OREANDA-NEWS. June 06, 2016. As a sales leader, Social Selling is likely a new world for your SDRs (Sales Development Reps). So in this blog post, I want to provide some tips for the three Social Selling tactics, and how you as a sales leader can coach your SDRs to success.

Social Selling comprises three unique sales tactics:

1. Insights-based selling

2. Trigger-based selling

3. Referral-based selling

Insights-based Selling

Through insights-based selling, you’re shaping the buyer’s journey through content. You want to push buyers off their status quo, and get them to have a priority shift by sharing new ideas and insights.

Tactical Tip for SDRs: Every single deal, every single day, you need to leverage a new insight that can help buyer along their journey. To do this, you can use data from your marketing automation platform to determine what the buyer is interested in. But you have to understand where your buyer is on their journey and answer the questions they might have, for every deal, every day.

Coaching Opportunity for Sales Leaders: During your one-on-one calls with your SDR, you can have your sales pro show you, the sales manager, what insights they’ve been sharing, and how they’ve been leveraging insights in various situations. For Social Selling to take hold, 90% of a sales pro’s learning retention comes from teaching what they’ve learned—that is, when they can coach and train a leader on what they’re doing. So in your one-on-one’s, you want your sales pros to teach you what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

Trigger-based Selling

Tactical Tip for SDRs: One of the most effective ways of enhancing your trigger-based selling is to monitor job change alerts of all of your existing customers. At Sales for Life, we use this tactic regularly. When we see senior leaders leave the company they’re working for and migrate onto other companies that meet our ideal customer profile, we can now reach out to them and ask how they’re intending to deploy a solution they had at their previous company that our company was part of. You’re now opening a door at this new company because you have a trusted advocate who has done business with you before.

Coaching Opportunity for Sales Leaders: Role-play an existing customer. Find a company your organization has dealt with and look for senior leaders that have moved on. Together, you and your sales pro can craft the message, the stories, and the value proposition you want to get across. You want the sales pro to take advantage of these live triggers.

Referral-based Selling

Tactical Tip for SDRs: Leverage your university and college alumni. Your alumni are within your own personal sphere of influence and they can be extremely important. You can begin by outlining the companies your alumni are working for, and then gain introductions and work through the organizations based on a shared life experience from your university days.

Coaching Opportunity for Sales Leaders: Together with your sales pro, research the sales pro’s university alumni and start identifying hot spots around certain cities or companies. Then, start talking through some of the profiles of people who have shared life experience with the sales pro, and brainstorm:

  • How would you approach it?
  • How would you get into the door?
  • What is a funny story or memory that went on in your school that both of you can discuss?

Join me June 15-16 in NYC for Sales Machine where I’ll discuss this more on the Sales Development track! You can register at this link for an exclusive Sales for Life discount.

Jamie Shanks, CEO at Sales for Life, is one of North America’s leading social selling experts. He has personally built social selling solutions in nearly every industry, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 corporations. Before starting his first sales agency, Jamie was the director of sales at two SaaS software companies — Captive Channel Corp. and Firmex — building their businesses from infancy to profitability. After success at Firmex, he decided to help other technology firms build sales 2.0 models under the brand Shanks Group. Sales for Life is now the world’s definitive social selling training and coaching company.