Relate Before It’s Too Late
“To be interesting, be interested.”
Seventy four years have gone by since this sentence was first penned. But even today, these words from How To Win Friends And Influence People — a Dale Carnegie classic — ring true. Especially in the context of Social Selling.
Social Selling has been ranked as the third biggest worldwide digital trend for 2022. In India, it’s a driver for a commercial ecosystem that could have a Gross Market Value of $50 billion by 2025. It’s a cornerstone for every organization which considers online presence as an avenue of growth. The entry of Meesho — which positions itself as a Social Selling startup — and 30+ other Indian firms in this year’s Unicorn Club has underscored one key element for success: building and maintaining strong relationships with customers is a bigger prerequisite than ever.
Social Selling is a process that can be used for expressing genuine interest in the customer; the first step towards forging such a bond.
According to LinkedIn (which has a metric for quantifying Social Selling prowess), leading implementers of Social Selling create 45% more sales opportunities than the rest. They are also 51% more likely to hit their sales targets.
Social Selling, Not Social-Media Marketing/Advertising
Owing to its coinage, Social Selling is quite often conflated with social-media marketing or advertising. But, there are two key differences:
a) Social Selling looks at leveraging brand presence for increasing customer engagement and nurturing new leads. In other words, building customer relationships takes precedence over immediate revenue generation.
b) While social-media marketing and advertising have more to do with the brand presence of a firm from a macro perspective, Social Selling focuses on sales personnel making use of their company’s visibility — and other factors — to foster leads in a relatively microscopic demographic.
A company using a paid Instagram post for promoting its organic coffee is an example of social-media advertising (or marketing). If a salesperson from the same company participates in a conversation on a coffee-lover Facebook group and sparks interest in the product, it is Social Selling.
More Social, Less Selling
In the context of the workplace or otherwise, we at Dale Carnegie consider relationship-building as an indispensable trait, be it from an interpersonal or an organizational perspective. Our research has shown that building strong customer loyalty through robust Relationship Selling practices can give sales personnel a 71 per cent sales-conversion edge over competitors, even if the latter are offering the best prices possible.
These Five Cs sum up the process of relationship-building from a sales perspective:
1) Connect: Establish initial trust. Use Qualifying Questions to gauge needs, and Credibility and Agenda Statements for creating transparency regarding your operational methods.
2) Collaborate: Engage the customer by ascribing context to your informational exchanges with the help of the right Questioning Model. Use Summary Statements to show how you relate to their needs.
3) Create: Stress on the evidence at hand — facts, benefits, et al — to build on the relationship. The idea here is to move towards Trial Commitments, to get an idea of how far you are in terms of closing the deal.
4) Confirm: Listen to any objections that the customer has, and respond appropriately.
5) Commit: Ask the customer for an official deal confirmation, and use the appropriate details and resources to build towards it. Stay in touch, keep following up, and look for opportunities to expand your network through referrals.
While the nuances of Social Selling may vary depending on various situational factors, do consider these aspects as well:
a) Status quo: Have a clear-cut idea of your brand and how it ties into your intended positioning, target audience and medium of outreach.
b) Strong credentials: Reputation does precede people, especially when it comes to building trust. Get endorsements from previous professional contacts. Do your due diligence while sharing information.
c) Flowing narrative: Spark topical conversations, and keep customers apprised about pertinent developments. Engage with your audience in an organic manner, instead of bombarding them with messaging solely intended to on-board them.
d) Observations: Take cues from interactions and pivot your narrative in real time.