0:00
Alina Dallal
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our webinar, how to get your sales team's buy in for social selling. I'm your host today. I'm Alina Delal, the content Marketing manager here at Oktopost. And I also have Yara here with me from Team Oktopost. Hi, everyone. So we absolutely love questions. You can go ahead and drop them in the chat once we get it enabled and we'll get to them at the end. And don't worry, you'll all receive a copy of the recording after the webinar. So today we're talking about how you can secure your sales team's buy in for social selling. As marketers and social media managers, we understand the impact social media can have on lead generation and sales. It's a powerful tool for building credibility. And research shows that decision makers have turned to social media to guide their purchasing decisions. But for social selling to succeed, our sales teams need to fully embrace it. After all, the future of B2B sales is on social media. In fact, 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to engage with sales professionals who are recognized as industry thought leaders on social platforms. So today we'll show you how to position your sales team for success in social selling and how you as a marketer, can secure that key role in shaping the strategy. So to help us do that, I brought the true experts from LinkedIn and Dutronics to share practical tips on how to get your sales team on board with with social selling. And when I say they are experts, you really will be blown away. So let's dive in and start by introducing everyone. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and your background? Alejandra, I'm going to start with you.
1:35
Alejandra Camacho
Thank you so much. Hi, everybody. So I am Alejandra Camacho. I'm a senior client solution manager at LinkedIn for the marketing side. So what I actually do is just consult a very selected group of clients on how to really present their brand and get the most out of their LinkedIn marketing ads. And my background is actually also on sales, acquisition and marketing field marketing and, you know, performance marketing. So over 20 years working on the field, trying to acquire new clients. So I'm really excited about the topic today. Thank you.
2:17
Lena Weber-Reed
Amazing.
2:18
Alina Dallal
We're so excited to have you here. Lena, would you like to introduce yourself?
2:22
Alejandra Camacho
Sure.
2:23
Lena Weber-Reed
Thank you so much for having me today. I'm Lena Weber Reid. I'm the UK Marketing and Communication Manager for Dutronics. We are a global IT services company. My background's very Much in social media marketing. I've been working as a social media marketer for businesses, mainly from a strategic perspective 4 for the last 15, 18 years. I'm very much B2B marketer and my background is in the services industry and manufacturing.
2:53
Alina Dallal
Amazing. I'm genuinely so excited to have you guys and I can't wait to share all your knowledge that I've luckily got to hear from you. So we're going to dive into the first question. What is social selling and why is it so important for B2B brands today? Alejandra, I'm going to start with you.
3:11
Alejandra Camacho
So social selling is actually a way for us to really connect with your potential clients in the future and it is to a way to also humanize the company that you're working for or that you own. I mean, we have everything across the board right now and the idea behind it is because sometimes B2B tends to be a little bit more dry and corporate and having a little bit of a face a person behind it will really connect in a. In a better way. The social selling aspect of it is important across the board, so it shouldn't be only dedicated for the C level people, but it should be implemented across the company in a. In. In a strategic way.
4:03
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And Lena, how would you define it?
4:07
Lena Weber-Reed
Pretty much exactly as Alejandra has said already, this is about how can you engage your future buyers when we know across all industries in B2B that most of the people we can sell to in the future are not looking right now. They're not looking to buy, they're not looking for a solution. They don't really want to engage with vendors. So how. But how can we get them now so that when they're ready to buy and move into that buying stage, they remember us and we're, you know, the people they're going to consider, they're going to put on their imaginary list of vendors and that's by building relationships. That's by sharing content and offering value for free upfront right now, regardless of their buying intention. So that you have that kind of relationship in place.
4:57
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And having those relationships in place is so important. I'm going to move over to the next question. Lena, I'm going to ask you because I think sometimes these concepts can become a bit intertwined and a bit confusing. What is the difference between social selling and employee advocacy?
