1.   Social selling lets you or your sales team build real relationships

Let’s face it Cold Calling is dead and 90 % of top decision-makers say they never respond to cold calls.

Social selling helps you research your prospects 40% faster

With prospects socially sharing so much information about their needs, wants, and pain points on their public profiles, even your first point of contact can be personalized, relevant, and helpful, rather than intrusive and cold. That leads to more meaningful ongoing prospect and client engagement, with 31% of B2B professionals saying that social selling tools allowed them to build deeper relationships with clients.

Better yet, building a strong network through various social media channels allows you to seek out introductions to new sales prospects through existing mutual connections, creating an immediate sense of trust and rapport. That trust is an incredibly important resource for both clients and salespeople, with 87% of B2B buyers saying they would have a favorable impression of someone introduced through their professional network.

With social sellers accessing all of these important advantages that give them the jump on their less socially minded colleagues, it’s no surprise that internal LinkedIn data shows sales professionals with a strong social selling index—a measure based on how well salespeople build their personal brand, focus on the right prospects, engage with relevant content, and build trusted relationships—have 45% more sales opportunities than others, and are 51% more likely to hit their sales quotas.

2.   Your clients are already engaged in social buying

 What’s social buying? Flip the concept of social selling on its head. Consumers and businesses are already asking for recommendations and doing the research on the best fit.

In fact, CEB found that customers are, on average, 57% of the way through the purchase process before they ever engage with a sales professional, and IDC found that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of executives use contacts and information from social networks as part of their purchase process.

If you’re not actively engaged in social selling, you’re not showing up in that social purchase research: that’s a lot of potential missed sales.

The good news is that, according to LinkedIn, 76% of buyers are ready to have a social media conversation with potential providers, and more than 62 percent of B2B buyers respond to salespeople who connect with them to share insights and opportunities relevant to their business. Even better, 92% of B2B buyers are willing to engage with a sales professional who is a known industry thought leader and expert, a reputation you can establish by consistently posting thoughtful, relevant content on social media.

Beyond the initial sale, keep in mind that 53% of customer loyalty is driven by a salesperson’s ability to deliver unique insight, a skill that salespeople can initially demonstrate through their social media content sharing, and later confirm through their ongoing social connections with past clients. Perhaps that’s why data from Aberdeen shows that teams engaged in social selling have a customer renewal rate seven percentage points higher than teams that have not embraced social selling tools.

3. Your top competitors are already using social selling

A whopping 71% of all sales professionals—and 90% of top salespeople—are already using social selling tools. Among younger salespeople, the numbers are even higher, with 78% of all millennial sales professionals using social selling tools and 63% saying those tools are critical or extremely critical to their sales performance. If you’re not allowing your sales team to use social tools and equipping them to do so, it will be more challenging for you to recruit top sales performers, especially from the millennial demographic. They are NOT afraid to use video and all methods of communication. Many sales executives using outdated methods will have a fair disadvantage.