.
Hootsuite is designed for professionals who want to leverage their social media channels just more than pure marketing and branding.With Hootsuite’s platform, you can manage all of your social selling efforts from a single dashboard.
“Hootsuite’s revamped capabilities officially cement its enterprise status.” Read the report to better evaluate enterprise social media solutions and to see where our industry is headed.” – Forrester
Hootsuite has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave™.
Source: Hootsuite: The Forrester Wave™: Social Media Management Solutions, Q2 2017You can search social leads based on sales territory in real time with intuitive monitoring and search features.It can be integrated with CRMs so you can track your social channels as a lead source by pushing social leads directly to your CRM system to expand contact profiles.Moreover, it’s very easy to identify buying signals to know when to reach out by measuring prospects’ engagement with right content.
You can on-board new sales team members quickly and build new social selling skills with training so reps see value quickly.Hootsuite makes it very easy for your sales leadership to measure the success of individual sales reps, including their productivity and interaction history.You can connect your social activity with your web analytics software to see the tangible the impact of your social selling on your sales.
With Hootsuite you can:
● Manage multiple social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+
● Streamline team workflow with scheduling and assignment tools
● Track and monitor keywords and mentions
● Measure and analyze social media traffic with the comprehensive social analytics modules
● Invite multiple collaborators to manage social profiles securely
● Access the Hootsuite App Directory, a collection of 50+ extensions and applications that can be added to the dashboard for a customized experience
You can leverage Hootsuite’s strong analytics capabilities. Hootsuite lets you make smarter, data-driven social media marketing decisions with confidence. Hootsuite’s real-time analytics let you spot trends as they develop and drill down for insights on how your social content is performing.
Hootsuite is free for up to 3 social network accounts and has over 15 million users. It is the top app for Android to help you manage your business on social media.
Pricing:
Free Version Available. First paid plan starts at $19 per month.
Wrap Up
I am sure you all have been doing some sort of social selling by using social media channels as it’s all about building relationship with your prospects through social channels. However, social selling is more about listening to your prospects, joining the conversation at the right time and helping the prospects with right content and information. I’ve shared my thoughts on popular social selling tools and how they can help you generate more sales leads from social media.
Are you already using any social selling tool? Don’t forget to share what has been your experience? How did it improve your sales team’s performance? If not, then pick one of mentioned the social selling tools and start using it. Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.
