What is Social Selling? A Guide for Saas Startups
Social media is now a key touchpoint in the selling and marketing landscape, way more than it was years ago. That’s why companies are integrating social selling into their strategies. Here’s how to do it.
What’s Social Selling
Defining Social Selling is hard, being it inherently similar to Social Media Marketing strategies: it’s not really a strategy but rather a technique in which marketing and sales are gathered to find and create relationships with potential customers.
It differs from pure marketing because the relationship is oriented toward small groups or single prospects with the ultimate goal of selling – while marketing goals can be multiple like awareness and engagement.
Nonetheless, both social media marketing and social selling are crucial: a target already involved in your marketing initiatives will be more likely to interact in 1-1 conversations.
This becomes especially remarkable in the contemporary Social Media scenario in which advertising is becoming more and more common – yet expensive.
Buying traffic and creating advertising campaigns is now easier than ever, you don’t even need too much time to invest and, potentially, you might not even know your ICP. (And if this line rang a bell in your head, here’s a bunch of tips on that).
At the same time, customers are becoming more aware of their role and power, and together with that, they’re demanding to be heard, seen, engaged with, and not only perceived as a target to reach with generic content.
Social Selling, ultimately, is not about chasing prospects and pushing selling.
That means, it’s not a “task” or something teams can adopt in a couple of months: it has to be in your DNA, in how you perceive your business and how you want people to feel about it.
The good news is that almost everyone knows how to do it on the marketing side: creating a brand, generating value through social media content, building a network, trust and so on.
Things get a little complicated when integrating social selling strategies with sales processes in a startup.
How to do it in a B2B Saas Startup
There are a couple of things to consider when setting your Social Selling like choosing the right social media that fits the kind of market you’re aiming for and considering budgets and goals: there are social media that are more B2C-oriented – like TikTok and Instagram– while others are more B2B friendly like Twitter and LinkedIn.
B2B SaaS startups have a huge starting advantage: bringing innovation through ground-breaking technology and ideas.
Basically, you’re like a wizard, creating something new where there was a need. This means that the way you communicate is only up to you, giving a blank space to be filled with creativity and personality. Decision-makers are people, and even if pure emotional content won’t work, providing results without being too rigid is possible.
This comes with some disadvantages too, for example, the need to explain something that hasn’t a category yet, that is very similar to something existing but not really.
Communication is crucial for a SaaS startup, and Social Selling techniques can improve your overall product/brand communication, adopting a more B2C approach.
How? We’re giving you a couple of ideas:
- Stop the pushing, it’s time to attract: this means no more jumping to DM someone right after you’ve added them on social media or chasing prospects. Start connecting with your niches and interact with them genuinely;
- Educate your audience: especially when a product is unique, solving a problem people are not aware of. Give them the resources they need;
- Build a strong company or personal brand, be memorable, and stay true to yourself – if you fake it, they can tell it;
- Give more than what you ask: be ready to support, encourage, and help your network. What goes around comes around.
These tips sound pretty basic, but to give them a real boost try applying them to your whole team (if they want to, of course – remember the last point). Creating a trusted brand, with engaging content and a community of experts working on it makes your startup way more interesting and worth the attention you need.
So great, now you have your brand and communication settled, with a kind of community starting to buzz about it. It’s time to leverage this to improve your sales and finally integrate the efforts of both your teams.
Integrating Social selling into your sale process
Both marketing and sales team know their audiences, now it’s time to blend them (because they might be different) while discovering new potential ones: that is how Social media can help. Don’t take for granted the targets you’ll get from platforms, remember that the perfect solution is data+human abilities.
Then, increase your startup footprint by merging your brand identity with your sales team’s one: this doesn’t mean that your salespeople won’t be authentic or themselves –please avoid this, and remember to stay true.
It means combining the best of both, highlighting individual skills and corporate values.
Including Social Selling, doesn’t mean stopping the Outbound and marketing strategy but integrating them to generate inbound leads focusing on a customer-centric approach on social media.
Focusing on your sales team accounts or your company page, there are a couple of best practices to always be considered:
- Make the best of profiles: fill in the fields, tell who you are and optimize your presence on social media;
- Build trust and credibility, share content and support good ideas;
- Use all your tools: connect, like, share, comment, and send DMs. It’s all about giving, also opinions and information;
- Use all your data: find and approach the right people;
- About giving, do it with a purpose and nurture your relationships.
Once you follow these basic rules, you’re ready to attract prospects and the right people into your sales funnel.
Max Böhm on LinkedIn uncovered potential
We’ve asked Max Böhm a couple of tips on how to use LinkedIn to do Social selling effectively. Here’s his answer:
LinkedIn is, for its professional nature, the best place for social interactions oriented towards sales.
Let me underline a key aspect: the social part is the most important. We need to be focused on the social part, we need to create a connection before moving into the sales playground. Otherwise, we are just selling through LinkedIn, not doing a Social selling activity.
How do we achieve this goal?
The first aspect we need to take care of to be good social sellers is our own profile. Of course, it needs to be well crafted but it’s also important to have a profile oriented towards the creation of social interactions rather than to sales.
If my headline is “exceptional salesperson, able to achieve 140% of my target every month”, what impression am I giving to my audience? Clearly, I am prioritizing the sales part.
The message we want our profile to convey is reliability, credibility and expertise. We need our audience to be willing to interact with us. And this is built through our reputation on the platform. Regularly share and create content that adds value to your target audience, such as insightful articles, industry news, and stories related to your work to establish yourself as a thought leader. Don’t forget to add a personal touch, there is no shame in sharing concerns, vulnerabilities or mistakes, they definitely help create a connection.
Furthermore, engage with your network by commenting on posts, answering questions, and participating in relevant groups to increase visibility and credibility. This is how you position yourself as a person your target audience will be happy to spend time with.
With all the above, the road to the creation of connection is paved. What’s left to do is create the very interaction.
Select your target (you can use LinkedIn’s advanced search tools to find the right people) and define a strategy to approach them.
Follow them (or save them in your Sales Navigator) to be sure you don’t miss their activity and start to get noticed by commenting on their posts or their replies to others’ posts. Your interactions shall always be aimed at creating a discussion.
Afterwards, they are ready to receive and happy to accept your connection request.
At that point, you’ll have already created a good level of intimacy allowing you to engage in a one-to-one conversation. But still, don’t sell.
You still need to give something. Share an article or a post of their interest, send them an analysis they might find insightful or even something not work-related but meaningful for them (sport, travel, music… your call). All with the scope of engaging in a conversation.
At that point, the social part can be considered done and you can move to the sales part.
Now it's your turn
Creating a Social Selling on LinkedIn is useful as the majority of your audience and network will be qualified and in target with your goals: but now comes the difficult part.
Forecasts say that personalization, automation, and AI-powered tools will be huge trends and will become pillars for both content marketing and Sales. Knowing this, how great would it be to be able to automate, and personalize your selling process while doing the social selling?
If these ideas feel good to you, it’s time to level up your Social Selling and have a quick chat with us.
