Gone are the days when buyers can be easily converted by the sales professionals using traditional selling techniques. Now the concept of social media has changed the selling and buying ways.

Social selling has replaced the old ineffective ways of selling. Social Selling basically comes into action when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects. It allows sales people to delight their prospects than interrupt their daily lives with cold calls, eventually converting them into loyal customers. Social selling influences three major stages in the sales process which includes building rapport, nurturing relationships and retaining clients.

The modern buyers of today are more empowered and demand access to complete information in order to make informed decisions. They remain happy and satisfied with the sales professionals who are willing to provide insights along the entire journey.

Implementing social selling into sales process will no longer make any sense without having a well-planned strategy. The key to successfully implement social selling is having a strategy.

Creating a social selling strategy means to make a plan which helps you to easily connect with your prospects with a motive to convert these prospects into customers. Without a social selling strategy, salespeople do not sure about gaining benefits of social selling tools.

Here are the top elements of an effective social selling strategy:

Empowering sales teams with coaching

If you are observing unqualified leads and if you are continuously losing sales opportunities, then consider coaching and training as an effective solution. The purpose of coaching and training is to impart specific skills and knowledge to the sales professionals. This includes defining the exact purpose, the right execution and motivating the sales team. Following these steps will lead to a successful social selling implementation and which in turn leads to maximized sales energy, focus, and engagement.

Keep the conversations going

In order to leverage a good networking community and to communicate with the already generated leads, you need to continue the conversation. Whether your motive is to increase the visibility, or set up a sales call, make sure that your every interaction should serve a purpose.

Communicating with someone through email, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn may confuse your customer. But it can be simplified by integrating with a CRM like Salesforce which will keep all of your lead’s history and social media information in the same record.

Go beyond basic tools

Using LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are alone not sufficient to turn your prospects. In addition to the basic tools, you should focus on adding social selling into your day-to-day activities which will prove more fruitful. Do not just train your sales team for using basic social media platforms. This will not only be considered a mistake in terms of covering all of the social selling aspects but also, it will make your sales teams much less receptive to the training that is provided to them, reducing its effectiveness.

Accepting the digital change

It does not matter with the kind of business you are running, the digital transformation has become an essential need. To ensure sustainable commercial success, embarking on a digital transformation is essential. So it is recommended to connect with your sales teams on LinkedIn and be a part of digital asset creation including blog articles or videos.

Share ideas, insights, and knowledge

Sharing the right information with your customers is of the utmost importance. Videos, photographs, websites, infographics, links to blog posts constitute a major part. Just make sure that the content you are sharing must be relevant to your followers and must be consistent with your brand and thought leadership.

If you are planning to implement a social selling strategy into your existing sales process then consider the above-discussed elements, which would definitely take to a successful social selling implementation. Social selling will help you win big if it’s implemented strategically.