Social Selling: how to make sales and marketing work smarter – Customer Conquest

Social Selling is an area that requires the skills of the sales team and the marketing team. During a conference at the E-Marketing trade show, the Linkforce agency gave keys – sometimes unexpected – to implement an effective long-term strategy.

Despite the notoriety of Social Selling, not all sales and marketing teams use social media in their sales strategy. Even less wisely. To interact with prospects and customers, there are two ways on LinkedIn:

– the official company page

– the profiles of its employees

Surprisingly, Chloé Chaix, commercial manager of the Linkforce agency, explains, during a conference at the E-Marketing fair, that the business page is far from the best option. If it remains useful, especially for the employer brand, “ these are very cold, very corporate pages and the algorithm emphasizes personal profiles much more “, she explains.

It is therefore better to choose a strategic profile in the company to represent it. Two cases are obvious:

– the manager, who embodies the company but can sometimes be reluctant

– commercialin the front line with customers

It is obviously possible to have several ambassadors, each with their own expertise.

Social Selling: become an expert in personal branding

Chloé Chaix proposes a strategy on several temporalities. First, build with its ambassadors, in the medium term, their personal branding : develop their expert image through marketing. Their LinkedIn profile should already be clear. The expert cites the ten-second rule to please: “on your profile, a prospect does not spend more than ten seconds to understand what you are selling “, she warns.

Of course, banner, photo and professional contact details must be provided. ” If I see a gmail address, I wonder if the profile is serious or not “, she warns. In addition, the more the profile is optimized, the more the algorithm considers that you bring value to your network and that it is important to distribute you. “So you gain notoriety “, she continues.

Personal branding is all about creating emotion, mentioning anecdotes from his professional daily life or talking about his teams. The goal? “ That your audience gets to know you, finds you friendly, wants to talk to you. The first axis of differentiation is the human “, she believes. If giving oneself up can arouse reluctance, she wants to be reassuring: “ IDon’t be afraid to talk about it, it shows that you are authentic. You will attract customers who look like you, this is the basis of loyalty », Develops the expert.

This approach corresponds to the criteria of the platform. “ The more we talk about personal things, the more emotion we provoke, the more interactions there are, the more the algorithm finds the relevant content. So he spreads it more “, she analyzes. It is therefore interesting to alternate cold, technical content, which places you as an expert, and more emotional “added heat” content which increase the interactivity, therefore the audience. The ideal is to mix the two in the same content.

Chloé Chaix recommends adopting LinkedIn’s writing codes: very short sentences, emoticons, line breaks frequent, plenty of space between paragraphs. Do not hesitate to repeating the same keywords from post to post, in order to be identified on these themes. With the objective of making prospects aware of certain problems, then possible solutions, and lead them to think that the one proposed may suit them.

In addition to a regular publication, she advises to comment and like the publications of others, so that we see you active on the platform, and respond to comments. ” But if you liked a post, it is better to leave a comment than to share it: LinkedIn values ​​the creation of content, not the sharing that it therefore disseminates little “, emphasizes Chloé Chaix. Also avoid putting an external link in a post. This encourages users to leave LinkedIn, which will therefore not value it. If needed, put a link in the comments. Finally, do not like your own posts nor publish several times a day : “ the lifespan of a well-made post is one week “, she reveals.

Tailor-made prospecting course

At the same time, for quick results, the manager advises use growth hacking, these marketing techniques to massively increase sales. Chloé Chaix refutes the idea that email campaigns and prospecting messages on LinkedIn no longer work.

Today, on LinkedIn it is possible to send a maximum of 20 connection requests per day. For Chloé Chaix, “ this is an opportunity to put in place a smart prospecting strategy”.

Before rushing to LinkedIn, she advises to conduct an e-mailing campaign. Be careful, the more messages you send, the more they end up in spam. It therefore requires very targeted segmentation, then “scraping on LinkedIn” to automatically obtain the contact details of its targets. Recipients who have shown interest for emails (opening rate, click on links) without answering them can then be the subject of an invitation on LinkedIn.

She also suggests to rretrieve the contact details of people registered for a webinar related to his field of activity on LinkedIn and then send them a message. ” 80% of the time, the registrants did not participate. This is therefore an opportunity to propose to talk about the subject “, she explains. But be careful, you have to be more subtle than “I am an expert in the field”: rather ask what the person thought of the intervention.

Last tip: do not get discouraged if the strategy does not bear fruit immediately. “ It is not uncommon that after all this prospecting, there are no results. But that, a few months later, I have a call saying that my content is interesting and that I am asked to talk about it “, admits Chloé Chaix. It is then time to convert all the efforts made on LinkedIn.