Why should your sales team use social media? Because it generates leads. We use LinkedIn every single day to generate leads for our sales team. A sales person can literally get on LinkedIn and generate leads all day every day.
But they have to know how to use it.
Social media is also free. Keep that mind. These are no-cost marketing tactics. In the B2B world your sales team should focus exclusively on LinkedIn. In the B2C world they should focus on Facebook and Twitter.
Social media will generate more leads and better leads than paid marketing ever could.
Sales is missing out on a goldmine of engaged, active, and sales-ready leads if they’re not using social media.
4 Ways to Get Your Sales Team to Use Social Media
1) Educate them
If they understood the power of social media and how many leads it could generate for them, they would use it. There wouldn’t be a question about it. They would all use social media because it generates so many leads.
Your sales team needs to understand this, first and foremost. The first step is education. They need to understand why this is important and how it will help them.
WIIFM.
Ultimately your sales team cares about their commissions. They want leads that turn to accounts. That’s how they make their money. So, explain to them how working on social media will create leads that turn into accounts.
2) Train them
Educating them on why social media is critical for your sales team isn’t enough. You must actually train them on exactly how to use social media to generate leads and sales.
The first part of this, obviously, is that you must know how to generate leads and sales via social media. There are a plethora of articles floating around out there that can provide you with in-depth information about how to do this. We’ve written an article that is perfect for the BtoB sales person called The Dos and Don’ts of LinkedIn Marketing.
We have had a great deal of success on LinkedIn specifically. We’ve signed up dozens of clients simply because we reached out to them directly on LinkedIn.
It isn’t hard.
How Do You Train Them?
Once you know how to generate leads and customers yourself, you can proceed to train them. I recommend having a meeting with your entire sales team where you walk them through the procedure. After the meeting–maybe a few days later–you should schedule some time with them to walk them through how to use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. on a one-on-one basis.
3) Focus on one thing
Don’t blast them with every tidbit of knowledge you have about social media marketing. Remember they’re not doing LinkedIn PPC or Facbook retargeting. That’s not their job. Their job is to directly engage people and reach out to potential clients via social media.
Spend time on just one element of social media engagement. For example, train them on how to directly message people they share a LinkedIn group with. That’s it. Train them on one thing. Focus. Focus. Focus.
4) Follow-Up and Be Consistent
A few days later follow-up with your sales team and make sure everything is going well. Make sure they’re doing it and make sure it is working.
Trust Me…
If your sales team is able to generate leads and customers on their own, you–the marketer–can focus on longterm strategy and SEO. If they generate a few leads a day via social media, you don’t have to focus on generating leads every single day.
This will help your business in the long run.
