Social Selling Primer | Dominating SaaS Sales #4

Cold Outreach part 3/4

Jul 13, 2021

BowTiedDingo Dominating SaaS Sales

And we’re back!

This is the last primer on types of outreach and the second last post on our cold outreach primer series (Putting it all together into a strategy is coming next as the final post). Truth be told, I’ve been putting this one off because it is a bit of a divisive topic, and one that I needed to get my thoughts in order for.

Today we’re going to be talking about social selling - using social media for cold outreach and prospecting. This is the newest form of cold outreach, and one that has the sales world split. My biggest issue with social selling is that people tend to be far too polarized on the topic, either they argue social selling is the only thing you should ever do and spend all of their time and effort on it, or they argue it is useless and ignore the avenue completely.

These polar opposites as with most things, are both wrong, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

So let’s dive into a deeper look at what social selling involves, what works, what doesn’t, and why it should be part of your strategy, just not your only approach.

Cold Outreach Primer 3/4

Social Selling

What Is Social Selling?

Well we gave it a brief explanation in the introduction, but this is insufficient. Yes, social selling is cold outreach via social media, but it is more than that. This is an interesting topic where marketing and sales merge. There are two focuses for social selling, one is to contact people directly over social media, and the other is to build up your own personal brand and community to give yourself credibility, and even have people approaching you.

A better definition of social selling can be found on the HubSpot Blog. It reads:

“Social selling is the process of researching, connecting, and interacting with prospects and customers on social media networks -- notably Twitter and LinkedIn, but others certainly fit the bill. Through commenting on, liking, and sharing prospects’ and customers’ posts, salespeople create relationships with buyers and boost their credibility by taking an interest in what they’re interested in.
Instead of a hard closing tactic, social selling more closely resembles lead nurturing. Therefore, social selling isn’t for reps seeking quick wins or a silver bullet. Salespeople have to be willing to put in the time and effort to engage with their target buyers on an ongoing basis, and even then, there’s no guarantee that their efforts will pay off.”

The Pros and Cons of Social Selling

The HubSpot definition of social selling frames my thoughts on the matter reasonably well.

The Pros of Social Selling include:

Interaction with multiple people at once
The ability to build a community of potential buyers
A chance to build credibility
Marketing your product for people to come to you, rather than the marketing team getting all the inbound fun.
A good way to get some sort of interest from prospective buyers who you may not have any luck with over phone or email
Will train your copywriting and marketing skills

The Cons of Social Selling include:

It is A LOT of work, this could be a full time job on its own
Easy to go too hard and either leave a bad impression, or have the social platforms ban/’shadow ban’ you
This is a slow approach, you will not see instant results most of the time
You NEED to be even more of an expert in your field, knowing your product is simply not enough

As you can see this approach has a few different things to think about when compared to phone and email prospecting. Though some of these pros and cons are not going to make a lot of sense until we dive into how social selling is done.

What “Social Media” Should I use?

I’m going to say this up front, and I know there are going to be a lot of people who disagree here, but we’re only going to talk about twitter and linkedin. Not facebook, instagram, youtube, pinterest, or any other social networks. Unless you are running your own business, or in a very specific niche where it makes sense for an individual rep to be active on those networks, they are probably best left to your marketing team.

Twitter and LinkedIn are uniquely ideal for building a business network as an individual, and so they are the best use of your time.

Twitter allows you to cultivate a great network without a lot of personal data and your personal life being brought into things, and LinkedIn was created entirely for this purpose, just don’t become one of the ‘gurus’ everyone hates, talking like you are the one sole source of truth and telling obviously fake stories for clout.

Who Should Try Social Selling?

The short answer to this is all reps who are tasked with prospecting, SDRs/BDRs/Full Cycles AEs, etc. should try it, but that doesn’t mean everyone is going to be successful or suited to it. Using social media (Specifically LinkedIn) to find contacts, map out company org structures, get contact details, find new businesses to sell to, etc is something that all reps MUST do, using it to sell the product is a bit harder.

I mentioned a Con earlier that you need to be an absolute expert in your field to be an effective social seller. This is because the main way you are able to build up your credibility is sharing educational content, interacting with news about the industry you are selling into, you need to be able to put yourself into the position of a “Trusted Advisor” in the eyes of your audience/network. If you’re treating LinkedIn and twitter like a new email and just sending messages pitching your product to people, you might find yourself a meeting or two to book, but you will also quickly find your ability to send messages limited by the platform. LinkedIn has a limit to the number of messages you can send in a short period of time, and so does twitter. In fact even if we look at the other social networks you will find the same thing.

If you’re then thinking about just posting sales copy publicly you may as well just quit, that's what the marketing team does, and they're better at mass appeal messaging than you are.

You need to be able to write with authority, without coming across as a know it all, about topics your prospects are interested in, and are relevant to your product. If that is you, then you are probably going to do very well at this. If it is not, why not? Do you need to learn your industry better? Get better at writing? Stop being so fucking full of yourself? Figure it out and make an effort to improve.

