The concept is nothing new, but it's often overlooked when adopted online.
The not-so-secret sauce? How to transform a complete stranger into a loyal customer.
This is the first in a series of educational and informative posts with tips, tricks, and strategies to help hospitality B2B sales professionals utilize social selling and today’s technology to boost the bottom line.
Your Linkedin profile claims you have been a member since 2005 and have 1,256 connections. Sounds impressive, right?
What does that really mean and so what? Like many sales professionals, do you think it’s all been a waste of time as no real deals have come from this social media platform?
Nothing could be further from the truth if you really understood the power of combining Linkedin with social selling strategies.
Social Selling for the Hospitality Industry is About Building Relationships
If you believe building RELATIONSHIPS is still a critical part of your selling success, you’ll soon be rockin’ your pipeline like never before.
Imagine attending hundreds or mixers, networking events and speak in front of thousands of key contact in your specific area of expertise each week!
How transformative would that ability be to your sales goals and professional growth?
The bottom line is…
The largest contact list/database/number of connections in the world will do you no good unless you are able to convert them into sales.
That’s Where Social Selling Comes In
What is social selling? According to Hubspot, “Social selling is when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects. Salespeople will provide value by answering prospect questions and offering thoughtful content until the prospect is ready to buy.”
The keyword in the above description is “interact”. Through interaction, you are building a relationship, showing transparency, and putting yourself out there as an authority in your space. Not as a hands-off authority figure, but as someone who understands, cares, and knows what to do about your prospective client’s pain point.
Now you know what social selling is. Let’s talk about what it’s not.
- It is NOT boosting posts over and over with the same selling message to cold leads.
- It is NOT gathering followers for the sake of increasing your numbers.
- It is NOT constant, seemingly random, cold messages to your ideal client.
The Most Bang For Your Social Selling Buck
LinkedIn is one of the best avenues for B2B social selling. It may not be all that exciting but getting new clients and having a successful business sure is!
While social media is great at generating leads and connecting people, most business still takes place offline. That’s where we see people getting lost. Making connections is easy. Moving online connections to offline relationships are where it can get hard.
Common Mistakes of Social Selling
Here are the basic mistakes to avoid
- Not taking the conversation offline: The intimacy of an offline conversation gives you a much better perspective of understanding a prospect's pain points.
- Rush the pitch: The other mistake some people make is that they make a connection and then rush to pitch their service. This destroys trust and any possibility of having a conversation on or offline.
How are going to avoid these mistakes?
People respond to transparency and authenticity. You can’t build relationships without letting people know a little bit about who you are. When done correctly, social selling not only builds rapport, it establishes trust which leads to loyalty.
Follow our blog to learn more about social selling, including our social selling framework
In the coming weeks, be on the lookout for our social selling framework. The purpose of this series is to help people move from simply collecting connections online to building relationships offline, growing their business infinitely more than you ever thought possible.
