What’s the visible part of social selling success on LinkedIn?
I’m talking about selling products and services leveraging LinkedIn.
This is different from building a personal brand and getting a lot of followers (which is not a necessary component of successful social selling, BTW).
So, back to the question: what do organizations who leverage Linkedin for sales and marketing actually do?
Well, the visible part of what they do are the things you see on Li: posts, interactions, networking.
But here is the thing: 70-90% of “social selling success” actually happens OUTSIDE of the platforms – or at least, behind the scenes.
So what’s the part that you don’t get to see?
– buyer research and trend analysis: being relevant and creating engaging content isn’t trivial.
– having defined the right ICP and following a strategy that makes sense is also necessary, otherwise, you’re just spinning wheels.
– marketing assets: apart from a few exceptions, you can’t go from a Linkedin interaction to a sales conversation in one go. Not in a scalable way…
You need other events/assets/tools… in a word, “marketing stuff” at your disposal so you can engage, prime, nurture accounts.
– sales processes: obviously you need a modern sales mech to pick up where marketing left off so you can actually score in the end.
– a solid product or service. If you want sustainable success, you need to be good at delivering on your promise as a brand and help your customers.
These are some things that make up successful social selling mechanisms.
