March 22, 2017 | 1 minute read

B2B Selling Online Starts with Listening

Passle

Providing insight to your clients is a key part of any online sales or 'social selling' tactic. As Malin Liden (SAP Social Selling Global Lead and VP Experience) mentions below, it is important to understand what your target audience is looking for i.e. if you sell a cyber security product but your prospective client is searching, commenting, sharing data centre content it is probably not the right target to put all your energy into.

With this in mind how can you gain a quick (free!) insight into your target clients:

1. Tweetdeck (here) - I highly recommend downloading (setup is seconds) and then create different columns based on interests, using the magnifying glass on the left panel. For example 'SAP Social Selling' (how I found this article).

2. Google Alerts (here) - A similar idea but instead of searching Twitter, Google Alerts searches....Google. You can have everything filtered by source, region, language etc. Perhaps a key client target and topic such as 'Coca-Cola Cyber Security' will pick up online conversations from the right person internally.

Both approaches fit well for account-based-marketing focused organisations. Beyond these options, starting to track what your users are doing on your site can become extremely interesting, especially if you do offer more than one product.

Whilst this technology falls into the busy world of 'marketing automation' I would recommend talking with your marketing team first. There is often legacy technology in large firms that is being under utilised, probably because it never gained traction in the first instance and is now just a glorified email marketing tool.

Content plays a big role, but social selling starts with social listening. If you listen to your audience, then you’ll know what sorts of content will resonate with them. It also helps sellers map out other relationships and content related to that topic. You have to go where your target goes and then find out who they are already listening to. Then you follow that person to understand what other interesting conversations are happening. This gives sellers a sense of what topics are trending with prospects, and we produce targeted content off that intel. Then we send our sellers out with this content to look for conversations where they can engage in a very targeted and very thoughtful way that adds value to the dialogue.