59% of a salesperson's time is not spent on selling*.
Information gathering on prospects, administrative tasks, sales tracking…
So, how can you save your sales representatives time and optimize their performance?
*Sales Insights Lab Study
KEY #1: Equip yourself with the right tools
You are probably familiar with the different stages of a sales cycle:
These are all steps that a salesperson must master! But they are not alone in this process... Thanks to the advent of marketing automation and Sales Enablement, many solutions have emerged to make life easier for your sales teams!
These different tools mainly function during the lead generation and prospecting phase, a step that does not represent the real added value of your sales representatives.
Chez Kestio, nos équipes utilisent au quotidien différents outils d’automatisation tels que :
Sparklane: Ultra-targeted lead generation!
Dataananas: sending personalized emails.
Ringover: Optimize your sales team's prospecting sessions.
With over 2,000 marketing automation solutions available in Europe in 2022, you're sure to find a tool that addresses your specific challenges!
Implementing a CRM (Customer Relation Management) strategy is a valuable asset for companies.
Between lead generation, return on investment optimization and increased turnover... It offers numerous opportunities that make it an essential element to ensure the good development of companies and best support for sales teams.
Improve your sales performance
A CRM strategy can help significantly improve the productivity of your sales representatives.
This is possible, in particular, through the use of software such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or Zoho CRM, etc. These provide, for example, the ability to work offline or via a mobile application.
The fully customizable nature of these CRM tools allows sales teams to save time by automating certain processes, such as data entry, allowing them to focus on their expertise: SALES!
How to choose your CRM software?
By taking these three criteria into account, you will be able to choose the best tool for your customer portfolio management strategy.
Et si cela reste toujours flou pour vous, sachez que Kestio peut vous aider à choisir la solution la plus pertinente pour vous.
Beyond the "recommendation" effect, developing and nurturing a customer community has many advantages, including being a real lever for innovation and effectively supplementing customer service. Some sectors, such as fashion and mass retail, have not been mistaken.
What if software vendors decided to take inspiration from it to boost their business?
Here is everything your customer community could do for you.
1. Make people want to choose your solution
From TripAdvisor to Trust Pilot, it is difficult today to choose a product or make a purchase without first putting the brand through the wringer of comparison sites and customer reviews! The software world is obviously no exception, with platforms like appvizer, to name just one.
The difficulty is that you have no control over what happens on these platforms...
Creating and nurturing your own customer community means offering your biggest fans a space to express how much they appreciate you.
And that's already pretty good. At least, judging by the results of a clothing brand like ASOS, which, for example, observed a 45% increase in spontaneous mentions of its brand among the "ASOS Insiders"...
2. Ensure the success of your upcoming modules.
Another good aspect of customer communities is that they are a true goldmine of inspiration and good ideas to fuel internal innovation and guide R&D investments.
The toy brand LEGO, for example, has developed a strategy via social networks and its LEGO Ideas platform to identify its future bestsellers. The selection of new models to be marketed is carried out through a consultative and collaborative process, which notably led to the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" model!
Others, like Decathlon, go even further in co-designing their products with their community of customers, establishing direct collaboration between development teams and users, who sometimes offer very specific ideas on how to solve a technical problem or an unsatisfactory use case.
Software vendors are generally comfortable in this area, as developers are often highly involved with users to resolve bugs or limitations and take note of change requests.
3. Test and improve your new applications.
Similarly, Société Générale has chosen to rely on its customers to create "le LAB" a community of beta testers that allows it to optimize the operation of its mobile application.
As soon as the bank wants to integrate a new feature into the app, the developers first put it online in the LAB. Users can then try it out in preview and give their feedback.
They can also give their opinion on the design, color, etc. The goal is to develop the solution that most closely matches the needs and expectations of its customers.
4. Nurture interest in your solution
As we've already mentioned, customer communities are also excellent channels for visibility, awareness, credibility, and influence!
By involving their customers in the design of their products, LEGO and Decathlon not only ensure that they "meet their audience" upon release, but they also create a real teasing of the future product and thus generate a strong anticipation effect around it!
Without going that far, sometimes it's enough to reward your best customers for their loyalty or their frequent use of your solution to create a buzz around your brand: this is what the start-up Tilkee perfectly achieved by sending its "Black Card" toits 100 best customers, which was well relayed on social networks.
5. Effectively support your users
Finally, customer communities are a real asset in terms of Customer Care. User forums sometimes prove to be more responsive than support teams, and your dedicated users are the best Happiness Managers!
