The Truth About Social Selling and Its Role in Sales Enablement
"Social selling" attracts a lot of attention, and with it a lot of bad advice. Search the term and you find endless tips on building a social presence and tools that mine social networks for prospects' digital footprints. Meanwhile many sales teams struggle to keep their LinkedIn profiles up to date.
Social selling is not just salespeople connecting with buyers online, though that matters, or posting thought leadership, though that can help. It is using social media and technology to do faster and better what sales and marketing should already be doing.
The three foundations
- Know your customer at the macro level (industry, segment, account) and the micro level (the individual and their role in the buying group).
- Show deep understanding of their business needs and challenges.
- Engage with a compelling value proposition mapped to the first two.
If you are not doing those three well, social selling will not fix it. It will just deliver poor messages to more people, faster, and risk the relationship. If you have built a marketing blueprint on these foundations and run it through your demand generation programme, you are already gathering the data social selling needs.
Share everything with sales
Marketing's job is to immerse sales in what it has learned and show reps how to use it. Without context, reps go into first conversations blind, and guess who gets blamed when leads go nowhere. How much should you share with people famous for short attention spans? All of it. Did a social post bring someone to your site, where they downloaded two reports and read five articles about one industry challenge? Tell the rep. That background can be the difference between an interested voice and the click of a hung-up phone.
Then make sure reps know what to do with it. A connection request that says only "I'd like to add you to my professional network" wastes all the work that went into your value propositions. Give reps short, persona-specific messages and content they can share.
Social selling around ICE and G2E
The gambling industry's trade-show season shows social selling at its most practical. In the weeks before ICE in Barcelona or G2E in Las Vegas, supplier sales teams use LinkedIn and industry networks to book meetings with operators' CRM, product and compliance leads. The ones who succeed do exactly what the three foundations describe: they know which markets the operator holds licences in, which platform it runs, and what problem a new product would solve for it, and they lead with that rather than a generic invitation to "come and see our stand".
After the show, the same reps share session summaries, research and recaps with the people they met, from online casino groups to sportsbook brands, which keeps the conversation going until marketing's nurturing programme takes over. We set out a full before-during-after plan in ICE Barcelona and G2E Las Vegas as demand-gen events, and the bigger picture of selling to operators in iGaming B2B marketing.
Measure it like any other channel
Track meetings booked, opportunities created and revenue influenced by social activity, not followers or likes. If the numbers do not move, go back to the three foundations before you buy another tool.
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