Monday 18 December 2017

Social Selling Definition

Social selling definition is important in sales training as many salespeople and sales leaders are still asking “What is Social Selling and how can I do social selling so it gives me results?
Despite all the news and chatter about social selling, many companies and salespeople struggle with a social selling definition that makes sense for them to incorporate into their sales habits. When I am conducting sales training on social selling, people will approach me ask “Is this social selling thing really worth it? Or is social selling really relevant to me as an experienced sales professional?
social-selling-definition
Social selling definition

My answer on Social Selling remain the same:

If a salesperson or a business has all the sales leads and pipeline of revenue they can handle for the next year or so, and don’t believe that social media is playing a bigger part in the buyer decision process, then no, you don’t need social selling.
If on the other hand, you see the more traditional forms of selling declining and you plan on being in business for the foreseeable future then using social media as a sales channel and social selling will not be optional tools. Digital selling and social selling will become increasingly vital to a salespersons and business success. So, let’s look at what “social selling” mean.

 Social selling definition!

I believe that every salesperson should view social selling as a sales touch point embedded into every aspect of your sales habit loop. If you review your sales funnel, it can be connected back to every sales step and to every lead. Successful salespeople have learnt how to use the social networks to build credibility, be visible and relevant in every step of the buyer’s journey.
My social selling definition is as follows:
“It is about building a communication bridge between social media activity (opportunity insights, sharing ideas and perspectives) and the phone call (sales outreach) to maximise buyer interactions and minimise wasted time.”
So, Social selling concentrates on sharing focused content and providing one-to-one communication that flows backwards and forwards between the salesperson and the buyer.
The goal is for the you to form a relationship with each prospect, providing suggestions and answering questions.


What Social Selling is Not:

Firstly, Social Selling is NOT Social marketing
Social marketing is focused on generating mass awareness and is more aligned to inbound marketing (to generate sales leads) while social selling is an organised sales activity aligned to sales (to generate leads for sales). Social selling is focused on individual buyer engagement while social marketing focuses on brand engagement. Sales people involved with pumping out marketing material on social media are doing social marketing not social selling.
Social media is no longer the exclusive domain of marketers. It’s not about pushing mass messaging. It’s about personalised conversations. It’s about connecting and engaging. Social selling needs to be integrated into the very DNA of your business.
A social definition is not one that uses social media to shout at, stalk, or spam people digitally. It is not about employing the social channels to replace cold calling, sales outreach or replacing the telephone with Twitter and LinkedIn. Trying to outshout your competitors, interrupting people and blasting their inboxes or profiles with generic sales pitches are not strategies that will create trust and credibility. Also, social selling is not about having a uniformed approach to every customer interaction.
One to one connections and interactions
Successful social selling that delivers real results comes from meaningful, relevant and personalised one-to-one social conversations and interactions. It is not all about content, while content plays a vital role it is a sales tool to engage the prospect towards a useful and valuable interaction. Forward thinking sales leads and salespeople understand the power and importance of developing one-to-one connections and interactions on social media.
As part of a sales training program or sales transformation process, a social selling strategy should be focused on creating opportunities for interaction in a very personalised manner. As we enter the era of the digital native buyer (2 billion plus people on social media globally), the ability to focus on and tap into your core market(s) online will be vital to sales success.

Why Companies Embrace Social Selling

 Traditional sales tactics have diminishing returns:
90% of decision makers say that they never respond to cold outreach – (Harvard Business Review).
Buyers use social media:
75% of B2B buyers now use social media to research vendors (IDC).
Bigger deal sizes:
Buyers who use social media have larger budgets – typically 84% larger than the budgets of buyers who do not use social (IDC).
Better Sales Achievement:
Social sellers realise 66% greater sales achievement than those using traditional prospecting techniques (Sales Benchmark Index).
 Research and studies from lead sales organisations show that social selling like any great sales strategy is best applied as part of a daily sales habit. In one study from SAP, 71% of salespeople who gained sales leads using social selling and social media were active on a daily basis.
Social Selling Tip: Social selling requires sales training and a planned approach. It is advisable to learn how to leverage all the social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Split out the social selling activity into engaging a new profile of customer, accessing new markets and increasing engagement with existing customers. Learn more about social selling training.
I hope the above statistics prove that social media and social selling are not a fad or empty time filling activity. It is a channel and valuable activity for selling and growing revenue. Companies who have put formal social selling strategies in place are seeing growth in double digits for the socially skilled sales professionals. Not a bad return!

