It’s a no-brainer that people connect with other people on social media and not with logos. Before you bash me on the value of branding, hear me out. 🙂 I’m all for branding. But what I mean here is—it makes more sense to converse with another human than chatting with a logo on the screen.
Think of the way you started using a new product in the last 2-3 years. There’s a good chance you heard about it from someone on social media or saw a post about it or something to that effect. And that was probably your first touchpoint with that brand.
In other words, what you experienced was social selling.
You tend to trust someone from your favourite brand whom you see as a domain expert and then your trust and relationship with them translate into a transaction with their brand.
What social selling is not
I’m sure you have experienced this. Someone sends you a connection request on LinkedIn (or any social networking platform). The moment you accept the request, an exhausting sales pitch follows which talks about the capabilities of their company and requesting a time to get on a call.
That is neither social nor selling. That is spamming. 🙂
Here’s a fantastic toon by the Marketoonist and I’m sure you have come across these so-called social media strategies.
The worst of all—these people go on to create courses in the name of social media marketing and teach you to spam every first-degree connection you have.
And too bad, many of us pay for these courses, going by the narrative/promise of the course.
Anyways, that rant is for another day.
So, what is social selling?
Social selling is not a hundred-meter dash. It’s a marathon. Fundamentally, it is the journey of building trust with your target audience/accounts over time.
In simple terms, social selling is a process where your sales and marketing team leverages social media to:
- Share valuable content consistently
- Find and engage with potential customers in a meaningful way (read: not with an intent to sell, but to help the connection solve their problem)
It can also be in the form of answering questions, responding to comments, and more. And as part of this process, you connect with the right accounts, qualify the connections based on their engagement, fit and interest levels, translate the trust and relationships into revenue, and thereby continue to engage with them.
What’s the role of social selling in ABM?
I reached out to some of my good friends in the account-based marketing (ABM) gang and asked them to share their definition of social selling in the context of ABM.
Here are some perspectives that came up:
So the common theme that comes out is:
- Helping or being helpful
- Creating a collaborative environment
- Building relationships
In a way, you can point this back to the fundamentals of content marketing, where the idea is to teach, delight, and move your audience into taking action.
ABM is all about being hyper-focused. Being clear on the accounts you want to build sales velocity into, i.e., being able to build relationships with a specific list of target companies. For instance, it doesn’t matter even if 1000 people have liked or commented on your social media post when none of them belongs to your target accounts.
In other words, you need to build trust, relationships, and your personal brand in such a way that is relevant to your target accounts. A good example would be Rand Fishkin. Until some time ago, he represented Moz, a company known for its SEO software.
He created a lot of credible content on SEO, and the SEO community looked up to his content. And if someone had an SEO related question, they tweeted to him or reached out to him. Moz became an obvious choice when these prospects were ready to buy SEO software.
And given the fact that over 90% of B2B buyers are now active on social networking platforms like LinkedIn, there could never be a perfect time for you to start social selling. You have to initiate a dialogue with your targeted connections and try to help them genuinely, even if they are not in the buying stage right now.
Does personal branding contribute to the success of an ABM campaign?
100% – without an iota of doubt. The very fabric of social selling is based on trust and relationships built with your target audience by the individuals representing your brand.
So if you are to succeed in social selling and contribute to the ABM strategy of your organization, then you also need to have the right kind of personal branding around you.
And if you are active and strategic on social media, you tend to play a vital role in identifying the accounts to pursue, planning the conversations you may want to have with them 1:1 as well through your content posts, and building meaningful relationships.
Your content team can always back you up with their expertise by equipping you with relevant high-quality content.
LinkedIn helps you to evaluate your personal brand standing by giving you a Social Selling Index (SSI) score, which works more like your financial credit score. The higher the SSI score of an individual the higher their credibility.
Here’s how a typical SSI score looks:
The SSI score is based on the professional brand established by you, how social you are, your engagement on LinkedIn and so on. To improve your credibility, it makes sense to connect with people having an SSI score of 54 and above. Think of this to be like a movie which has an IMDB score of more than 6.
Also self evaluation of your SSI score will tell where exactly you need to improve to increase your impact on LinkedIn.
The above SSI score image tells you that there is scope for improvement in the areas of:
- Engagement – engaging with content posted by others, sharing valuable content, etc.
- Finding the right people – making more targeted connections
- Brand establishment – opportunity to make your profile more relevant and meaningful to your target audience, and more.
