If your sales team aren’t allowed to use social media platforms in work time, you’re missing out on enormous sales opportunities.

• Are you using social media for your business?
• Have you allowed social- selling training for your team?

A structured Social Media sales strategy and time allocation (to avoid them drifting off into Facebook for their own reasons!) could vastly increase your sales turnover!

There’s no secret that it’s the sales-person that gets a sale across the line. It doesn’t matter what marketing material or advertising you’ve created, it all comes down to how your sales-person treats their prospective customers to convert sales.

With vast online opportunities to get your brand “out there” across social media platforms, it’s all very well to place static visual ads on your page/s, but that human interaction with prospects is always going to be the reason someone decides to purchase from you.

According to Forbes.com, 74 % of prospect buyers spend half of their product research time online, both on websites and on social media pages.

We’re not talking about merely posting an image of your product or brand on your business Facebook page.

We’re talking about allowing the opportunity for a customer to directly contact you via your social media platforms, and be able to ask questions while getting answers in real time from your sales team.

Instant contact in the online world is invaluable and allows personal engagement with prospect customers, gaining their trust.

If your competitors are using social media platforms to sell, you need to jump on that bandwagon!

Social selling allows the development of one-on-one relationships as opposed to advertising en masse which is impersonal and indirect.

The written tone is crucial in social selling. Understanding how to engage prospective clients is more difficult in writing than it is verbally.

While social selling absolutely does work, a staggering 93% of salespeople in New Zealand haven’t received any official training in this field!

Training to sell online is as important, if not more so than training to sell in person. You only get one opportunity to get your pitch right, and it’s out there for the world to see.

Everyone uses the internet to research products and find feedback before they buy – in fact 60% of us make our decisions about whether to buy a product or not directly from the information we find online.

Considering these statistics, it would be foolish to NOT train your sales team how to engage with prospects via your social media platforms, would it not??

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram are incredibly powerful tools with an enormous reach that should be a major part of your sales strategy.

Teaching your sales team to use these will bring results if they’re using the right sales-speak.

These platforms allow an informal, SOCIAL engagement where prospects can speak in their own casual terms and enjoy a relaxed chat with your salespeople – opening the doors quickly to enable nurturing them across the line.