7 tips to get started with social selling

Updated on
June 30, 2021

Reading time
11 min.

There are over 750 million members on LinkedIn, and more than 55 million companies registered on the professional social network site.

Chances are, you’re on there yourself.

In fact, chances are, your next customer is on LinkedIn as well.

I’ll also bet that the next prospect you lose to a competitor is also there, as well as that competitor. And most, if not all, of your other competitors.

In fact, no longer than a few weeks back, I was doing customer interviews as part of a persona creation project, and it was astounding to find how many customers first heard of GetAccept through LinkedIn. Astounding, because all of them mentioned it.

So if you are on LinkedIn, and your customers are there, and your prospects are there, and your competitors are as well, isn’t it about time you upped your social selling game?

I hear you. Social what, now?

In this podcast, I talk to Daniel Disney, who runs the Daily Sales LinkedIn page (700 000+ followers), about how to get started on social selling.

Podcast Episode

Getting started on social selling - with Daniel Disney

Jun 18, 2021
Season 1
Episode 1

What is social selling?
Social selling, in its simplest form, is using social media to sell. When you break down the two key components of it, you have:

Social media, which are platforms like LinkedIn and other social media networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter.
Selling, which can be put into a deeper context of prospecting, qualification, communication, presenting, closing, follow up, relationship building.

In short, it's using social media to do all of those things. That is what social selling is.

How do you get started with social selling?

The first thing is to understand that your network has value, just like a database for a marketing team or a list of leads for a sales rep. And it will only have value if you fill it with the right people.

You could chuck out a ton of bland viral content and grow an audience of random contacts from around the world. A lot of “influencers” do that and have these huge networks.

But you will not convert any of your networks into customers.

And, well, it is called social selling…

If you invest time into this, your manager will eventually ask to see a return on investment.

To create a valuable network, there are two ways:

Manually add people
Build a personal brand

Manual growth is great because you dictate the process by adding your target prospects and other relevant people in the industry. However, it’s a very outbound, non-scalable approach, which should be done religiously.

Then, there’s the growth that comes to you - Inbound - which you can accomplish by building a personal brand and sharing content on a regular basis. The only trick here is to share value so that your content reaches beyond your network and attracts prospects to connect with you.

In short: quality over quantity. Your metric numero uno when it comes to social selling should always be revenue. How much revenue can you attribute to your social selling efforts?

And you’re more likely to achieve that with a small network of the right people than a large one of the wrong people.

Daniel Disney’s advice for someone just getting started:

I would recommend spending between 30 to 60 minutes a day to get started, and focus on the network growth. Add people to your network every day, put time for creating some content and engaging in other industry relevant content to get your name out there and build your brand. And then the last component of it would be messaging. Start messaging prospects, but doing it in the right way. Not spammy copy and paste sales pitch messages, but real genuine conversations.

Misconceptions about social selling

As simple as the definition of social selling is, there are still two big misconceptions about what it is … and what it’s not.

The first misconception is that social selling is not social marketing.

Of course, the lines are quite blurry.

The second important misunderstanding around social selling is its apparent limitation to prospecting.

Most sales reps see LinkedIn, or social media in general, simply as another communication channel to reach out to a prospect that doesn’t pick up the phone or reply to emails.

But use it correctly, and it becomes one of the best account management tools on the market.

If you can build your personal brand and give value on a regular basis to your network - the right network, remember from earlier? - that trumps the 3, 6, 12-month follow-up calls that most reps will have to do to build that rapport.

How does social selling impact the sales cycle?

The world is going to be more and more hybrid for everyone as a result of the pandemic and increase in tech development, sales reps included.

And social selling slots in nicely with this new hybrid model. A majority of companies will start leveraging social a lot more than they used to as meetings are virtual and time spent commuting - to the office or customer sites - diminishes drastically.

An interesting debate is looking at how to qualify social media in terms of sales activity. According to research, reps spend only 37% of their time on revenue-generating activities.

But what about the daily 30-45 recommended minutes spent on social media? Is that a revenue-generating activity or admin time?

Both, actually. The trick is to segment those activities. Spend 30 minutes before 09.00 prospecting and squeeze another 30 minutes later in the day starting conversations through personalized messages to key prospects.

How does social selling impact the buyer journey?

B2B buyers consume on average 13 pieces of content before they make a purchase decision, and over half of them consume some of that content from social media.

Social selling has a massive impact on the buyer journey because buyers now have this incredible power and knowledge; they have access to all your competitors in a few minutes through a few clicks.

So make sure to step up your game and use social selling techniques to influence buyers and changemakers.

Other social media channels

What are the best social media platforms for social selling? In this blog post, we cover mainly LinkedIn, although a lot of the principles would apply to other platforms like Twitter. Pinterest is good if you produce a lot of visual content like infographics. Instagram works well in the B2C sphere for brands. Facebook is a massive platform and really interesting from a community, user-engagement perspective.

Then there’s the boogeyman of social selling: Reddit.

However, very few companies use it for social selling/marketing because Redditors are notoriously against the commercial use of their platform.

Is social selling just for sales?

As we covered already above, social selling is a revenue-generating activity. It means you actively engage on a social media platform to find and close leads.

However, the same initial efforts of social selling - building a personal brand, growing a network, sharing valuable content - can be applied to social marketing.