What a year 2024 has shown to be.
The social selling space and the markets around it have grown noisy with fierce competition for consumers’ eyes and attention.
Consumers today have more choices than ever, and your ability to remove friction from your sales process for social sellers is more crucial than ever.
Our article last year in Social Selling News highlighted the power of deepening your sales pipeline data.
Our findings, in summary, found that most companies fall short of their ability to compete in a meaningful way because the technology and systems they use to measure their social selling promoter’s behaviors track the transactional data like sales, enrollments, cancellations, and subscriptions and fail to measure accurate leading indicators(like webinars viewed, videos viewed, samples consumed, face-to-face meetings) and the predictive actions that created the leading indicator(phone calls made, text messages sent, and social media content shared).
When companies only focus on transactional data, the best outcome they can hope for is to hit the ‘benchmarks’ of our industry like their peers(who are doing the same thing).
The exciting finding was that if teams expanded their vision to measure their entire sales pipeline(using the newest third-generation technology in the referral marketing space), from the first interaction with the social seller to the sale, they would see opportunities to remove waste and optimize. From our industry benchmarks, even a 20% optimization across the sales process would double an organization’s revenue per active social seller.
With the opportunity to measure the pipeline still in mind, what strategic initiatives can a social selling organization take to make a difference in 2024?
1) Build Programs That Model Appropriate Behavior
One of the simplest ways to measure member behavior is to provide technology, such as back office systems, marketing tools, or mobile apps.
Regardless of which provider you choose to move forward with, the key is to structure your systems and tools to ‘feel like’ an experienced(and compliant) social seller sitting next to the newest person on the team, suggesting what to do next.
By having your technology prompt members with appropriate content when connecting with a contact, sharing on social media, or following up with a prospective customer, you’re modeling appropriate behavior and removing friction from the process.
By providing platforms that suggest content to members, you can harvest insights on which messaging works and which does not.
2) Turn Your Training Into Predictive Actions
Just as you would traditionally use training videos and compliance software to build relationships with your social sellers and give them a path to run on, the focus in deploying tools that model appropriate behavior is to take what your training programs would have suggested and build tools that ‘suggest’ social sellers to post the way you desire.
Let’s say you have a specific training module on how to share a story compliantly on social media, and you can create a library with examples of compliant content that other members can model their content after.
A side benefit we’ve witnessed from clients who have created these compliant social media libraries is that we’ve seen success with social sellers simply downloading the compliant videos on their devices and filming reaction videos to the compliant content to share on social networks. The benefit has been that each video is unique to the algorithms. The end content traditionally remains compliant since the member is just reacting with facial expressions to your compliant content.
3) Measure The Results With A Regular Cadence
Now that you’ve implemented platforms that give you data across your entire sales pipeline, you must create a cadence for taking action based on the data these platforms reveal.
We’ve seen the cadence with which a company reviews and adjusts its predictive data directly influences its ability to optimize and grow.
Today, you may run your business with a monthly promotion and two ‘seasons’ content around your national training events.
Once you deploy a platform to measure the entire pipeline data, the key is to insert a bi-monthly review to remove waste in your messaging sequences and social content that is feeding your core campaigns.
In the end, you’ll not only convert more sales but also know which types of content and promotions to invest in and which ones to skip, all based on your own members’ natural behaviors.
In summary, each of us as leaders has the opportunity to be extraordinary. To win in today’s market, the decision comes down to doing the actual work to provide platforms that add real value to our social sellers’ lives. We can then get accurate data on their behaviors and apply what we learn to continue to optimize and remove waste for each stakeholder involved.
One Response
Interesting read!!