How Social Selling Brings in More Prospects for Growing B2Bs

Wholesalers will get more out of happy customers making referrals and social selling than from antique sales tactics.

Research bears this out. Potential customers are too busy to swim through the inundation of marketing campaign email and cold calls they receive. Prospects return outbound calls less than 1% of the time and only look at 24% of outbound emails.

Maybe they are fatigued, or too busy and focused on their work to make an instant buying decision. This may explain why it takes 18 or more phone calls to start doing business with a new prospect.

1 Referral Social Selling vs 18 Phone Calls

Yet, prospects will still be in the market for your product. They are turning to online sources for information, and are relying more frequently on testimony than on the pitch. These days, 84% of b2b buyers start the purchasing process with a referral, and many of those referrals come from peer-to-peer recommendations on platforms like LinkedIn.

This is bad news for the established b2b sales workforce which stands to shed a million jobs by 2020. But, for newer, smaller wholesalers, it is potentially good news. If b2b purchasers are behaving more and more like b2c customers every year, these smaller companies won’t have to make big investments in outbound sales teams to grow their business.

Social selling―customer contact using social media platforms―appears to be more effective than emails and phone calls for closing deals and generating referrals.

B2B is a Social World

Social media platforms bring together peers with similar concerns and interests which makes organic word-of-mouth growth possible.

Let’s take LinkedIn as an example. Three out of four b2b buyers use social media for information from peers to help in their buying decisions. Buyers are 5 times more likely to engage a sales rep from a business that provides insightful content about their business or industry within those same peer communities.

Using social media wisely ends in better customer engagement. More than 70% of b2b salespeople who use social media report that they outperformed their sales peers, and more than half said they closed deals as a direct result of social media.

There are, of course, multiple platforms, and engagement doesn’t begin and end there.

The best way to start is with a b2b eCommerce website where customers from every platform can find all your information, pricing and availability to support your social media selling activity.