Today’s guest post comes from one of my favorite content marketing bloggers Tom Martin. Tom is the owner of Converse Digital and he recently authored a book called “The Invisible Sale”

What impressed me the most about Tom is his ability to communicate the shift that information is creating for how B2B organizations go to market. With the informed consumer being one of the six trends that I believe is shifting the future of sales (featured in my new book coming out soon), I believe Tom is one of the leading voices on this subject.

In this post Tom talks about how Social Selling beats Cold Calling. A subject that both he and I are passionate about.

Enjoy the read and let me know what you think. I’ll let Tom take it from here.

At a minimum, social media is the new phone. It’s both an inbound and outbound way to contact and communicate with sales prospects. Is it the best phone for all your prospects? Certainly not, but it does allow you to do more sales prospecting in a single day than you’d likely complete in a week using a standard phone. But scale is only the beginning. Social Selling delivers a host of additional benefits unattainable with traditional outbound selling techniques.

Social Selling is like cold calling, except the calls are warm and welcome.

 

When your prospect is on a social platform, they are inviting conversation. They are there to interact, to learn from others and to engage in conversations and mutually beneficial information sharing. As long as you consistently present (in the words of my friend Jay Baer) Youtility by providing helpful content that answer questions, they’ll continue to welcome your engagement.

They may even look forward to that engagement. Now when is the last time you actually wished a sales person would call you?

Social Selling helps you hear the voice of the sales prospect.

 

By engaging in online conversations and social networks, you create the opportunity to hear the voice of the prospect. And the more intimate relationship you can establish, the more loudly you’ll hear that voice. You’ll be the first to hear the pain or problem that sends a clear buying signal you can note and ultimately begin converting.

Every social media platform provides some level of platform conversation search capability. By leveraging those platform search engines, you can cast a long, wide antenna that helps you painlessly prospect for business each and every day by simply listening for prospective customer problems.

Social Selling creates a sense of attachment.

 

The single biggest benefit of social selling over traditional sales prospecting is the sense of attachment social selling can create. No one likes being interrupted by an unplanned phone call from a sales person that just wants to meet a quota.

But everyone welcomes a social friend that has a link to the a perfect piece of content, a helpful video or just a great podcast that either informs or delights the listener. Traditional selling is all about trying to close a transaction. Done well, social selling is all about creating B2B sales seduction with the goal of drawing the prospect closer to you so that you can convince them that you or your solution is the most desirable option available to them.