4 Lessons Sales Teams Can Learn From Social Selling

Saphyte Team

3 min read

Updated: April 27th, 2022

Social selling is a way to reach and sell to customers on social media. What are the important lessons sales teams should learn when it comes to this strategy?

What you should know:

• Social selling is the process of developing meaningful sales relationships with customers on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Its goal is to sustain business relationships and establish a meaningful relationship with them in the long run.
• Social selling requires sales teams to build trust, which requires time and effort. It goes beyond asking regular questions because sometimes customers themselves don’t even know what they want or need.
• Providing only relevant information should be prioritized by sales teams. This is needed to sustain their interest and helps them move forward in the buying process.
• Empathy can set you apart from the competition. By establishing empathy maps, sales teams can gain a deeper insight into their customers. 
• Training customers to provide feedback is the easiest, cheapest, and most effective way to improve customer experience. Companies should also seriously consider automating this workflow to reduce sales teams’ workloads, helping them focus on more important tasks.

What is Social Selling

Many people on social media have already come across social selling. In fact, you might even have already made a purchase because of a post on Facebook or Instagram, or at least influenced to make one, in one way or another.

Social selling is the process of developing meaningful sales relationships with customers on social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. It involves more than just selling products. The goal of social selling is to sustain business relationships by acquiring leads and customers and establishing a meaningful relationship with them in the long run.

Four Lessons Sales Teams Can Learn From Social Selling

Sales teams can learn from the following principles:

1. Building customer trust requires time and effort

Sales teams are often tempted to cut customer journeys short to reduce sales cycles. But the truth is, acquiring customer trust requires time and effort. It entails a constant, regular back-and-forth exchange of information.

Know your customers. And sometimes it goes beyond asking the usual questions such as “What do you need? What do you prefer?” Moreover, sales teams should also take note that sometimes customers themselves don’t even know what they want or need.

This necessitates providing sufficient and relevant information on the part of sales teams to fully inform customers of their options. Letting customers know about the advantages and disadvantages of your product or service offerings let them know more about what they really want.

2. Relevance should go first

When interacting with leads and customers, sales teams should prioritize sending only relevant information. Relevance is established when sales teams are able to identify customer needs and preference— and they can do this by gathering information about their customers first.

Sales teams can send a list of questions to target audiences through forms. By carefully crafting questions in the forms, sales teams are able to gather specific information about their customers which helps them personalize their interaction with said customers.

For example, knowing what type of car the customer wants, the number of family members he/she has, or even his/her monthly income lets sales teams send relevant promotional emails about cars that fit the customer profile.

Know more about forms here:

3. Empathy can elevate service

Customer empathy involves understanding your customers on a deeper level. It entails knowing who they are, what motivates them to make certain decisions, and what standard of service they expect from businesses.

Sales teams should create empathy maps— a tool that they can use to gain a deeper insight into their customers. The empathy map represents customer segments, customer personas, and customer behavior. 

An empathy mapping session might involve asking the following questions:

• What is user thinking and feeling? What could worry them? What aspires them to continue making certain decisions?
• What is the user saying and doing while using the product? How will this change when the product is being used  in public or private?
• What would their social circles (friends and family) say while the user is using the product? 
• What are user’s pain points when using the product?
• What benefits will the user gain by using the product?
• How is the product best experienced?

By determining the answers to these questions, sales teams are able to predict customer response and manage customer expectations. This elevates the service and provide a better experience for the customer.

4. Train customers to provide feedback

The best people to help sales teams improve their service are the customers themselves. That’s why gathering customer feedback is top priority. Training customers to provide feedback helps salespeople what part of their service needs to be elevated and what needs to be eliminated.

Providing feedback does not have to be an arduous task for the customer. So by placing feedback loop mechanisms in strategic parts of the sales process (ex: after purchase), customers can send useful information to sales teams without feeling aggrieved by the whole process.

You can also motivate them to provide sincere feedback by incentivizing their behavior (ex: providing instant discounts or vouchers after every feedback). Moreover, you can also automate this entire process by using a CRM software. This reduces the workload of sales teams so they can focus on the more important aspects of social selling.

Know more about workflow automation here:

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