When it comes to getting a return on investment (ROI) from your LinkedIn Sales Navigator licenses, there’s a key component that many businesses miss. Owning the licenses isn’t enough for success.
First, you need to train salespeople in the behavioural skills they need to embrace the platform and social selling.
Building Behaviours
Behavioural skills are an important part of establishing a new habit, routine, or outlook.
Teaching someone the benefits of doing something is important, but if someone feels they don’t have the time for social selling, those benefits won’t be enough to convince them to do it.
Most of the time, salespeople just want to use the tool. It’s the least amount of effort required.
But if they don’t have the right behaviours established first, they won’t be able to experience the full range of possibilities they could get from social selling.
Salespeople need to understand why it’s important to build their personal brand on LinkedIn, and how to do it. This requires a mindset shift that doesn’t happen overnight.
Brand building is an important part of social selling. Understanding how and why to do it is one of the first steps an employee needs to take to become a successful social seller.
If someone is uncomfortable building their brand, they’ll struggle to use Sales Navigator.
The Benefits Of Listening First
To be successful on LinkedIn, and get the most out of Sales Navigator, the first skill an employee needs to learn is listening.
This goes beyond them just listening to what you’ve told them about how to be a social seller. They also need to learn to listen to their network.
Before sharing their own thoughts and engaging in conversations, they need to look at what their audience is saying and what they’re talking about. That way, they’ll know the latest trends as well as their audience’s viewpoint. Knowing these things means they’re less likely to alienate their audience.
It’s not about agreeing with everything their audience says and being fake. Instead, it’s about making sure the employee doesn’t offend their audience. Knowing the right thing to say at the right time is an important part of being a social seller.
If they need to persuade someone of something, there are techniques they can use to bring someone around to their way of thinking. But they need to know and understand these before diving into conversations.
It’s really about branding, listening, and engaging.
Using a tool like Sales Navigator to build relationships in a virtual environment means that when it comes to that phone call or in-person meeting, a prospect knows who they are, and the salesperson knows the prospective buyer. It speeds up the sales process and makes it less stressful for everyone involved.
What It Really Takes To Be A Social Seller
Behaviour is half, if not all, of what it takes to be a social seller.
Outsourcing will never work as well because it’s inauthentic. That person content creation has been outsourced to won’t know the salesperson, the business, or the brand as well because they aren’t living it on a daily basis. They’ll have a different point of view. They may also have a different writing style.
As soon as someone picks up on an inconsistency in posting style, or point of view, it will break brand trust and cause their audience to become disengaged. Which is the last thing any salesperson – or business – wants.
There are no quick wins or quick fixes when it comes to social selling. It takes time to become a great social seller, but the benefits it provides for personal branding, and the company’s bottom line, are well worth the investment.
