Three ways to get C-level buy-in for your social selling campaign
In our recent blog post, we identified three roadblocks to successful social selling — lack of confidence, lack of expertise, and lack of senior management buy-in. As promised, we’re revisiting that third point to help you find ways to persuade your busy C-level managers to lead the way with social selling.
If buy-in is an issue for you, here are three messages you need to deliver to the board.
- Social selling isn’t sales
This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s important to get across to your C-levels that you’re not asking them to take part in a routine activity that might be best left to the sales team. Of course the sale is the ultimate goal, but social selling is as much about nurturing relationships as hitting sales targets, and this is where senior management can add — and already do — add value.
- You will make it easy for them
Show the board how easy it is for them to share the content you’ve prepared for them by committing to provide them not just with awesome content, but also pre-prepared soundbites and hash tags that they can copy, paste and send with minimal or zero edits. If they’re still not convinced, offer to run a four-week trial and dare them to demonstrate what a burden it is!
- They can help calm nerves
We talked about lack of confidence in the previous blog . Of course we’re not suggesting the salespeople themselves are shy and retiring, but they may not yet have confidence in social media as a means to nurture the sales funnel. When they see senior management putting out great imagery, provocative thought leadership and pithy commentary though, they’ll feel much more inclined to follow suit. Particularly when they see how easy it is (point 2).
C-levels hold massive sway — people will accept their connection requests and listen to what they have to say. Convince them their prime objective is not to sell, but to get the content out there and seen, and they should be more than willing to help. If you’re ready to plan and execute a social selling strategy the most reticent CEO can give the thumbs up to, please give us a call on 01628 622187.
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