Introduction
Social selling can be used to generate leads but also for closing deals. From my personal experience with social selling, I believe that it's way more powerful to use it to close deals.
Why?
Because you just need to focus on what you already have. Lead generation is unpredictable, you never know when and if a prospect will be interested in your offer. On the opposite, once you have warm leads, your only job is to focus on turning them into paying customers.
Social Selling can be used in 2 ways
That's usually where sales teams are the least efficient because they don't follow-up enough and don't keep building B2B relationships with prospects because all these things takes time.
When you know that sales reps only spend less than 40% of their time actually prospecting, you can understand how a Social Selling Software can be a game changer here.
1°) Interacting with prospects on LinkedIn/Twitter to stay top of mind
This is my favorite technique to close deals with social selling
Why is it a good technique to close deals?
What usually happens to the leads you generated?
You have calls with them then you need to follow-up; or
They sign-up to your product and you send automated email sequences; or
They sign-up to your product and you have inside sales reaching out (rare);
In all these scenarios, are you currently doing the following with your CRM or sales tool?
adding the warm leads on LinkedIn
engaging with prospects on LinkedIn and Twitter
following up on them with hyper personalized messages or emails
You can enrich the data manually or automatically with integrations
I bet not but the best performing salespeople are doing it manually or with a social selling software.
Engaging prospects during the warm lead phase accelerates your sales pipeline up to +50%. After all it is human nature, the more someone engages with you the more you're encline to engage back.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
It's a lead generation example but you can imagine how the prospect can feel at the closing stage
How to do this social selling technique
1/ Add warm leads to your social selling software
Normally, if you used a social selling software to generate leads you don't have to do anything so you can skip this step.
But maybe you just want to use a social selling software for the closing part, in that case read the following.
You can add leads in multiple ways:
with a CSV file
manually creating the leads
importing the data from your CRM (Pipedrive, Hubspot, Salesforce, others).
importing the data with Zapier, Make or other automation tools
Example of ways to add leads using Breakcold
It's also good to note that this social selling strategy won't work if you don't have leads that are a minimum active on social media. To prevent that, make sure to build a prospecting list with leads that are active (see below).
For example, let's say I want to target Head of Sales in B2B startups in NY. My process would be the following:
going to LinkedIn Sales Navigator to apply some filters to find them
adding a filter to only have people who have been active in the last 30 days
exporting the data with softwares like Findymail/Evaboot or any other LinkedIn Sales Navigator Scraper
Filters of LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Why targeting only the prospects who have been active in the last 30 days? Because if you build prospecting lists with people inactive on social media, you won't be able to leverage what they share online to build a relationship faster, meaning generating leads faster.
It's also good to note that in general, it's much easier to close deals with prospects that are active on social media. Otherwise you'll have to go through cold email (which works well) and cold calling, which would be a more tedious task.
2/ Add warm leads to your sales pipeline (key for later)
Social selling softwares like Breakcold have sales pipeline (or social selling pipeline) to help you stay organized in the closing phase.
To add leads to your social selling pipeline, you need to:
select a lead
assign a status (here we'll go with warm leads)
add a deal value (it represents the contract value)
That way, you'll always know how much you have in your pipeline and on what warm prospects to focus on.
You can do this action in bulk or lead by lead.
3/ Make sure to have their LinkedIn/Twitter URLs
How to do it if your warm prospects comes from sign-up forms (for SaaS or others)?
With Breakcold, when we have a sign-up, I automatically push the data to a list then I manually add the LinkedIn URLs of my prospects.
But you can also imagine a workflow where you enrich the lead from its email by using softwares like Clearbit or Datagma.
But normally, if you go through an email finder or a LinkedIn Sales Navigator scraper, you should have the LinkedIn URL of your prospects.
If you don't, you'd need to add their URLs in the required fields to be able to track their activity on social media.
These are some fields from Breakcold CRM
4/ Track the leads & engage with their posts every day
Once you have the social media URLs of your warm prospects, you'll need to track them.
Social selling softwares like Breakcold are doing that to allow you to focus on particular prospects instead of tracking everyone all at once. At scale, this could be a nightmare to handle otherwise.
You see, I'm not the only one believing social selling is the lead generation technique out there
Then it's simple, just engage with warm prospects on a daily basis by liking and commenting their posts on social media.
