Support your valuable salespeople, respect their time.

Don’t expect your salespeople to optimise social selling and accelerate sales. They can’t.

It is widely accepted that social selling drives revenue. Buyers now expect timely, relevant and personal approaches from salespeople who can help them. When executed well engagement skyrockets.

Highly effective social selling requires 2 to 3 hours of extra work each day.  

This is a big challenge.  

Today many sales and marketing leaders are dishing out LinkedIn Sales Navigator licenses, arranging some training and letting them get on with it.  We know this as we recently interviewed over 50 sales and marketing leaders who shared their experiences - read the associated whitepaper to find out what they said. As you might expect adoption is an issue.  

The heart of the matter is salespeople have been hired because of their interpersonal skills, sector knowledge, network and strong track record of closing deals.  

But now they are being asked to log in to LinkedIn and perform time consuming activities ranging from research, monitoring, messaging, writing articles, publishing, leveraging new tools and apps, more updating of CRM.

Seriously?

Let’s all be honest. This is never going to happen.  Even the most connected, digitally savvy salespeople cannot dedicate the necessary time to this even if they are inclined to.

Must they do this - Yes. Salespeople are now micro marketing channels as well as sources of value to buyers.

Should they be doing it all themselves - No.

Now I am not advocating that salespeople should ignore social selling, on the contrary they must become big advocates. They should spend the occasional ten minutes here and there reading, liking, commenting and sharing posts.  They should use LinkedIn to help prepare for initial calls with leads and leverage the In Mail and Introduction tools where possible.  However, excluding weekends where they may find more time, salespeople can maybe find 30 mins a day for social selling tasks.

So what is the solution?

They need help of course.  Salespeople can initiate more new relationships if they have support.  Yes, other people doing the laborious early-stage social tasks including one-to-one personalised email outreach for them so they can carry on doing what they are good at - selling.

With weekly briefs and regular interviews support staff can manage research, outreach, social listening, content curation, content creation, CRM updates etc.  The extra investment in this resource usually results in 50 to 100 fresh leads per month from new connections to email and website engagement, referrals and requests for calls.   These can be followed up by the salesperson or their inside sales colleague, resulting in perhaps 4 new sales opportunities per salesperson per month. @10% conversion = 4 new deals per year.

It is time for many sales and marketing leaders to rethink their approach to social selling. Consider putting in place a back-office infrastructure which will allow you to ramp up sales and increase market share.

Support your valuable salespeople, respect their time.