5 Easy Tools For Social Selling Success

Social selling is an awesome way to get things done. But, like the early days of anything on social, it’s difficult, messy, and imprecise.

A big reason for this is a lack of organizational tools. Remember trying to manage your brand’s presence on social media pre Hootsuite? It was the stuff of nightmares. You were constantly switching between tabs, hoping that you weren’t missing a valuable comment or brand mention, and every day was broken into hour-long pieces, each of which was punctuated by sitting down and writing a post.

And then, one day, a host of tools were released that made it SO MUCH EASIER.

Social selling needs that day, that one dashboard to rule them all, and, unfortunately, it hasn’t come quite yet (at least that I’m aware of.)

But several incredibly useful tools have popped up that work to focus your efforts, making it easier to identify, engage, and ultimately convert your social prospects.

5 Easy Tools For Social Selling Success

• Listen To Two Million Channels At Once With Hootesuite’s UberVU: Hootsuite’s UberVU listening tool (or something like it) should be the veritable foundation of any social selling effort. Allowing you to track keywords and conversations across more than twp million channels, UberVU makes it easier than ever to discover important discussions and important customers across the internet. From social to industry publishes, to niche blogs, UberVU helps you pinpoint potential customers and conversations at exactly the right time.

• Focus Your Prospecting Efforts With InsightPool: If you’re looking for extremely targeted prospecting, look no further than InsightPool. With tools for prospect identification within your social network, customizable lead scoring, and some seriously slick options for staying engaged, InsightPool offers the opportunity to leverage your business’ social community in a big way.

• Make The Most Of Your Network With CircleBack: You may know CircleBack as an intelligent address book that keeps your professional contacts up-to-date automatically. But, what you may not realize is that CircleBack is also a great way to leverage the connections your sales teams already have. Because CircleBack tracks titles and companies and shares those changes with you, it’s easy to see when contacts move into decision-making roles or switch companies, and when it might be a good time to ding them on social.

• Grow The Right Relationships With Nudge: Nudge makes keeping in touch with all of your social prospects a breeze. It scans whatever networks you connect it to (LinkedIn, email, Twitter, etc.), and highlights those you have the strongest relationships with and who might be worth a bit more effort. Then, based on their social posting and interactions, Nudge recommends content and conversation topics you can use to build a great relationship and close a sale.

• Deliver Brand-Appropriate Content With WittyParrot: Because every social sales conversation is different, it’s easy for a brand’s voice/message to get lost in the deluge of articles and collateral different reps are sending out. WittyParrot works to change all that by collating relevant outside articles and useful internal collateral and delivering them directly to your team. In doing so, it gives decision makers the ability to control the consistency of your message and gives your sales team access to the resources they need.

With these five tools in place, you’ll have all your bases covered. With solutions listening across social channels, giving you better insight into existing networks, and facilitating relationship building through communication and outreach, you have everything you need to close deals is an organized, impactful way. Now go sell something!

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12 Tips to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Social Selling

“You can create a business, choose a name,” Sir Richard Branson told Inc. magazine, “but unless people know about it, you’re not going to sell any products.” …Or, professional services, for that matter.

And it’s not just advertising, promotion, direct mail and website content that helps you sell. In professional services, it’s all about the quality of the people working on the front lines—their areas of expertise, their insights, and their ability to solve client problems. Your employees are your advantage.

Highlight Your Visible Experts℠ on LinkedIn

As your employees’ expertise gains greater visibility in professional circles, becoming what we call Visible Experts℠, your professional services firm benefits tremendously. Here’s how:

• Increases visibility
• Attracts new clients
• Builds and strengthens the brand
• Commands higher fees

You can help employees have greater visibility on your website by creating individual bio pages.  Showcasing their thought leadership in blog posts, white papers, etc., will help them get better results in Google searches. Another critical platform for visibility is LinkedIn.

According to our research, when prospective clients turn to social media for a professional services firm and specific expertise, 70% tune in on LinkedIn.

Your challenge is to get found on LinkedIn. You can set up your profile, your company page, and even get involved in several LinkedIn Groups. The next step is to get every professional in the firm—executives, account managers, business development specialists, consultants, and more—using LinkedIn to its best advantage.

Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

Your presence on LinkedIn begins with each employee’s personal profile. When writing or editing the profile, remember to use action words that convey a sense of what you do, how you bring value to clients, and the kinds of people you serve.

