Optimum Sales – Social Selling is not homogeneous for all companies
For more than 20 years that I have been implementing commercial optimization projects, one of the most frequent objections I have received from my clients’ executives has been, “My sector is different, it is very special, standard solutions do not apply to us…” and I couldn’t agree more. The sales process of a company that markets cable glands for ATEX environments is not the same as the commercial process of another company that sells chemical specialties to companies manufacturing granules, or the commercial processes of insurance companies that sell liability policies to companies in the energy sector.
Each company has its own defined business processes, which are different and unique from other companies in the same sector and from companies in other market sectors.
Each of these companies defines its commercial processes with different phases and varying intensities of action based on its value proposition.
According to this reality, the adoption of Social Selling activities by sales teams CANNOT BE THE SAME FOR ALL companies. Each company must define its specific Social Selling methodology based on its market, its customers, the sales objectives it needs to achieve, and each of its commercial processes.
At this moment, the internet is full of good tutorials explaining how to correctly interact with clients on LinkedIn, but their vision is general and with an individual focus, as it is very difficult to create tutorials that detail and corporately explain how each company should adopt Social Selling activities to increase their commercial productivity.
The current challenge for companies is to ensure that their entire sales, post-sales, and customer service teams incorporate Social Selling activities in a homogeneous and methodological manner, under a corporate strategy and in a structured way, to effectively increase their commercial productivity and, as a result, boost their sales.
To achieve the challenge of having the entire sales, post-sales, and customer service team increase their commercial effectiveness using LinkedIn, we propose that companies undertake the following activities:
Seven steps to increase commercial effectiveness with Social Selling:
- Define all your business processes with their phases and performance indicators.
- Establish how to incorporate sales activities through LinkedIn into your business processes.
- Define in detail what the sales, post-sales, and customer service teams should do on LinkedIn to execute each of the commercial processes.
- Establish corporately the content that the sales team must share in each sales process, sales moment, and sales cycle.
- Set the KPIs for commercial activity in terms of sales on LinkedIn.
- Train the sales, post-sales, and customer service team on how to “sell” on LinkedIn.
- Incorporate into the follow-up meetings with the post-sales and customer service team the review of the commercial activity carried out on LinkedIn.
Ultimately, getting a company to increase its commercial productivity and boost its sales through LinkedIn depends on the decision of its management team to implement a methodological and corporate process of Social Selling commercial action.
| David Galve | General Director www.linkedin.com/in/davidgalve |  |
