Social selling – How to engage customers beyond email and phone with LinkedIn and CRM
Are frustrated faces taking over your sales teams as prospecting fails to pay off?
The conversion rate of cold calls is less than 1%, according to . And honestly, let’s face it, even that number seems optimistic. As technology advances and social media plays a larger role in our lives, cold calls and cold emails are simply becoming less effective and more intrusive.
Even in the earliest stages of a sale, customers want to feel like they’re understood. Short of stepping directly into their minds, there is no better way to learn about your customers than with social media.
Social selling and social listening allow your sales teams to connect with prospects on a more relevant level. By routinely engaging with leads on social media you can demonstrate real value with much less effort than grinding away behind the phone or keyboard. After all, sharing is caring, and that’s never been more true today.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network – we’re talking 450,000,000 registered members. That’s a HUGE opportunity to discover prospects and directly engage with them. No email required. No “iffy” attachments for the prospect to worry about. No time wasted.
And while LinkedIn alone is a great prospecting tool, sales professionals can get advanced features in LinkedIn Sales Navigator to help prioritize leads, build connections and navigate LinkedIn data more efficiently.
Find the missing link
First impressions mean everything, so make it memorable. Sales Navigator allows you to find colleagues who already have a relationship with your lead and request a warm introduction.
Fun fact – According to LinkedIn data, Sales Navigator users are 128% more likely to secure meetings and 70% more likely to win deals than free LinkedIn users.
With the acquisition of LinkedIn, Microsoft has fully-integrated LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 for Sales to create a single solution for modern sellers – Microsoft Relationship Sales. With LinkedIn integrated in CRM, you get advanced prospecting features and insights from LinkedIn, all in one single work space.
Now the leads that you save in LinkedIn can automatically enter into your CRM, loaded with insights. Additionally, mutual connections, commonalities, and other influencers within the same company become visible and in context with your sale. Features like InMail and connection requests can even be sent without opening any additional windows.
Say “Goodbye” to stale data
If you’ve ever sent an email blast, you know that lead data gets stale quickly. With LinkedIn and CRM integration, you never have to worry about data going stale as your leads update their profiles, change jobs, find new employers, etc.
Study after study finds that the average customer completes over half of the buying process before ever engaging for a sale. And with more and more professionals seeking business news on the trusted LinkedIn platform, savvy sales and marketing professionals are providing customers with the information they need where they are seeking them.
By – Gold Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner for implementation, enhancement and support, based in St. Louis, Missouri.