Marketers love buzz words.
Every so often they’ll come up with another doozy that makes them sound knowledgeable, but that in reality is just another catch phrase.
It gets banded about on the internet and before you know it, it’s wheedled its way into your vocabulary and you start using it, and worse still, believing in it.
In the B2B arena, very few sales can be linked to social media.
In reality, the only genuine way you can use the term ‘social selling’ is as part of your customer management process when you use social media as a tool to reach out to customers and interact with them.
Great sales people have learnt the value of social media as a customer touch point and have woven it into their communication strategy. Now, reaching out to them by phone, email, face-to-face meetings and social media generate better responses because you and your customers can be reached practically anywhere.
But when it comes to selling directly through social media in a B2B environment – no, it’s not going to happen in isolation.
There are plenty of ‘gurus’ out there that will try to convince you that vast viewing figures on YouTube, the number of Twitter re-tweets and likes on Facebook all indicate the power of a social selling framework. The thing is none of these actually show you your impact in the marketplace. All they indicate is that a particular video, tweet or post was popular and shared.
Social selling will not solve your sales-related issues.
The only think that will do that is getting your sales team to speak to you customers effectively and giving them all the tools they need to foster strong relationships. True selling excellence comes from these relationships and how you maintain them.