You also need to have enough time to write constantly about your industry, make comments on relevant news and other peoples posts, and interact with your community. This is a lot of effort.

I’m not saying there is no direct messaging in social selling, I’m just saying it is inefficient since there are other messaging platforms with unlimited outreach potential.

As Jeb Blount, Author of Fanatical Prospecting says:

“If you’re trying to peddle your wares on social media you’re likely not selling anything AND you’re irritating people and damaging your reputation and relationships. Prospects don’t want to be pitched or sold on social media.
What they do want is to connect, interact and learn. That’s why the social channels are better suited to building familiarity, lead nurturing, research and inbound prospecting, and trigger-event awareness.”

How Do I Do It?

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about what not to do, but let’s get into how you can be successful on social media. If you’ve been in sales for a while, start by adding everyone you have sold to, this is your network. Once that is done, you can start to search for your ideal customer profile. Add people in your sales territory who match the job title of someone you want to sell to. DO NOT just go ham and add everyone in one go, both twitter and LinkedIn have a soft ban on this and you won’t be able to add anyone again. You can look up the number of people who can be connected with at one time before taking a break.

Do this a little bit each day, it helps if you add a nice little message like “Hey XX, I saw you work in (Your industry) as well, it would be great to connect.” - This is essentially the message LinkedIn pre-fills for you. The thing to keep in mind for connection requests is that if you add a sales pitch to it, you will reduce your chances of connecting by a HUGE AMOUNT. Just don’t do it.

Keep adding people daily. If your company has a rule around who you can interact with (Like account ownership rules), only connect with those you are allowed to, likely a LinkedIn request isn’t against those rules anyway.

When your network is starting to look active, your LinkedIn and twitter feeds are going to have relevant posts on them, news, opinion pieces, rants, etc. You want to start interacting with them. Not just liking or commenting on everything for the sake of it, you’ll be pegged as a spammer immediately.

Comment when you have something useful to add - If you don’t, either you shouldn’t comment or you need to get more knowledge on your topic. Like freely, just know, liking every single post doesn’t really help.

When you have something useful to say, write an article or thread and post it. You want to position yourself as a generous expert. Someone who people look at when they want news and tips on how to do their job better, or learn more about your industry.

Feel free to add occasional posts about how your product makes their lives easier, but place it into a post about something else, not as the main topic. Product updates on their own are fine, just don’t do it constantly.

You will start to get a feel for the tone and writing styles that are successful within your industry as you read, interact, and create.

As you go, you will start to see opportunities to pitch your product, if you do not do this constantly again, you can either comment on their question saying something like “Hi, my company XX can help with this.” (will be fine if you’ve honestly done the steps previous) or reach out directly and offer some information.

This message usually looks something like this:

“Hi XX, I saw your question around XX. The company I work with is a software that helps with XXX by XXX. It sounds like we could help out. Did you have some time to have a chat to see if we can?”

Keep messaging on LinkedIn and twitter casual not like a formal letter and even less formal than an email, think water cooler chat (not casual like your mates over some drinks).

Over time you’ll find people are coming to you asking about your product, especially when you post product updates or mention problems your company solves. Those are the important posts, but they need to be padded with even more industry posts so you build credibility.

Let’s Talk About Tools

Social selling takes a lot of time and effort, but the good news is that there are tools that are designed to help reduce this.

Usually they automate adding new people, sending messages, finding relevant contacts, visiting profiles etc. or about scheduling content to be posted at a future date.

There is a short list of tools I’ve used or have some experience with below for twitter and LinkedIn. I do recommend tool use as long as you keep in mind the connection and messaging limits, and DO NOT SPAM PEOPLE.

Twitter:

LinkedIn:

www.octopuscrm.io
www.meetalfred.com
www.leadzin.co (Not affiliate, but a BowTiedAnimal that I’ve spoken with, I haven’t used his tool)

Further Thoughts

I do not favour social selling because it takes up too much of my time. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. I do believe that the ideal outreach strategy includes social, calling, and email. I’ve given my thoughts on how it should be done, and where to focus your efforts.

Here is a list of a few more resources from social selling proponents if you want to do some further reading and dive into this method of cold outreach.

In my next post I’ll be talking about how to build your outbound strategy by putting together the different communication channels we’ve spoken about over the past 3 posts.

Looking forward to hearing people’s results and how much money you are all making!

Best,
@BowTiedDingo
W.A.G.M.I

Recommended Tools:

Apollo.io - We are happy to say we’re partnered with Apollo! This is a tool we personally pay for a subscription to and use in every sales role. Search, engage and convert over 250 million contacts at over 60 million companies with Apollo’s sales intelligence and engagement platform.

Hypefury - Manage your Twitter like a professional! Start your personal brand and earn online.