The most active mutual aid communities can come from unexpected sectors: every day, for example, more than a hundred questions receive an average of four answers from enthusiasts on the online fishing equipment sales site pecheurs.com!
The community support chats of SNCF (French National Railway Company) and BlaBlaCar are run by experienced users, with a proven positive impact on the conversion rates observed on their sites!
One of our clients, a manufacturer of photovoltaic panels, found that their customer community on WhatsApp became their best support system and achieved immediate success with their products' installer craftsmen: the speed and relevance of the answers provided were unmatched in resolving their clients' technical difficulties. This allowed them to quickly identify areas for product improvement.
These approaches can be widely applied in the software publishing sector and contribute to your growth.
In all cases, the success of a customer community should not be left to chance and relies on compliance with a few good practices and key steps:
Define a goal for your community: what should it contribute (to my company and its members)?
Define a target (What type of customers? How to identify them? How to "recruit" them? How to "retain" them?)
Choosing the channel: social networks, specialized platform...? (Which channel will be the most relevant to engage this community? Ensuring that its members autonomously keep it active?)
Reward and recognize the most active customers (points/benefits systems, gift vouchers, highlighting, rewards...)
Establish an effective internal organization to animate the community and use the feedback generated (improvement of products / services, customer relations)
The examples cited in this article are largely inspired by these sources:
To go further and learn more about targeting and building a customer file, you can also watch our webinar:
Even professions that traditionally don't engage in prospecting, such as lawyers and notaries, are increasingly seeking ways to attract new clients!
However, there are ways to optimize your actions and attract customers without (too much) effort!
To know, to like, to trust!
Being known, being appreciated, and having a capital of trust, these are the three indicators that must be greenlit to successfully conclude a sales conversation. Also, if you want to minimize your prospecting efforts, you will primarily seek to engage in a commercial approach with a target that already trusts you, that already knows you, or with whom you will be recommended.
To achieve this, you need to rely on your networks, whether online or offline. If your goal is to find new clients in a relatively short time while minimizing effort, it's best to start with those who already appreciate you!
8 tips to attract your customers effortlessly
1.Take stock! List the people you are or have been in contact with, classify them by relationship history, and identify those who could become clients. Don't forget that you may have relationships in your network, even close ones (friends, sports, cultural contexts, etc.) who may never have considered what you can offer them professionally, simply because that was not the context of your meeting. And yet...
2.Adopt an attraction approach: this involves meeting your contact to get to know them better, making contact, warming up the relationship, and sharing information. Be interesting before being interested!
3.Look for connectors, those who have a culture of networking and connecting people. Because getting in touch with them also allows you to access their network. They are quite easy to identify: just look at how they came to you. These connectors are relationship pointers, they like it, they function like "hubs"!
4.Multiply contacts. At each meeting you have, ask for a recommendation, 1 or 2 names that you can contact on behalf of your contact! If you have 10 lunches, you potentially end up with twenty names!
5.Restart an impactful approach, that is, think about what you can give in return, seek reciprocity. Being too self-centered is counterproductive and would attack the bond of trust.
6.Set yourself some benchmarks not of results but of means. For example, the time spent per week, the number of contacts, lunches...
7.Prepare the ingredients for success! Know how to pitch your product or service offer, prepare a brochure, a website or at least a business card. Be ready!
8.Adopt a follow-up approach: even if it doesn't lead to an immediate sale, maintain a relationship of trust.
Online: volume with less effort
With digital technology, the relationship between effort and efficiency is changing significantly: social networks, especially LinkedIn (see our article '4 tips to increase sales with social selling'), the professional network, allow your actions to be reproduced infinitely and without additional cost. In the real world, you can do at best 200, 220 lunches per year. With digital, there is no limit.
We can see it clearly: while attracting customers effortlessly isn't possible, doing it at a lower cost is still feasible if you do it the right way!
The advent of new technologies has enabled the evolution of business in many areas, especially in communication and prospecting. To optimize business activity, it is essential to integrate these new prospecting methods into your strategy. Find out how with this webinar:
A boon for a company!
The idea is to be present on social media by sharing relevant content that sparks the interest of users as they search for information. This approach, driven by the company, does not mix personal and professional content, as we saw in the first post on the subject, "4 tips to increase sales with social selling." It is implemented and managed by marketing and is part of the perspective of generating inbound leads. To exist on social networks, there are three levels of actions that correspond to three levels of involvement:
– Reacting to other users' posts (likes, comments, shares, etc.); consumes few resources, generates few results, and maintains activity.