Optimize the profile for LinkedIn search by using relevant keywords in all fields, especially in the headline, summary, and interests sections.

With more people using LinkedIn like a digital business card, add LinkedIn Badges for employees on your website. And have employees add their LinkedIn Profile URL to their email signatures.

Below are the key areas of a LinkedIn profile that should be thoroughly vetted:

1) Before You Edit

Turn off the Activity Broadcast (go to Settings/Privacy Controls) while you edit and update. This way, you won’t fill up everyone’s feed with notices of all your edits and adjustments. Remember to turn Activity Broadcast back on when you are finished.

2) Headline

The headline is not simply a job title. It may be the most important 120 characters in the perfect profile. Clearly state your role, the value you bring, and the types of clients you serve.

3) Picture

Have employees use professional photographs. Don’t omit a photo either. People like to see the person they are considering hiring. Headshots are best. If some employees lack good photos, schedule a companywide photo session.

4) Contact Information

Make it easy for prospective clients who find your employees and want to know more to get in touch. Contact information should include an email address, phone number, Twitter handle, and company URL.

5) Profile URL

LinkedIn creates a default URL for each profile, but you can do better by customizing it. Maybe you’ll want to create a companywide format, such as https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathydam, which uses both the employee’s name and company name. You can use up to 30 alphanumeric characters, and you can change your URL.

6) Connections

While it’s logical to invite clients—both past and present—to connect on LinkedIn, there are other categories to consider: prospects, professional peers, and press. Remember, when you reach out to people you have not met, send a personalized invitation that explains why you wish to connect instead of using the LinkedIn template.

7) Summary

Your summary is prime real estate. So, don’t repeat content. Use those 2,000 characters wisely. Flesh out your background or showcase a more personal side of yourself. Show that you are an interesting and approachable individual. Most importantly, talk about the value you provide.

8) Experience

If you’ve worked in the same firm for years, you will want to go beyond listing career experience and jobs. LinkedIn now makes this easier. You can showcase Projects, which is an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise and range of skills.

9) Additional Information

Don’t overlook any categories that enable you to demonstrate your skills and expertise, and that includes Interests, Publications, and Honors & Awards (include certifications). You should even list the causes you care about and your volunteer work.

10) Skills and Endorsements

LinkedIn lets you list up to 50 skills. If you want prospective clients to find you based on skills, use only the skills that LinkedIn recognizes. As you begin typing, LinkedIn uses a drop-down menu to show you the skills it knows. If you want to move certain skills to the top of your list, just drag and drop. The Skills list becomes even more robust with the addition of Endorsements, which enables others to add their support.

11) Recommendations 

Our research shows that 46.4% of people rely on reputation-based referrals, so encourage your colleagues and clients to recommend you. It’s a great way to build credibility and trust.

12) Groups

As you join other professionals on LinkedIn Groups, you’ll want to make sure you have the Groups section turned on, so they appear on your profile. In addition to using Groups as a forum for starting discussions and commenting, they’re also great places to connect and introduce yourself to someone you want to invite into your Connections.

There is power in numbers. And when you and your employees all build strong LinkedIn profiles, you’ll have the foundation for an effective companywide social selling strategy.

Amplify your LinkedIn strategy and download our free guide, The LinkedIn Guide for Professional Services Executives.

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The Business Case for Social Selling [Infographic]

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This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.

If you haven't started incorporating social media into your sales process, you're not alone.According to a survey from PeopleLinx, only 31% of sellers currently use social to sell.

But a quick look at the data backing social selling indicates that the trend will only get stronger in the years to come. For instance, 79% of salespeople who actively engage on social media outperform their peers, and over half of buyers consult social channels as part of their research processes -- up from 19% in 2012.

While there's no shame in not being a social seller today, salespeople who refuse to join the party will get left behind in the near future. Need some convincing? Check out the data in the following infographic from Sales For Life. Better to join the ranks of social sellers late than never.

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Our Top 10 Social Media Marketing Posts of 2014

It’s that time of year again – time for a round up of our top social media marketing posts for the year.

2014 was full of social media marketing changes ranging from major news feed visibility drops on Facebook to the sputtering of Google+. While often cited as difficult to measure, marketers are increasingly optimistic about social media. According to a Duke University study, social media represents about 9% of marketing budgets and is expected to increase to 21% in the next 5 years.