5:12
Lena Weber-Reed
Employee advocacy is something you deploy across your whole team so you get all your colleagues involved. So this is very much about reach and volume. How can you get your company in front of as many people as possible. So if you think about the content strands that you'd be using, they'll probably be quite general. It'd be something about employer, brand. What is your company doing for its employees? It'll be more general. On a kind of broader level, social selling is much more strategic and precise. How can you engage your buyer Persona? What is that audience like? What do they find interesting? What kind of content would be relevant to them? What kind of value can you add to them? So it's a bit more precise, a bit more planned, evolves, fewer people, but in principle, it's about reaching people on social media.
6:04
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I think you explained the differences so clearly. And something I'd also add is that if you have an employee advocacy in place already, you can use that as a starting point to provide your sales teams with content for social selling. But we know that becoming a thought leader on social media doesn't happen overnight. And we also know that sales teams have their eyes set on one goal.
6:23
Alejandra Camacho
Right.
6:24
Alina Dallal
And that's obviously to sell. Um, so how can we explain to our sales counterparts that social selling is worth their time? Lena, what are the benefits for sales teams? And while we're here, how does it help us?
6:36
Lena Weber-Reed
I always give them exactly this answer, right? There's a benefit for the company and there's a benefit for you. The benefit for you is pretty straightforward. You're building your reputation, your personal brand, you're building your. Your kind of standing among your peer group, and that is something you keep when you move on in your career. You know, that is the reputation you've built and you own that. But at the same time, it obviously also has an advantage for your company. If you think about how LinkedIn works, company posts don't really get organic. Company posts don't really get a lot of reach. So how do we get in front of the people we want to engage is through personal accounts and people's accounts.
7:20
Alejandra Camacho
Also.
7:20
Lena Weber-Reed
It's about trust building. Right. If I buying a, a product or a service of a person company, I want to know who these people. I want to get a feel for them. I want to get some kind of rapport. I want to understand who they are because I'm going to be dealing with them and I want it to be successful in my company. So these are kind of two distinct answers, I guess, about relationship building from a company perspective, but also for you and for the long term for both.
7:47
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. So I've got another question for you right now, so stay with me. Now that we understand the benefits that you've explained, how do you then get your sales team on board when you've launched programs like, how have you done it in the past?
8:00
Lena Weber-Reed
For me, the easiest way to do it, and this is usually her approach, is to see what is already in place. Most Companies will have LinkedIn Navigator licenses already, but very rarely already have a formalized program. Usually these kind of licenses sit with sales. Often salespeople expense them on their credit cards. We don't even know who has them and who doesn't. And because it's not formalized and because there isn't an objective to it, it's really difficult to tell if it's working or not. Is that investment in LinkedIn Navigator actually paying off? And this can be a really good starting point, coming in and identifying who is using these licenses already. Are these the right people? You know, you want people who are hunting, who are keen, who are going out, look actively looking for prospects, not people who are in the accounts team or maybe perhaps really senior people who just don't have the time to engage and focus on both organic LinkedIn and the social selling element of it. So this would be my first step. Have people already got LinkedIn navigator licenses? Are these the right kind of people? And then find a group of people you can work with to begin with and get the program up and running. Proof, proof that it's going to work. And then scale. That's usually how I'd approach it on a much smaller scale. If you work for a really small company, again, I choose maybe two or three champions. Look at your C suite. Or is your CEO perhaps the person that can tell that story, build those connections and build those relationships on a peer to peer, C suite to C suite level. Again, concentrate on few people, make it a success and then scale up.
9:44
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And starting with those right people that are going to be engaged and enthusiastic is really key. As you were explaining. Alejandra, I'm going to move over to you. Why should we encourage our sales teams to be active on LinkedIn for social selling?
9:58
Alejandra Camacho
Well, there, there is a very key point that Lena already mentioned is that a lot of people are not right now in the market active to buy at this very moment when you're trying to sell. So based on our statistics, only 5% of the buyers are in market and 95% will be some way in the future part of your, your market. And I'm going to throw you a couple of statistics here again. But there is also, Based on our LinkedIn research from the B2B Institute, we know that in the B2B space for sales, you need a buying group on average of 13 people. So 13 people are involved in this decision in am I going to buy this or not? And then again, the decision at the end of the day. Usually you would say, you would think, oh, I lose my sale to my competitor. But in actuality, we have found, based on our research, that around 70% of the deals fell through because not a competitor came with a better price, but because people were afraid to make a decision. So we call that actually fear of messing up. So people rather want to have trust in the decisions that they make. And this is the core of why we should encore encourage our sales team to be active on LinkedIn because it's not just as humanizing and creating a personality around the brand, but it's creating trust. And people buy from people at the end of the day. And the way that you can use LinkedIn for social selling is that you can reach out not only one buyer, the person that signs the contract, but you can actually involve at least those 13 people that are going to be making that decision at the end of the day. So that's why we should really encourage our, like Lena was saying, our top tier, let's start small and, and see from there.