– Choosing curation, a practice that involves selecting, editing, and sharing the most relevant content on the internet for a given query or topic; consumes slightly more resources, provides visibility, but does not contribute to building an identity.
– Producing your own content: This consumes a lot of resources and requires a strategy, but it delivers significant results.
This third point deserves more attention. To succeed, there are indeed a few rules to follow:
1 > Be interesting
To attract attention and be perceived as a valuable resource providing useful content, it's better to talk about what interests the other person than about oneself, therefore addressing the topics on which the company is an expert from the point of view of the potential client. In other words, prefer "How office furniture improves productivity" to "We sell offices at the best value for money."
2 > Know your target
To effectively target your audience, you need to know them. We will discuss "personas" or "buyer personas." Ideally, marketing and sales departments should work together to describe these targets by addressing the following topics: Their profiles, their career paths, their responsibilities, their objectives, their challenges, their stresses, their constraints, the projects they are working on, their decision-making processes, their types of beliefs, their constraints, what is important to them... It is understood that we are describing here a typical profile that does not exist per se, a bit like the "average person" in statistics. However, by specifying these points, we will better visualize the target, the collaborators will have a shared representation, and we will become more audible thanks to adapted content.
We can do this work for each type of clientele.
3 > List the topics
It is then necessary to work on the editorial line, to find the points of convergence (form and substance) between the company's offer and the expectations of the targeted internet users. At this stage, it is interesting to organize a brainstorming session between employees, produce as many content themes as possible on post-it notes, with a very broad exploratory work, then make a synthesis by asking each person for the 10 most important ones. This shortlist becomes the backbone of the editorial line. An exercise to be repeated every 6 months, which must mix topical themes and cold subjects. From the chosen themes, all that remains is to come up with article topics and organize the production.
4 > Write the content
For writing, two solutions are possible.
Either the workload is shared among several writers, but not everyone is comfortable with writing. In this case, it is still necessary to designate an editorial manager to validate the articles and ensure a certain consistency.
Soit un rédacteur interne ou externe qui pourra se charger d’interviewer les experts pour produire ensuite le contenu. Cette solution a été retenue par Kestio. Il s’agit ensuite de varier les formats pour apporter de la diversité et intéresser encore plus largement sa cible avec des formats longs (articles…), des témoignages, des infographies…
This is how a company, a startup or even an SME, can initiate quality communication with its potential targets and then trigger commercial conversations.
Eventually, digital tools will allow us to verify the effectiveness of what is produced and ensure proper alignment between the output and the concerns of web users. We will be able to measure the impact and audience by looking at interactions with shares, comments, and then refine as needed.
To develop your company's communication tools, consider webinars! Webinars highlight attractive content and promote the company's activities. However, they require some rules: in this webinar, learn how to organize a webinar that generates more participants and leads.
Le Social Selling c’est donc une vitrine digitale visible par son audience directe et indirecte.
Pour créer et développer ces liens, il faut une approche long terme, structurée, active, organisée et tournée vers la cible et ses enjeux.
Et respecter les étapes-clés.
4 étapes incontournables pour un Social Selling gagnant
1 : Soigner son profil
Le profil c’est la vitrine qui expose la valeur ajoutée que l’on propose. Il mêle du contenu personnel (mais d’un point de vue professionnel) avec celui de l’entreprise (un exemple ici :www.linkedin.com/in/dominiqueseguin ).
L’objectif est d’être crédible et attractif : il est nécessaire de soigner cette présentation et de faire attention à la photo, à la présentation des expériences, des motivations. Le ton doit être sincère, le contenu complet et pertinent, authentique, chaque information devant être utile, intéressante afin de donner envie d’entrer en contact. Sur la forme il faut partir des besoins du visiteur. Par exemple préférer «J’aide les commerciaux à transformer les leads » à « je forme aux techniques de ventes », ou encore « j’aide les dirigeants à analyser leurs chiffres et prendre des décisions » sera plus percutant que « je suis contrôleur de gestion ».
Le profil, c’est une vitrine statique qui doit donner envie d’entrer dans la boutique et qui est tournée bénéfices pour son audience !
2 : Développer ses contacts
Deuxième étape : connecter tout l’écosystème, de près ou de loin (ce qui se fera d’autant plus facilement que le profil est de qualité) et déployer à partir de ce point central un maximum de connexions, comme des ronds dans l’eau.