You have basically two options to carry this task:
using the social selling feed
doing it lead per lead
1 - Using the social selling feed (prospecting feed)
A social selling feed or a prospecting feed is a place where all the LinkedIn posts and tweets of your prospects are aggregated into one place. It allows you to create curated feeds to engage in a productive way with you prospects.
Using the prospecting feed is a good method to do sales prospecting like you're chilling on TikTok, you don't feel like you're prospecting at all!
This is the prospecting feed of Breakcold
2 - Doing it the lead per lead way
The problem with the prospecting feed is that it shows you only 1 post per prospect. If you want to see all their past activity you'd have to use the lead view.
That way, you can interact with different posts or old ones if they don't post often.
This is the lead view
What is good with this technique is that you can open your social selling pipeline (sales pipeline on steroids), see which leads are in the warm stage and when you decide to click on a warm prospect, you directly see their past activities on LinkedIn or Twitter.
4/ At some point, they will go from warm leads to paying customers
The best thing about interacting with warm prospects is that it's like you're naturally following up on them every day/week without actually sending a DM or an Email.
It's like you're a Facebook ad that is liking and commenting their posts. With this technique, you always remains as the 1st choice in the prospect's mind.
2°) Following up on prospects with multi-channel prospecting
This technique works the best from social media insights to email
Why is it a good technique to close deals?
You need to stand out from the crowd to make the difference if you want to win deals.
For that, one of the best ways to do it is to use information you saw on another medium to reach out prospects
Without a social selling software, doing this will be time consuming
Let's take an example:
prospect A post something on Twitter, like and comment the tweet then reach out on LinkedIn on what he/she said on Twitter
prospect B shares something on LinkedIn, like and comment the post then reach out via Email on what he/she said on LinkedIn.
This multi-channel prospecting technique works like a charm but takes many steps to execute without a social selling software.
How to do this social selling technique
1/ Go to your prospecting feed
To access your social selling feed, you need to click on the big blue "Br" button.
The "Br' button means Breakcold
2/ Choose the list of prospects you want
Your prospecting feed will adapt to the list of leads you choose.
Example of prospecting feed lists
3/ Filter the list by warm prospects
Not only your feed will adapt to the different kind of lists you build, it will also adapt to where you prospects are in the sales pipeline you built.
You can build your pipeline the way you want
4/ Scroll your feed and engage with prospects
Once you've selected your list and filter, you just have to scroll your feed and playing the prospecting game just like scrolling and liking the posts of your friends on Instagram, Facebook or TikTok.
Liking posts is usually not enough for prospects to remember you. You need to comment their posts. The longer the comment, the better. It's a good occasion to nurture your leads.
5/ Once you see something relevant, reach out
I usually like and comment the posts before reaching out
To reach out warm prospects, click on the direct message button. It will automatically populate the company news of your prospects as well.
That way, you have all key informations to use what you saw on LinkedIn/Twitter to send a DM or an Email in a multi-channel way.
6/ Bonus tip: use the lead view
Social selling tip: if you have highly active warm leads on social media, you can use the lead view to see the whole history of their posts.
3°) Sending hyper-personalized warm email sequences
Everyone is on cold email right now but warm email is truly what makes your business more money
Why is it a good technique to close deals?
Warm emails are emails sent via cold email standards (in deliverability, copywriting, etc) to warm leads or people you interacted with in the past. It can also be for example, to inform them about your product updates, or offer them personalized pricing.
Cold email vs Warm email is a hot topic and will always be.
With the rise of techniques like Social Warming, everything is getting warmer in cold outreach: what a paradox.
If your social selling software also integrates a powerful cold email tool like it's the case at Breakcold, you can do wonders.
How to do this social selling technique
1/ Go in the lead view of your leads
Once you'll be done, you can just use the right/left arrow of your keyboard to switch leads quickly.
2/ See all the LinkedIn Posts / Tweets they published
Get inspired from what your prospects posted on social media to craft warm email first lines.
3/ Like and comment some posts
Like and comment some posts so they might remember you the day you decide to send your warm email campaign.
You can choose with which team member you want to engage
4/ Write the cold email icebreaker
Use the icebreaker section of Breakcold to write your first lines. Each block corresponds to a custom variable that you can use in your warm email sequence.
It took me less than 3 minutes to write this email including the personalized Loom video
5/ Send cold email campaigns using your cold email icebreakers
Prepare your warm email sequence and insert the icebreakers. You're now fully ready to get more replies :)
This how you can insert the variable in your cold email sequence