But—broadly speaking, there are two kinds of personal brands built around a product/company’s brand.
The first kind (which I’m not a fan of) are the kind of people whose LinkedIn walls talk only about things like:
- Hey X (my company) acquired/added another product to our family
- We hit X million dollars in revenue this year
I mean, it’s not a bad thing to do. But it’s essential to realize that your LinkedIn profile is not a branded news publishing channel. It will help if you come across as an individual that people can talk to, discuss, connect to.
Authenticity is fundamental. And always ask ‘what’s in it for your connections?’ Here’s something I had posted two months ago:
If it’s going to be just a news feed, then people can better get information going to the company pages. 🙂
Now, onto the second kind. The ones that go on to become trusted domain experts.
Who comes to your mind, the moment you talk of anything martech? Scott Brinker, right?
Who comes to your mind when someone talks of ABM?
What about when you talk of revenue marketing?
About fintech?
The names that came to your mind are the ones that have not only are domain experts but have also gone one to become the best social salespersons their organization could ask for.
What do they do? How do they exercise social selling?
- Share useful content on social (not just about their products)
- Build conversations with a relevant audience
- Have 1:1 conversions
- Build trustworthy relationships
- Be genuinely helpful in a non-salesy manner
What happens as a result of it?
The prospects that show interest in your products are far more educated and aware of how your product solves their problem and more importantly, what to expect. That makes them better-qualified leads.
Your sales team begins to trust the marketing team because the leads that come in are now much better.
Here’s an interesting case study on how personal branding contributed to ABM
SAP conducted an experiment within their organization. A few years ago, the management at SAP came up with a plan to use social selling for their sales team.
So they trained a group of their sales professionals to use LinkedIn while letting the rest of their sales team continue with their old sales techniques. The salespeople who used LinkedIn started sharing content that was of interest to their target audience and began engaging with the potential clients.
Here’s what followed.
Few months down the road, the team that established themselves as subject matter experts in the same domain as their customers delivered 32% more revenue compared to the sales folks that didn’t use social media as a sales channel.
The study also shows that the sales team at SAP were able to explore new opportunities and close more sales outside of their immediate focus area because of the personal branding efforts around social selling.
Is ABM on social free?
Yes and no. ABM is a strategy, not a piece of software. And similarly, social selling is a method.
Access to social media, which we all know, is free. But social selling requires effort, clarity of thought and approach. You need to empower the right set of people on your team to do social selling.
The only cost you have to pay is time and effort, which you will have to pay regardless of what strategy you choose anyways.
It’s very costly – if you are doing it wrong. I mean if you are spamming the life out people, you are incurring boatloads of damage to your organization/brand in the long run.
Remember, with every interaction; you are either improving or damaging your brand reputation.
But if you are diligent enough in your social selling, you are helping your ABM strategy in a big way. You save your time, money, and energy by not spending your money and effort in ten different places that are not going to give you the results.
It becomes your high-ROI approach to make your ABM strategy work.
Lastly, why social selling on LinkedIn?
It’s “the platform” to do social selling if you are into B2B. If you look at how social selling works on LinkedIn, you can identify your prospective buyers by title and start connecting with them.
About 60% of these connections tend to keep in touch even if they don’t have a need right away and start consuming and engaging with the content you post. This journey helps them get a better understanding of your company.
Mind you; social selling isn’t like social media marketing. The only thing that matters is the trust built and your relevance to their business journey.
And it is no surprise that 90% of LinkedIn’s top sellers use social selling because it helps them generate ROI.
Some tools offered by LinkedIn to enable social selling with your ABM strategy:
- Sales Navigator: The sales enablement platform makes it easier for your sales reps to monitor target accounts and incorporate vital signals updates such as an increase in headcount, mergers and acquisitions, news and announcements, etc.
- Lead Gen Forms: You can use lead gen forms to pre-populate lead gen fields, based on your prospect’s profile data, to make their life easier (primarily while registering for your product demo or signing up for a webinar). You can also use these forms to go along with your ads.
- Sponsored Content and InMail: Especially if you are trying to get your brand message out from your company page, Sponsored Content is of great help to reach your target audience. You can top it up with you using InMail as an individual to reach out to specific prospects to continue the familiarity established.
And finally, people using LinkedIn have agreed to the terms and conditions to be contacted (GDPR and CCPA regulations are taken care of).
