The Secret to Sell Through Social: Your Team

Selling through social has been the talk of "socialites" for years. Yet, reality is that often only one or two folks on any given business team "get" social, have a following, or believe they are actually gaining business value from it. Why is it that sales professionals who are active on LinkedIn and Twitter are so often lone wolfs inside their organization? 

I posit there a few forces are at work: an age dynamic, an ROI dynamic, and a resulting self-fulfilling cycle. 

The median age of the US workforce is 41 years old. Most sales teams are made up of folks younger and older than that, and often the more senior ranking sales team members are older than the junior ranking ones. This lays the foundation for an interesting dynamic - senior folks who are not motivated to "fix what ain't broke" and junior salespeople who haven't stood the test of time. The result is that whether a senior or a junior salesperson on a sales team is the "socialite," their peers and counterparts do not have an inherent motivation to be like them, unless ... the socialite is also the top ranking sales person.

In that case, we bring in the ROI dynamic. There is often a significant difference between the online following of a socialite and a newcomer. Even if the salesperson socialite is the top salesperson, an emulator might observe the difference of number of followers and feel overwhelmed by "all" of the things they need to do in order to match their team member in results. 

Therein lies the self-fulfilling cycle - and social selling remains an individual sport.

What's the secret to sell through social? How can the forces in play be overcome? 

I posit here that the answer is to figure out how to make social a team function. Centralize the heavy lifting to sales operations or marketing, and be able to "drop" social selling into the lap of every sales team member. 

Empower every sales person on your team with the tools to overcome any different of following between the newcomers and the socialites.

How?

Make your sales people contributors to the social engine. Give them content to share on various networks, which will result in a steady increase of followers, and the sense that "they are everywhere." Soon enough, conversations will start, leads will appear, and this new channel of selling will be become a powerful platform for the organization to share their message through their entire sales team (and not just their company pages). 

What's the next step? Well VipeCloud has developed the most robust and easy to use team social selling tool available...:)

-Adam