4 Awesome Social Selling Tools That Will Help You Sell More

Remember the days of dialing a list of suspects and reading from a script in an attempt to generate leads? Some of us (not you and me, of course) are still dialing for dollars, usually in vain. Technology has rendered that painful process mostly obsolete – buyers use voicemail to screen out unwanted interruptions from their busy day.

Today’s successful salesperson uses social selling to provide qualified leads with information that helps them do their jobs better. Oftentimes, this helpful attitude starts sales conversations that draw potential buyers into your sales pipeline.

Being helpful to your buyers requires a persistent and consisten approach. Good salespeople carve out time in their daily schedules to manage their social selling process. Here are 4 awsome social selling tools that will help you sell more.

1. LinkedIn Premium Accounts

If you’re in sales or are a C-suite executive and you don’t have a premium LInkedIn account, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. There are several versions of premium LinkedIn accounts, but the features that are most useful for social sellling are:

• Premium search – helps you create lists of potential buyers based on criteria like job function, industry, company size and geographic locations, among others. Premium seach gives you the ability to create target lists that are highly qualified. Social sellers can research members of these pre-qualified lists to see common connections, professional and educational history and trigger events that may identify potential opportunities. You can save your premium searches so that you are notified by email when new members match your list criteria.
• InMails – let you send LinkedIn messages to people that aren’t your connections. According to LinkedIn, InMail messages receive a response 2 times more often than cold calls. Don’t abuse InMails – use catchy headlines, keep them brief and quickly give your target a reason to respond.
• Introductions – let you see which of your connections knows someone you’d like to meet and request an introduction. An introduction from a trusted friend or colleague is always more effective than an cold outreach.

These are just a few of the features of a premium LinkedIn account. They are a must-have for todays social salesperson. Sales teams can use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator to supercharge their social selling efforts.

2. Feedly

One of the best ways to be helpful in your social selling is to share content with prospects that is relevant to the problems they face. Your company probably produces helpful content and it’s great to share, but it’s important to mix in third-party content when you share. Feedly is an efficient way to organize third-party content to help you help your prospects by sharing content relevant to their pain points.

Feedly lets you choose the blogs that address pain points of your ideal customers and aggregates them for you. Content is updated daily so social sellers can scan new content for articles to share with prospects and customers. Feedly is free with a professional versions available for $5 per month or $45 per year.

3. HubSpot’s Social Inbox

Here at Ringio, we use HubSpot’s internet marketing software to power our content marketing efforts. HubSpot’s software includes a Social Inbox that alerts you when someone mentions you, follows you on Twitter, or shares, comments or likes your content. Our sales team monitors the Social Inbox every morning to interact appropriately with our social media audience. Social inbox helps us manage our social selling so that we’re having conversations, not one-way broadcasts.

HubSpot also has a Social Monitoring tool that lets you monitor twitter feeds based on keyword mentions or segmented lists. Some of the feeds we monitor regularly are those of our top target list and our competitors. Monitoring the Twitter feeds of the companies and people we want to do business with help us learn what’s important to them and identify trigger events that may be a reason to connect.

We use HubSpot because it integrates with our entire marketing process. Other options include Hootsuite and Buffer. In any case, a social monitoring tool is an essential tool for social sellers.

4. Mention

Mention scours the web for mentions of your brand, your target accounts or keywords. Trigger events like M&A activity, new client acquisition and layoffs often identify a potential need for your product or service. Mention lets you monitor the web for mentions of your target accounts, competitors and your company. Mobile versions of the app make it easy for social sellers to keep up with what’s happening in their sphere of influence so that they can react quickly to trigger events.

Google alerts also monitor the web for mentions of companies that are important to you, but we like Mention because it aggregates the things you’re monitoring for easy access.

We’re strong proponents of a social selling approach. To do social selling right, you need to spend time every day to put forth a consistent effort to get results. These 4 tools will make your social selling process more efficient, effective and most importantly, will help produce sales results.