Challenge, Solution & Benefit

 Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you will be able to:

• Describe what social selling is.
• Describe the main benefit of social selling.

 Social Selling Challenge

Your Sales Operations know that McKinsey, Gartner, LinkedIn and Salesforce forecast a need for social selling innovation to be right alongside email and calling in sales cadences for Sales Development Reps (SDR) and Account Executive's (AE).

As you may have experienced, LinkedIn is more successful than email for early stage Sales Engagement, but the main obstacle is that it’s not a system of record and it's laborious. Which results in it falling down your priority list in day-to-day processes.

As an SDR or AE, when your social selling activity isn't being tracked, how do you remember who you have engaged with? What post did you comment on? Which of your prospects have engaged with your company posts?

Your Sales department value productivity improvements for both SDRs and AEs. Sales Operations have developed a vision for your sales process and know that best practice would include: guidance, scoring and qualification.

How can Sales ensure you are actually do social selling? Then guide and track both your follow up activity and outbound social selling engagement?

So, there needs to be a method to embed efficient social selling processes in the CRM for you.

 Solution

Using LinkedIn’s APIs, your social activity data can be integrated directly into sales records and processes in Salesforce.

Salesflags’ unique Salesforce solution enables you to be guided with lead scoring, to better qualify and engage leads and contacts.

Salesflags enables you to see prospects' LinkedIn activity against your Salesforce Lead and Contact lists, with a link directly to that LinkedIn activity.

As a salesperson you are guided with follow up engagement suggestions, and a record of this outbound activity is created.

 Benefit

Your Sales Manager will measure results with Salesflags, they can expect to see a 25% reduction in sales research costs and 30% increase in conversions.

Here are some examples of what you can expect to see: 

Company Posts

• New Engagers: 100 per month  → 150 per month
• Follow Up: 5 per month → 120 per month
• Engagement from Existing Leads: 5 per month → 20 per month

Personal Posts

• New Engagers: 5 per month → 120 per month
• Follow Up: 0 per month → 20 per month
• Engagement from Existing Leads: 5 per month → 20 per month

Outbound Activity

• Existing Contacts: 1 per month → 10 per month

 Quiz

What is social selling? 

1. Posting regularly on LinkedIn.
2. Sending connection requests and In-Mails on LinkedIn.
3. Engaging with other individuals posts.
4. Building and maintaining relationships with prospects or contacts through regular posting and outbound engagement.

What is the main benefit of social selling?

1. Increasing your LinkedIn connections.
2. More and earlier touch points with prospects and contacts, with higher levels of conversion in the sales process.
3. More views on LinkedIn posts.
4. Creating more leads for the sales team.

 FAQs