 Where how do we start social selling?

Social Selling consists of five main steps:
  1. Establishing a presence on social networks (Goals and objectives)
  2. Finding the right people (Research into Buyer Personas or Ideal Customer Profiles)
  3. Engaging with those people (Content assets, rules of engagement)
  4. Building trust (Credibility and Connecting)
  5. Measuring the impact (Conversions, Mentions, References and Leads)
To build a team of great social salespeople, they have to be trained to become personal marketers, content experts and storytellers. Also, a change in mindset that requires sales leadership to move away from constant pitching to focusing on sharing great content and building relationships and a community online. Salespeople and the brand should strive to be a “Thought Leader” in the eyes of their target audience and market.
The relationship between seller and buyer has changed. Today the buyer self-educates, does their own research and is influenced by what they read and see online. This change to “online conversations” can either be seen as a risk or as a fantastic opportunity. But only if you’re willing to have a formal social selling program with goals and objectives. Then you can jump in, interact on a personal level, start social conversations that eventually lead to warm sales meetings.


Social Selling Definition – Sales Training Company - The Bitter Business

Wednesday 13 December 2017

Sales Consultant in Dublin, Ireland

Sales Consultant in Dublin, Ireland – Sales Training Solutions -The Bitter Business



Sales Consultant in Dublin, Ireland


Sales Consultant and Sales Training based in Dublin

I work as a sales consultant and provide sales training courses to help clients grow their revenue and improve the business results. The buyers journey is changing and becoming more challenging for salespeople to engage with. Many companies need to embrace social selling, digital selling, sales transformation, social prospecting on social media and lead generation activity which speeds up customer acquisition while reducing the cost per lead or sales cycle. Also in the digitally influenced selling environment your sales process and selling tools along with your product-to-market fit need constant attention to drive business growth.
The Bitter Business can provide – Sales Training Courses, Sales Strategy Reviews, Develop Sales Playbooks, Sales-As-A-Service options, Sales Mentoring, design and implement of your sales processes, implementing sales KPI’s. We can assist you with the sales structures and sales training to increase revenuesales productivity and profitability for your company. We understand that what matters most is business results.
sales-growth
As a successful sales consultant and sales training provider, I offer a highly personalised service to my customers, establishing trust and take a highly practical approach to ensure selling success for all involved.
The Bitter Business a 100% Results Driven Sales training 
  • Personalized sales training courses
  • Speed up time to market and customer acquisition
  • Improve your sales process and results
  • Sales consultant services to boost sales
  • Optimise marketing, social selling and social media strategy
  • Implement lead generation and customer acquisition plans
  • Drive Sales and lead generation
  • Develop Sales Playbooks
  • Hands on selling and business development resource
  • Outsourced sales services and sales consultancy

Friday 8 December 2017

Matching Sales Training to the Buyer’s Journey – Sales Training Solutions -The Bitter Business

Matching sales training to the buyer’s journey is essential when designing not just your sales training courses but also as part of your digital selling strategy. Developing a deep understanding of your customer profiles and their buying journey is critical in getting a sales force to engage a company’s target audience. When done correctly, matching sales training to the buyer’s journey will improve the effectiveness of your sales strategy and dramatically increase sales growth.
sales-training
Sales Training Class
We know that social media and the digital channels provide buyers with self-education which leads to greater autonomy when making buying decisions. Which poses the question, “If most of the information they would need to make an informed decision when considering a purchase is available online, what is the role of the modern salesperson?
Sales leaders need to ask where does sales prospecting and customer acquisition tactics fit into engaging buyers in the digitally influenced sales process.

