Is Social Selling eliminating old school sales processes??
Well, maybe not quite. But it certainly changes the entire landscape of B2B sector and it seems like there is no going back. For the past couple of years, salespeople were moved away from the buyer’s journey and lost a lot of input. Instead, almost half of prospect’s interactions are performed with content marketing. Today, when a potential client reaches out to a company, they are already halfway through their purchasing process.
Buyers don’t believe traditional advertising any longer. Instead, they now interact with brands via blog posts, webinars, podcasts and a million other online media tools.
But despite this, somewhat obvious change that we all can see even in ourselves, many companies are still reluctant to change. Even today, so-called modern business will have an overcrowded sales department, while there are close to none marketing experts. So many CEOs and business owners would much rather just keep doing the same old thing in hope that somehow everything will go back to “normal”, as they perceive it.
However, what they don’t realize is that building up the right structure for social selling with proper tools is not only beneficial but it is also a necessity today. That is why we saw the emergence of new platforms such as Nimble Social CRM, LinkedIn Social Selling Index and more.
How to Use Social Media for Accelerated Business Growth
The primary role of social selling is not to advertise your product/service and sell it to the client. No, its goal is to establish trust in your brand. People don’t really like to be sold something on the internet, it is rather annoying. They want to believe that a company truly cares about their problems and can help solve it.
And that is exactly why it is important to establish an internal connection between sales and marketing departments. They are two sides of one coin, working towards the same goal, and alignment of marketing and sales efforts should go beyond just closed-won deals. In order to do so, you have to apply social selling along every stage of the sales cycle.
The success of your social selling strategy will largely depend on the following:
- Standing out as your own authentic personal brand;
- Showing business insights and demonstrating expertise through content marketing;
- Staying on top of trends;
- Always networking;
- Having a human conversation;
- Being proactive and agile.
And although this list seems generic and obvious, keeping on track with every point and hitting the mark will prove to be more difficult. Working on each separately and achieving all is near to impossible. But just like with anything today, there is software that can help you overcome certain challenges and stay on top of the digital environment.
Training to Become Better at Social Selling with Nimble CRM
Nimble was designed to be a social selling platform for businesses big and small. The CRM allows you to bring together all our contacts, communications, activities and sales information in a single interface. The software allows you to gain social intelligence and manage your entire online social presence. Nimble also helps you engage them in meaningful conversations, and transform them into long-term customers.
Nimble review
Probably the best aspect of Nimble that puts it against all competition is its innate simplicity. You can view and respond to tweets right in the interface, see public profiles, identify prospects and engage with them quickly.
Not to mention that as a CRM it also includes a sales pipeline right with all the deals information. Granted, its overall CRM functionality may seem sometimes a bit limited, when compared to Salesforce, for example. But when it comes to user experience and actual social selling – Nimble is number 1 platform.
We won’t be the first company who praise Nimble in the review. The platform was named best CRM four years in a row by G2 Crowd and received overwhelmingly great feedback from customers.
Nimble pricing
Currently, Nimble charges $25 per user per month or $22 if paid annually, on top of 14 days free trial. The affordability and flexibility of the platform make it a go-to choice for both SMB-type companies and Enterprise-level giants.
Nimble is also a highly scalable platform that lets you grow business at a rapid pace without any sacrifices in form of updates, upkeep, and upgrades.
Integrations
Nimble CRM can be integrated with hundreds of applications and provide relationship insights from your social sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, AngelList, Google+ and in any web browser app. Similarly to LinkedIn Social Selling Index score, Nimble CRM can give you an overview of your performance.
If you’ve been networking through LinkedIn and following company’s releases that you’ve probably heard about the importance of Social Selling Index score. It consists of 4 essential pillars:
- Establishing brand visibility;
- Finding the right contacts;
- Engaging with insights;
- Building lasting business relationships.
Creating All-Round Social Selling Solution with OMI
Nimble might be a relatively young player on the field of CRM, but it has been an innovator in the realm of interaction through social streams that now many giants of the industry are trying to catch up to.
As a Nimble partner, OMI can take your existing IT assets and build up a smart digital infrastructure centered around the social CRM with. From initial implementation to complex data integrations, our team can help you establish truly all-in-one social selling solution that will help your business succeed in the market.