3 Steps to Driving Sales Conversations and Revenue With Social Selling
Every sales development representative (SDR) wants to achieve results. But how do you drive business and book meetings faster?
Through social selling.
Take today, for example. We won a customer completely through social selling.
Here’s how we did it — in three steps.
Step 1: Demand gen specialist creates campaign
First, our demand generation specialist created a campaign based around a virtual summit, or webinar, that discussed the topics of social selling, digital transformation and sales best practices. With more than 10,000 registrants, it was a huge success.
This event gave us the opportunity for a lot of potential conversations, and we were able to transform a lot of unknown visitors into known contacts who are now part of our database.
They became blog subscribers, read our ebooks, attended our webinars, and downloaded our assets.
What’s significant is that through consuming our content, they began to change their behavior. And because we use marketing automation, their digital fingerprints showed up in our results — which led to Step 2.
Step 2: From lead to marketing qualified lead
Second, through our marketing automation software, the behavioral score for these new contacts showed that they have enough interest, and have consumed enough content, to warrant a phone call from a sales rep.
Having access to these results means that the SDR team is able to follow up within minutes of a change in a buyer’s behavioral score.
So in our case, the SDR team booked a meeting with this potential client. They’ve booked the appointment, gone through the discovery process, and this buyer is now a sales qualified lead (SQL).
Step 3: Pass SQL’s to sales executives
The final step is to pass SQLs to the sales executives. During the discovery process, our SDRs learned a project was imminent within the next six months.
They passed this along to the sales executive team. And the team won the deal.
The social selling connection
The SDRs were able to monitor the content consumption story of this buyer — what they were and weren’t reading, what they were downloading — and were able to suggest insights and content based on the buyer’s interests. This allowed us to close the deal.
Part of the Intellectual Property (IP) transfer process is that our SDR team was able to provide feedback to marketing on ideas and concepts for digital assets — maybe they learned about objections from the customer that we could address in the future through additional content.
The alignment between sales and marketing is key to ensuring your social selling is successful.
This is a great example of how a team can get results faster because they’re opening doors to the right types of organizations through providing content insights within a social selling framework.
Guest blogger Jamie Shanks is the CEO of Sales for Life.
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