How Successful Sales Teams Integrate Social Media Metrics

Smart sales teams know that the guessing games are over. There is no longer a need to arbitrarily identify your customers or presume who they are when you have access to social data. Modern success means social selling and if a sales team really wants to reach the finish line, they must learn to work in conjunction with marketing.

Consumers are intelligent. As they move online to research their purchases, e-commerce sales are set to hit an all-time high of $4.48 trillion by 2021. Therefore, it is critical that sales and marketing teams work together to not only comprehend the modern consumer pain points but understand how to market to them as a team.

Social Selling and Sales Strategy

Producing sales from a social aspect is a much more organic approach than one might assume. In fact, 61% of organizations that use social selling report a positive impact on revenue growth, compared to 41% of businesses who don’t use it as part of their strategy.

Meeting customers online can help create valuable interactions and build relationships. It encourages repeat visitors and brand loyalty. This will ultimately lead to a higher conversion rate and make the sales process a lot easier.

Social Listening

You may think that salespeople find “the close” the most difficult part of their job, but a recent study found that over 40% of salespeople actually identify prospecting as their most challenging task. Social media makes this much easier because it allows sales teams to access a vast amount of social data without needing to interact. Thus, sales professionals can “keep up with the Jonses” without ever actually keeping up with them. They have ample time to prepare and understand their lead before making a pitch.

One of the modern digital marketing techniques that make prospecting much easier for sales teams is called social listening (also referred to as social monitoring). This type of technology allows you to set an alert and receive a notification whenever someone is talking about your brand, industry, or similar product/service. You can plug in keywords that will return conversations in real-time, so you can jump right in. Google Alerts is a great tool for social monitoring and is free when you have a Gmail account.

Successful Collaboration

The best way for a sales team to integrate social metrics into their strategies is by working closely with their marketing team. The benefits of aligning the two departments are numerous, yet a recent study showed that the greatest challenge both divisions faced was communication, followed by flawed processes (42%) and different metrics (40%).

The lack of accurate data is directly proportional to how often the two teams are really talking. When sales and marketing exist in silos, not only do you have an opportunity for data deduplication, but the data often doesn’t match. Sharing one set of metrics ensures everyone is on the same page when strategizing and planning for future outcomes.

Measuring the impact of sales strategy is crucial to know if your team is doing a good job. Collecting standards and benchmark data is key so you have an idea of where you started. Then you can easily see which processes are a success, and which may need work.

Customer data is more available than ever before. It doesn’t even take much digging. With tools like social monitoring and proactive marketing departments, a salesperson’s job has never been easier. Forget about playing guessing games. With the right customer data and the proper social selling strategies, everyone wins!