6 Use Cases of a Modern Sales CRM To Close Deals (For Agencies & Startups)

Introduction

Social selling softwares are still pretty new in the sales prospecting world.

Some people still believe that social selling softwares are just tools to publish content on social media like Buffer. But in the word social selling, you have the word "selling", not publishing.

So let's see together what are the actual use cases of a social selling software. For that, I'll showcase you the examples with my own software: Breakcold.

Social selling is a combination of different actions

The goal is to show you that there is another way to generate leads and close deals instead of mass mailing prospects, being super agressive and overusing cold email automation. This is how you can get clients with social selling.

1°) Warming up leads before contacting them (Social Warming)

This use case is my favorite to guarantee a 100% reply rate on high-value customers.

Use case explanation

I first saw the term "Social Warming" used in the context of social selling by Guillaume Albisetti: CEO & Co-Founder @Jungow. We can also talk about Social Warmup according to this French blogpost.

Social warming is a 3 steps process

Basically, it means that you like and comment the LinkedIn posts / tweets of your prospects before reaching out.

You don't want to send a LinkedIn invite, a cold email or a cold DM before interacting with the prospects first once or a couple of times.

Some software do the job automatically but let be honest, like automation is cool but what do prospects remember? Comments, and comments can't be automated properly even with the use of AI. Your goal to aim for quality to have the best ROI and conversion rate possible on your sales outreach.

Below are the steps to use a social selling software to carry this task.

1/ Import your prospects in your social selling software

Before importing prospects, make sure to build a prospecting list that contains leads who are active on social media, otherwise it will be hard for you to use this technique.

To do that, you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to filter your ideal customer profile (ICP) from leads who only have been active in the last 30 days.

Example of building a social selling list with Sales Navigator

2/ Make sure to have the social media of your prospects

Once you've imported your leads, make sure that you have their LinkedIn profile or Twitter one set in their fields. It shouldn't be a problem normally if you used a LinkedIn Sales Navigator Scraper.

Example of social media fields

3/ Track the prospects and start interacting with the posts

On Breakcold for example, you need to track the leads you want to focus on once you have their social media URLs set.

From there, LinkedIn posts & tweets will be automatically aggregated every single day. Breakcold also gets old posts the first time you synchronize the leads.

Example of how to track leads for social selling

4/ Like & comment the LinkedIn posts & tweets for a week

Once the posts are aggregated, implement in your sales routine one hour block to like and comment the posts of your prospects.

You can do it in two ways:

• by interacting with them from the prospecting feed

• by interacting with them from their lead profile

1°) This how the prospecting feed view looks like:

The advantage of this method is that you can scroll the feed and interact with prospects easily. It's really the instagram of sales prospecting.

2°) This how the lead view looks like:

The advantage of this method is that you can access all the old posts of your prospects. You can then use the left/right arrow to switch leads rapidly.

What to do if the prospect doesn't post every day?

Some prospects don't post every day on social media. No problem, you can just like and comment their old posts. I won't go too far though, maybe 8 years back in time is a lot!

Benefit of this use case?

This social selling strategy is beneficial for many reasons:

• some prospects will start a conversation from themselves with you

• you boost your chances of getting your LinkedIn invite accepted to almost 100%

• you boost your chances of getting a call upon your first message

• you stand out from the crowd with your likable approach

This is the main benefit of social warming in social selling

In a world where everything gets commoditized, prospects tend to favor who they appreciate the most, this is how you can differentiate yourself.

2°) Hyper-personalizing cold emails or cold DMs

Use case explanation

Cold email personalization is a huge debate among lead generation specialists. In my opinion, it depends on your offer and your total addressable market.

However, from my experience and what I noticed over the years, it seems that the problem of personalization is that you can't automate it. Many softwares have tried (including ourselves at Breakcold) to create AI email first lines but the tech is just no there yet.

Therefore, people kind of gave up on personalization.

How to solve the social selling personalization problem

But what if the solution was actually wrong, what if sales automation was not the answer but that data aggregation was? This is what I believe at least.

Imagine you have all the data aggregated in one place, you won't have to spend 10 minutes doing data research about your prospect and could focus on personalizing your cold email.

Well, this is what a social selling software is capable of doing.

Method 1: using the prospecting feed

1/ Scroll your prospecting feed

Scroll your prospecting feed until you find a prospect you never reached out.

2/ Click on sending private message

Click on the send private message button, it will make the company news automatically populate. From there you can decide to send a cold email or LinkedIn DM or Twitter DM.

Social selling tip: like an comment the post before reaching out

3/ Craft your message

You can then use the most recent news of your prospect, along with its company ones to craft a quick DM or quick cold email. This will allow you to stay super natural and most importantly to be relevant.

Social selling tip: use the company news to make something original

Relevancy beats personalization every single time. Your goal is to use what your prospects said to start a conversation.

Method 2: using the lead view (my favorite)

1/ Go to a list and open a lead

2/ Click on company to display company news

This will help you replicating the view from the prospecting feed.

3/ Craft your message

Like the prospecting feed way, you just need to get inspire from your prospect news to craft a short cold email ord DM.

This is the lead view of what a modern CRM should be

4/ Use the left/right arrow to quickly change lead

It's the best way to do it in a productive way from my experience. On average, if I don't include a picture or a loom video in my cold email, it will take me about 1 minute/2 minutes maximum to craft something super relevant.

If I was not using a social selling software, this would have take forever.

Benefits of this use case?