Il faut chercher partout dans son réseau, ses relations professionnelles, amicales, ses partenaires, ses fournisseurs, ses rencontres etc. Dans l’absolu il n’y a pas de limites, hormis celles imposées par les plateformes des réseaux sociaux.
Développer ses contacts réclame une logique de quantité : à partir du moment ou on dispose d’un point d’entrée, on connecte.
3 : Passer du statique au dynamique
Il s’agit d’être actif, d’animer son réseau en adoptant une stratégie de contenu que l’on va diffuser auprès de son audience, soit en autoproduction soit en curation (comme relayer une information vue sur le web). Interagir sera aussi important, c’est-à-dire commenter et partager des contenus de votre propre réseau.
Pour tout ça mieux vaut avoir sinon une ligne éditoriale du moins un axe cohérent, comme par exemple partager des éléments intéressants qui vont aider vos contacts à atteindre leurs propres objectifs, grâce à votre production.
Le Social Selling est un outil de communication qui permet d’être présent dans l’esprit de vos contacts et des contacts de vos contacts sans avoir besoin d’être présent ou de gérer un planning d’appels téléphoniques. Soyez inspirant autant qu’inspiré, développez votre présence en tant que personne plutôt qu’en tant que marque.
4 : Entrer dans une logique de conversation commerciale
On peut alors passer au « to trust », entrer dans une logique « one to one ».
Après avoir créé le « to like » et le « to know », les conditions sont réunies pour générer des conversations commerciales tout en restant totalement et sincèrement décentré sur son interlocuteur c’est-à-dire, comme on l’a vu, en restant en mode intéressant plutôt qu’intéressé.
Passer à la vitesse supérieure !
Le Social Selling est un outil puissant qui permet de communiquer du « one to many » au « one to one », autrement dit qui rapproche respectivement le marketing et le commercial.
Knowing how to reposition your company's activity can be vital in a difficult situation. Discover the different stages of this process in this webinar:
One might think that Social Selling is naturally becoming essential in the marketing and sales landscape… However, this is far from being obvious.
Indeed, the culture that prevails within many companies is opposed to the very philosophy of social networks. Discover the contradictory injunctions of Social Selling and the fundamental transformation required to use this formidable lever.
1.Social Selling & Social Media: the « globalized and open one-to-one »
The infinite possibilities offered by social networks, which are « globalized » and « open », are based on new communication rules and a certain number of « values » conveyed by these new media. Which ones?
First, "trust": each member can publicly speak and widely disseminate what they want to their contacts. The company, its organization, and internal rules must therefore be based on the same principle! Have confidence in the ability of individuals to demonstrate responsibility in their speaking, the exchanges they make in their own name and on behalf of the company. It's impossible to imagine motivating a salesperson to speak to THEIR network while controlling what they're going to say!
Next, individual initiative: on social networks, everyone is a media outlet, and anyone can take the initiative, both in developing their network and in speaking out. And this is regardless of their function and level of responsibility in the organization. It is better, as Orange does for example, to offer its employees a guide to Social Media best practices giving them reference points and very concrete practical advice, to enable them to make the most of social networks without harming their image or that of the company.2 Accompany rather than control, therefore.
Finally, "social" sharing: social networks are based on a collaborative approach and on the notion of "community." Asking a question, requesting a service / help on a subject, sharing an experience, getting in touch with people around the same subjects of interest, gathering contributions around a cause... so many powerful actions that social networks make possible immediately, but whose results are not always directly measurable in immediate commercial results. Using social networks from a business perspective therefore requires setting up new indicators to measure this commercial performance, which were previously in the marketing domain.
2.Social Selling and organization: "Hierarchy and silos" versus "initiative and collaboration"
And it is clear that the organization that prevails today in many companies and the current functioning of marketing and sales departmentsis actually quite radically opposed to these principles:
90% of companies are organized according to models defined in the 60s: a hierarchical organization, marked by a logic based on "command and control": clearly defined responsibilities, actions to be carried out, and control measures to ensure these actions are properly executed. In this context, it is difficult for managers to imagine their sales representatives speaking autonomously on their behalf and on behalf of the company... It is also difficult for the sales representatives themselves to take initiative without fearing potential negative feedback from their management or the marketing department regarding their social media activity!