 Defining the buyer’s journey 

Defining the buyers journey is not so much about “what is it” but “HOW is it” enacted. A simple definition could be – The process a buyer goes through to become aware of, consider, evaluate, and then decide on purchasing a product or service.
In the buyer’s journey, the biggest change is in the “awareness’ and “consideration” stages. In these stages, social media now plays a bigger part than the traditional sales engagement. Is this a failure by business to address this in sales training (by providing better sales prospecting tactics) or have we just ceded a vital part of customer acquisition to the internet?

Matching sales training to the buyer’s journey

This will ensure a sales team that is skilled in using a multi-channel approach to nurturing a target set of customers throughout the buying process.  This is now essential for any business to attract buyers towards purchasing your product or service. Salespeople need to have a clear understanding of what the customer expects at each stage of the buying process. It is the responsibility of sales leadership to provide the training, coaching and guidance to help them interact with potential customers with relevant content and messaging at every stage.
There is no mystery in the digitally influenced buyers journey, the key to successfully engaging customers on their buyer’s journey is constant engagement. Digital sales transformation is being rolled out in sales training to teach salespeople how to skilfully engage with prospects throughout each stage of their journey. The goal is not just selling but to build trust and rapport between the business and the prospect. Research shows that the biggest differentiator in selling success may just be getting the prospect trust. So, if you can build credibility, usefulness and trust above your competitors in the chase to win business, it will give you the advantage when converting a prospect into a customer.

Stages in the Buyers Journey

b2b-buyers-journey
B2B Buyers journey
The buyers journey can be condensed down to a three-step process: The Awareness Stage: The buyer realises they may have a problem. Consideration Stage: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it and then the Decision Stage: The buyer chooses a solution.
Awareness.
In the Awareness stage, a buyer will identify an issue, or challenge they want to address. At this stage they decide what priority this issue or challenge should be. So, does your sales training cover off:
How would the buyer describe his or her challenges?
Where and how does the buyer educate themselves on the challenges facing others or their industry?
What would be the compelling reasons when the buyer comes to deciding whether or not this should be prioritised?
Consideration 
Next is the Consideration stage, here the buyer should have moved to having clearly defined the issue or challenge plus a commitment to dealing with it. They have self-educated, read whitepapers, interacted with companies and sales people plus will have evaluated the different options available to pursue the end goal of resolving the challenge. Again, sales training needs to address:
Which categories of solutions do buyers investigate?
Where do buyers educate themselves on the various options or solutions?
How do buyers perceive the pros and cons of each solution?
How do buyers decide which option is right for them?
Decision.
The third stage is Decision. The buyer has arrived at a decision on which solution matches their need.  Some questions the sales training material should cover:
What criteria or other considerations will a buyer use to evaluate the available offerings?
When the buyers comes to researching you (yes, they will) and your company’s offering, what do they like about what they see or read compared to the competition?
What concerns will you need to cover off on your solution?
Is there a buying committee or who else needs to be involved in the decision? For each person involved, how does their perspective on the decision differ?
What is the buying process or will the buyer have expectations around sampling/trying your solution before they purchase it?
What is the true cost of acquisition, so outside of buying your solution, do buyers need to make additional plans around implementation, IT or training?

Some sales training tips 

It is important to break down each step in your sales process and then match your sales training to the buyer’s journey. Each sales training session should focus on a step in the sales process including what sales assets, content and information to use. For a salesperson, learning the next step in the sales process should be a reward for mastering the previous one.
The buyer to supplier relationship along with how buyers engage with salespeople is changing rapidly. Your sales strategy , sales process and  sales training will have to become more dynamic, multi-channel and digitally driven, just like our customers.