Here you go:

• personalizing faster your cold emails

• personalizing faster your LinkedIn prospecting

• personalizing faster your Twitter prospecting

• basically becoming a productivity machine at high-quality outbound sales

Example of a Social Selling Software (Guide)This is video showcasing the uses cases of a social selling software

3°) Staying top of mind during a deal to win it

Use case explanation

Generating leads is a piece of cake. Closing deals is another deal (sorry for the joke).

No but really, it's astonishing how easily companies generate leads these days but how poorly they close them. And it's not a SQL/MQL problem, it's a purely a closing problem.

Why though?

Like I said below, everything gets commoditized, attention is scarce in today's B2B environment. Therefore, it's not because you had a call with a prospect or that they signed-up to your product or service that they will become customer.

You not only need to follow up on them, you need to stay top of mind.

For that you have not many solutions:

• solution 1: you have a solid brand on social media

• solution 2: you use retargeting ads

• solution 3: you follow-up

• solution 4: you bond with the prospect to be his most likable solution

Solution 1 is expensive.

Solution 2 is good but you're competing with many other ads who want the attention of your prospects as well.

Solution 3 is great but not many people do it unfortunately. Still, prospects receive so many emails/DMs these days that now they're ghosting you.

Solution 4 is my favorite because it's where you create a deep B2B relationship with your prospect.

1/ You focus on prospects that are warm leads

Once a prospect has signed-up or became a hot lead after a call, you automatically move them in Breakcold in the sales pipeline stage your created for hot leads.

In my case, I just called it warm leads.

Example of my social selling pipeline

2/ You go to your prospecting feed and filter it with warm leads

Your goal is to everyday or every week, catch up with your warm leads to stay top of mind to ultimately close them as clients.

Some prospects become customers after 1 week, others after 8 months. You can't master their agenda but you can penetrate their head to be the choice number 1.

You can choose a list and then apply a filter

Benefits of this use case?

I think it's probably my favorite thing about the use cases of a social selling software because it allow you to truly do what a CRM should have become in the last 20 years:

• accelerating your sales cycle up to 50%

• improve your B2B brand authority

• closing more sales by being the 1st choice

Who in your company can carry this task

• The co-founders: for high-key prospects

• Account Executives, SDRs, BDRs

• Marketing team

4°) Increasing retention by bonding with existing clients

Use case explanation

Whatever your business (SaaS company or Agency), if you serve a product or a service on a monthly basis, churn is your enemy.

You need to distinguish between bad churn and good churn.

Good churn: endemic churn like the business stoped.Bad churn: your service/product wasn't good enough.

You can't prevent good churn but you can prevent bad churn by bonding with your existing client.

Why?

Because if you create a deeper relationship with your existing clients, it will be easier to ask and receive feedback which ultimately result in a better retention rate.

This how you can do it.

1/ Put closed customers in the last stage of your sales pipeline

Move warm leads to closed customers in your sale pipeline. It's important that you do it for step 2.

My sales pipeline goes from cold to lost customer

2/ Interact with closed customers weekly

Compare to warm leads that you want to remind your existence every single day, you can interact with closed customers every week or so.

This will be enough to build a bond with them.

I have more than 10 social selling lists to engage with

Benefits of this use case?

Benefits are as follow:

• reducing churn rate

• increasing word of mouth

• creating super fans of your product or service

5°) Building engagement lists with B2B influencers for key partnerships

Use case explanation

B2B influencers can take your business to the next level. They can make a post about your product, they can push it to their newsletter, Youtube videos etc.

But B2B influencers are hard to reach. They receive many direct messages every single day and have hundreds of notifications.

Even myself, with only 8000 followers on Twitter I get spammed with DMs. To break the noise, you got to be different in your approach.

1/ Create a B2B influencers list

For example, I created a B2B influencers list in my Breakcold account and I added about 80 influencers that can potentially promote our product.

As you can see, I have many social selling lists!

2/ Interact with B2B influencers daily

Thanks to our social selling software, all their posts on social media will be aggregated. You can then focus on liking but most importantly commenting their posts every day.

After a solid week or two, you can send a LinkedIn message if you're connected with them on LinkedIn. They will automatically remember you because you engaged with them.

I try to engage with B2B influencers every day

Benefits of this use case?

Benefits are as follow:

• building key partnerships for your business

• growing your network in your niche

• growing your personal brand

By the way B2B influencers have a solid social selling strategy, we studied some real life examples, many lessons learned.

6°) Growing a personal brand

Use case explanation

Growing a B2B personal brand is becoming more and more important. Some people are focused on LinkedIn, others on Twitter. The best among the best are doing both.

To build a personal brand on these platforms, you need to engage with other people, it's all about engagement. This is where a social selling software will help you.

There are no more secrets about personal branding than this picture

A social selling software will help you regroup all the LinkedIn posts and Twitter posts of your different engagement lists into one place so you can be hyper productive to like and comment other people posts.

If you need to investigate these topics in-depth, I've talked about it the Social Selling with LinkedIn and Twitter blogposts.

1/ Crete an engagement list of peers

The goal is to add people that are:

• on your level of following

• talking about the same things as you

You can create engagement lists on Twitter too but it's not optimal for engagement

2/ Create an engagement list of big names in your niche

The goal is to add people that are influencers in your target audience.

3/ Crete an engagement list of your fans

The more you grow, the more you'll have super fans (people who regularly like and comment your posts), if you engage with them it will reinforce your personal brand growth.

4/ Use a social selling software to engage the three lists

Once you have your 3 engagement lists, you just have to click on a list to have a feed corresponding to that list.

Benefits of this use case?

Benefits are as follow:

• growing a personal brand faster

• increasing your LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score

• building engagement lists on LinkedIn & Twitter in 1 place