Suffice it to say, marketing with social networks is a hot topic! Also, it’s no surprise that blog posts connected to our involvement with Social Media Marketing Examiner dominated this collection. Based almost entirely on overall popularity, these posts include coverage of the 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry report, liveblogging of the Social Media Marketing World conference and posts drawn from the SMMW14 conference eBook we created.

From Hashtags to Industry Trends to Social Selling, this group of 10 posts, each with a minimum of 1,300 social shares, has something for everyone.

Social Media Marketing: The Hashtag Test — When Is It Too Much?@NickEhrenberg
#1 is an amazing place to be and TopRank’s Nick Ehrenberg is there fair and square for writing #1 social media marketing blog post for one of the most popular marketing blogs on the internet. Of course Nick does most of his magic with our clients, but when he makes an appearance here, everyone notices.  Congratulations Nick! It is an absolute pleasure to have you on our team!

15 Women Who Rock Social Media at Top Tech Companies – Career Advice & Insights 
@leeodden
We just published this post a few days ago, so it’s remarkable that it has achieved the #2 spot for the entire year so quickly. Then again, what else would you expect from a group of high performing brand social media marketers like the women featured in this post?  Representing major technology brands like Xerox, Intel, Adobe, IBM, Dell, LinkedIn, Cisco, Motorola, Sysomos, Oracle and SAP – this group is a force of social media power to be reckoned with.

24 Social Media Tools To Boost Your Marketing Performance 
@EmilyBacheller
Do you know what marketers like more than statistics but not nearly as much as ROI? Social Media Marketing tools! Luckily, Ian Cleary was on hand at Social Media Marketing World to share the product of his obsession with social media tools. And better for us, TopRank’s Emily Bacheller was there to liveblog his presentation. Guess which tools can have the biggest impact on your marketing results? Click the link!

25 Social Media Marketing Experts You Need to Know, According to LinkedIn
@leeodden
Did you know? 1 out of every 3 professionals on the planet Earth is on LinkedIn. In the LinkedIn Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn a list of 25 social media marketers is included as experts you should know. We called that list out in this post because, well, LinkedIn is a client and many of my professional friends are on the list.

New LinkedIn Profile Features: 4 Tips to Optimize Your Presence 
@eprokop1 (Evan Prokop)
Being the optimizer that he is, Evan looked at our blog analytics data and noticed that LinkedIn posts were quite popular and under-represented topically. So he took that opportunity to write this how-to post about optimizing new LinkedIn profile features and BAM it became one of the most popular social media marketing posts of the year. See how that works?

5 LinkedIn Marketing Tips to Optimize Your Social Media Success 
@leeodden
I’m no stranger to LinkedIn or repurposing content and this is the post where those worlds collided in a perfect storm of social media satisfaction. Our agency TopRank Marketing created a conference eBook for Social Media Marketing World and pulled this prime collection of LinkedIn marketing tips from contributors that include Martin Jones, Jill Rowley, Connie Bensen, Viveka von Rosen, and Neal Shaffer.

4 Essential Social Media Marketing Trends for 2014 
@eprokop1 (Evan Prokop)
Liveblogging is an incredible opportunity to create useful content and Evan Prokop was on the case at Social Media Marketing World to document not one, but 4 essential social media marketing trends from Mike Stelzner. The result? A very popular post with over 1,700 social shares.

5 Social Selling Tactics to Attract, Engage & Convert More Customers 
@leeodden
Social Selling isn’t a new topic for us but this year it really gained momentum through an explosion of consultants, books, events and online content. This post outlines 5 steps that range from creating a social hub to tactics for engagement to advice on tapping the collective wisdom of your social sales crowd.

2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report 
@leeodden
Did you know? 92% of marketers say social media is important for their business. Another interesting stat from this 50 page report published by Social Media Examiner is that only 11% of B2B marketers and 6% of B2C marketers find blogging most important while 68% say they plan on increasing their use of blogging in the coming year. Everyone likes social media stats and I’m sure you do too, so check out the report.

Organic Facebook Marketing Tips From the Pros 
@leeodden
Another highly popular post that was repurposed from the 2014 Social Media Marketing World conference eBook included advice from a “Who’s Who” of Facebook marketing: Andrea Vahl, Mari Smith, Amy Porterfield, and Dennis Yu. What did they say? You’ll have to click the link to find out.

What were some of your favorite social media marketing posts from 2014? Any predictions for next year? Google+ anyone? What about Instagram and SnapChat?

Top photo: Shutterstock

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