Within this type of organization, marketing departments have often tended, until now, to apply their old operating models to the newsocialmedia: marketing initiates campaigns, produces content, and positions itself as the guarantor of message integrity. Sales representatives are then "used" as simple "channels" or relays for disseminating the brand's messages, conceived upstream. However, we know that this doesn't work! When a sales representative's page relays the same content as the Corporate page word for word, their network quickly notices and simply turns away from them.
Similarly, in terms of sales management, the last two decades have been marked bythe implementation of measurement processes designed to optimize overall performance and ensure that the activities carried out by each person corresponded to what had been defined. The new measurement indicators specific to social networks are therefore confronted with the measurement of the effectiveness of commercial processes as it has been conceived until now... and this can bother some sales managers, especially when the salesperson spends a significant amount of time on it: building their profile, making it attractive, developing their network, identifying and following up on interesting prospects, it takes time!
It is therefore urgent to change the paradigm as Social Selling invites us to do! How? Why not start by trusting your sales representatives! For example, by implementing the necessary measures to train your teams and support them; or by supporting positive individual initiatives and by disseminating good practices internally...in short, by giving them the means to appropriately adopt social networks.
To develop your company's communication tools, consider webinars! Webinars highlight attractive content and promote the company's activities. However, they require some rules: in this webinar, learn how to organize a webinar that generates more participants and leads.
Sources:
: Source Invox
: Social Media Guidelines, Orange, http://www.orange.com/sirius/smg/FR_Guides_Medias_Sociaux.pdf
Voici donc le second article à destination des startupers né de cette jeune collaboration, proposé cette fois-ci par Fabien COMTET – fondateur et dirigeant de KESTIO – sur le thème “5 conseils de commerciaux pour vendre votre projet”.
Les commerciaux chevronnés le savent mieux que quiconque : pour vendre votre projet (ou vos produits et services) et vous différencier face à vos concurrents, vous devez activer le “cerveau droit” de vos interlocuteurs (siège des émotions) plutôt que le gauche (le cerveau dit “rationnel”). Le corollaire, c’est que vous devez être à l’écoute de leurs attentes et de leur ressenti, comprendre ce qui fait écho chez vos prospects, clients ou partenaires potentiels… et établir rapidement une relation de collaboration avec eux.
Exit l’argumentaire produit, donc, et place à l’écoute active et à la co-construction !
1. Dépassez la conviction, et suscitez l’émotion 2. Arrêtez de parler : questionnez et écoutez 3. Adaptez le ton à votre interlocuteur 4. Démarquez-vous pour retenir l’attention 5. Misez sur la co-construction
Also read other articles related to this topic published on our blog:
Enfin, pour aller plus loin sur le sujet de la performance commerciale, téléchargez notre livre blanc “Homos Sapiens Commercialis” dédié aux méthodes commerciales et aux opportunités à l’ère du Digital :
Why not simply step back and take a fresh look at your sales activity? In the current environment, with the social tools available, do all salespeople necessarily need to be in the field? Aren't the costs of visits prohibitive? Can't we make the strategic choice of a sedentary sales force? Asking the question is already answering it. A choice already made by many sales managers. Moreover, the real question is rather about "how?"
In this approach, we're not talking about an offshore call center or an inexperienced hotline. We're talking about real, experienced sales representatives, trained in remote sales techniques, who know the product inside and out and use high-performance tracking tools.
We're talking about men and women with solid field experience, bringing real added value, knowing how to understand the client's needs, provide answers, and make a difference.
Of course, there are many upstream questions, as it is not only a matter of creating a new team with different methods, but also of redefining the distribution of roles between field and office-based sales representatives, and even with the marketing team:
Do inside sales representatives support field sales representatives or work independently?
Are they focused on the prospect base or the customer base?
Are they only doing account monitoring or also sales?
Are the current tools suitable?
How to determine team size?
How to position it?
The manager...?
It's to prepare the ground well and to respond pragmatically to all these questions that we support sales managers in this upstream phase of definition and construction. Initially, to estimate the ROI of such a project, then to define its operational dimensions and, sometimes, to ensure its implementation.
Also, if the equation seems complex, don't hesitate to reconsider your assumptions about salespeople: being present in the office can make them extremely profitable!
To discover more about using specialized and adapted tools to adopt, check out this webinar on optimizing the performance of your commercial asset:
Are you tired of your sales representatives ignoring the essential relational techniques for their success?