Matching Sales Training to the Buyer’s Journey – Sales Training Solutions -The Bitter Business

Friday 1 December 2017

Sales Strategy Presentation – Sales Training Solutions -The Bitter Business

Information on pulling together a sales strategy presentation, a template for what to include when developing your sales strategy plan with presentation guides and insights. An effective sales strategy presentation needs to consider what are your products and where or who is your market. It also plots out how the sales effort will be directed to ensure it captures profitable growth selling to customers. A sales strategy presentation should outline market and customer coverage with detailed plans that give the best possible opportunity for the business to win more customers. In more detail, a sales strategy defines the customer segments it wants to target and the business value propositions for each segment. Then it spells out how the sales force will be structured along with a documented selling processes.
sales-strategy-presentation
So a sales strategy is a business decision on 
  1. Who are you going to sell to.
  2. What are you going to sell them.
  3. How are you going to sell to them.
  4. What is your core sales and marketing messaging.
  5. What are your sales priorities.
  6. A clear set of goals that everyone will work toward.
Effective Sales Strategies are 100 percent aligned with the overall business strategy. They outline the ideal target clients, what is your value proposition, what are your success metrics, goals, roles, processes and specific actions required to meet targets. The sales strategy presentation must be based on the business and marketing plans so they all ties in together. It needs to outline in as much detail as possible – how will the sales and marketing team will deliver on objectives and the plan to target market segments. It covers how the sales team will they support marketing activities, such as inbound leads or promotional events.
Identify the Key Aims of the Sales Strategy.
The questions it should resolve and bring clarity to include, Is it to sell more to the same customer base? or Is it about market penetration or market development?. Also which target markets you are aiming for and the time, money and resources needed. These questions should be answered by researching when, where, how and why the existing customer base buys.


Set A Clear Market Strategy.
The sales strategy presentation needs to detail out questions in the plan such as;
Grow existing accounts?
Revenue with existing products?
Revenue from new products?
New revenue with existing products?
Up and cross-selling?
Retention plan?
Acquisition plan?
Customer mix?
Product mix?
Seasonal sales cycles?
Business growth depends on acquiring new, profitable business with different customers. Plan how you will approach every new customer. Maybe to win the business of a key customer, you may offer acquisition pricing, creating a loss-leader or maybe giving the product on a trial basis. Make sure you have a plan to move prices and margins back up to a profitable level, or else live with reduced margins from these customers.
Reaching the Customer and Target Market.
  1. Which sales channels will be most effective in selling to which customers.
  2. Do you sell direct or through channels?
  3. Map out the costs of each channel against the benefits it would bring.
  4. Implement a well-functioning funnel and opportunity planning process.
Sales Plans, Forecasting and the Annual Sales Budget.
The sales strategy presentation should include a detailed breakdown of the sales to be achieved each month, by customer and by product. The sales forecasts should be based on previous sales levels, or if a new business then the sales targets should be based on the business plan. It also takes into account information about customers’ buying habits, the sales cycle and other factors such as pricing and marketing activities.
Selling Resources Required to Meet the Plan.
The sales strategy is not just about sales, it also covers what resources are required to meet the plan. So it should document topics including – What is the Training plan. The plan to improve the customer experience. What (if any) specialist support is needed. What resources will be needed to make the sales force more productive.  What will the cost be of providing admin support so sales people spend more time on selling. Then it needs to call out all the marketing and sales assets in play and what needs to be created prior to launch the sales strategy.

Sales Strategy Presentation – Measuring Sales Performance.

Finally, the sales strategy presentation will give insight into how the sales performance will be measured against the plan. Areas to be included are;
Sales forecasting accuracy.
Cost of sale analysis.
Time and money spent on different customers.
Analysis of customer segments.
Insights into the win/loss ratio.
Salesperson productivity.
Channel productivity.
Lead to conversion ratio.
Cost per customer sale.
The return on sales costs.
In the business of selling, there are many of the factors that determine success which are outside of your control. So all the more reason you need to define your goals and tactics for meeting (and exceeding) your sales target. Writing a sales strategy presentation will help you take a more control in the fast paced world of sales.
Remember, the success of the sales strategy is the engine for the success for the whole company. It may sound simplistic but without acquiring and developing profitable customers, a business will eventually fail. Regardless of the size of a business, it’s critical to ensure your sales strategy presentation is clear, purposeful, with clear goals on what you want to achieve, and how you will serve your customers.  Learn more about Sales and Social Selling Training Strategy
This article was republished with permission of The Digital Sales Institute. Original article here:  https://www.thedigitalsalesinstitute.com/sales-strategy-presentation/


Sales Strategy Presentation – Sales Training Solutions -The Bitter Business