To enable you to raise your teams' awareness of good relationship practices, the importance of active listening, and effective questioning techniques, we have created this infographic for you, presenting "the 6 deadly sins of listening in a sales meeting" and offering ways to remedy them!
Share with your sales teams, post near the coffee machine, and apply liberally!
Was this article helpful to you? Share it! It's the best way to thank us 🙂
Is optimization your watchword? Then discover in this webinar how to maximize the performance of your sales representatives by saving them 50% of their time:
KESTIO is a consulting and training company specializing in Commercial Performance and Customer Experience.
For over 10 years, we have been helping companies and their leaders – from SMEs to large corporations – improve their profitability by activating all levers of customer acquisition and loyalty.
Indeed, with millions of registered members (LinkedIn announced that it had exceeded 11 million members in France at the beginning of 2016 [i], thus surpassing Viadeo), it is possible to find your targets and engage with them. How do you conduct your prospecting on social networks? Do you have a strategy in place? If you are a sales manager, how do you guide your teams to help them use this platform? To succeed in digital prospecting, it is essential to have a structured approach. Discover in this article (the first episode in our series on "social selling") some "keys" to transforming a simple contact into a future client.
1- To prospect with LinkedIn, start by targeting your contacts and stop chasing after connections
Unfortunately, this is a reality, and too many salespeople are adding people they don't know on LinkedIn left and right. What do you hope to achieve by doing this? The law of numbers! Out of 100 people added, one of them will eventually do business with us! Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. Worse, frantically adding contacts and competing to be "the one with the most connections" damages your image with your contacts. A salesperson from an unknown company who has 5,000 contacts? These are all signs of heavy-handed prospecting and the promise of unwanted advertising messages. Help!
Adding contacts on the fly, or conducting a basic search and adding people who seem relevant in a few seconds, or "look good," is not a strategy. What happens after this untargeted addition? Generally, nothing. Sending an advertising message right away doesn't work either. In reality, we are bordering on SPAM, the opposite of an engaging conversational approach. Indeed, approving a contact request does not signify an immediate need for a product/service. Some people are looking for help, others are observing, and some are in an advanced purchasing process.
To send the right message from the start, you need to find a communication angle that initiates the relationship and helps contacts build their thinking, regardless of their level of knowledge of your company. You have to support them whatever stage of their research they are at, without rushing them.
We understand it well here, the challenge is not to have one more contact, it is to have one more reader who considers you as an asset for his reflection, one more person to whom you can provide an answer.
In practice:
You shouldn't just randomly connect on social networks. Whenever possible, you should favor a mutual contact who can make the introduction.
Always write a message explaining why you want to be connected with someone. There is nothing worse than an unmotivated request, which has no basis.
2- Get approval for a contact request on LinkedIn
As we have just seen, you can use networking through a mutual contact, who introduces you to a person, or choose to directly contact another user. In either case, use the InMail function, which are internal LinkedIn messages.
In practice:
" Pitch » your request so that your contact sees the benefit of accepting it for them ;
Ask yourself the right questions before writing a message: what problems might this person encounter, what could help them produce more value for their own clients, help them in their daily life...
The contact request is accepted? The work is not finished. On the contrary! Once "connected" via your network or via an InMail, you must not contact the newly added person intrusively.
Build your relationship steadily by helping your new contact and providing them with value,focused on their objectives, not yours.
Offer them a white paper, a customer testimonial, or a relevant article. This is where marketing managers have a key role to play alongside sales representatives, by providing well-thought-out communication materials so that the contacts gleaned on LinkedIn enter the engagement funnel in the best possible way.
Build your credibility and legitimacy, and be seen as an expert. Be patient. You are often in it for the long haul here, not using a pushy approach like traditional outbound prospecting to secure a meeting in minutes. A well-selected LinkedIn contact can bring you business several weeks or months after the first interaction.
Remember, it's far more effective to have fewer contacts with a high conversion rate by building a quality online conversation, rather than sending out dozens of invitations that yield no results!
Discover soon on this blog the following episodes of our series on social selling, which will teach you:
What are LinkedIn groups (really) for and how to run yours
How to develop a sales approach that is "interesting, not interested" and disseminate quality content adapted to your targets.
How to develop and foster an engaged community around your brand values
To go further and learn more about the concept of social selling and the various communication tools, you can watch this webinar:
KESTIO regularly trains the sales teams of many companies in digital prospecting (social selling), particularly in mastering LinkedIn, which is the preferred social network for business leaders and therefore the most suitable for BtoB prospecting.