12:12
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I love the data you threw out. We love to hear the statistics, and it's so true. You need that meaningful connection to avoid that fear or losing that deal. Because once they have that relationship with you, they have the trust solidified. It will make all the difference, and it's so important. Um, so I'm gonna move over to the next question. I'm interested to hear your answers to this. What training sessions do you run for your team and how do you then keep them engaged in a social selling program? Alejandra, I'm gonna start with you.
12:40
Alejandra Camacho
So usually, like. Like I was saying, on. On our program as LinkedIn and in the marketing field, we kind of select people that have the highest engagement rate on their product, personal profiles, and who has the. The most followers. And we try to bring all these people together, see what they do, what is actually the thing that is bringing that amount of followers, and on the other side, what is bringing that high engagement, and try to tailor down a workshop where we sit everybody together and we say, okay, you have been doing something very well, but we can improve on it. And what we do is just try to align their personality, their messages to what the company's message is. So this is really kind of. It sounds a little bit complicated. But it's really not that, not that of a bigger task is just see what are the topics that the person, the salesperson or the team is pushing out personally and what. And what is aligned to the company and see where we can really find that niche that people are looking for to, To. To. To. To connect. So I would say for the training session, prepare. Select your people very well and they try to stay true to the. To the person that you have selected. Don't push too much the narrative of the company. Let them be who they are.
14:10
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I think that's one of the most important tips also to give an advocate to let their social seller, to let their voice shine through so they feel like it's them, because that is the most important part of it and building the connection. Lena, how about you? How have you done it?
14:25
Lena Weber-Reed
I think the reality of working in quite traditional B2B businesses is that you don't often have people who have a big LinkedIn following. You know, you might have people who, and I have an active profile in it, but they, you know, you might not have the luxury of finding people who already know how to do it. So you might be starting from scratch, but I usually do two, two training sessions and the first session is on organic LinkedIn. Before we even talk about LinkedIn Navigator, before we go into social selling, it's about your profile. How do you set up your profile? And this isn't about how can you brand it or how can you represent Teutronics. It's more about how can we highlight who you are, what your strengths are and what. Alejandra, as you're saying, how, how can we highlight what they're doing already to our customers that our customers or potential customers would find relevant. So it's about that. It's about showcasing to them how they can tweak the content. They're already sharing, what good content sharing looks like, teaching them that engaging actively on LinkedIn is probably more important than posting yourself all the time. It's also sort of setting the expectation that especially if you're starting from. From zero or near zero, it's gonna take some time. You're not. You're not gonna post for two weeks and get six DMS with people asking for our services. That's completely unrealistic. So you kind of go through this, the wallet, the valley of death of three months of not. Not getting any engagements, not getting anything. And that's when so many people get disappointed. But if you kind of set that expectations, that expectation to begin with, kind of Explain it'll take some time. This is a long term program, it works. And only then that's when I run a second training session on how to use Navigator, how the, how to use different features that Navigator offers. But these are the kind of two things. How do you optimize your profile? How does organic social work? What's good storytelling? How long is it actually going to tell you and be honest about it? And then how does Navigator work?
16:38
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And this thing you just said at the end there about being honest about it, that's the main part. Them knowing it's not going to happen overnight, it's not going to change, it's over time. And explaining right from the beginning and supporting them throughout the process is also something that's going to make the biggest difference and things so important when you're doing these training sessions. Lena mentioned about your profile and Alejandra, I want to open this question up to you and to drill into it a little bit more. How should a sales professional's profile and posts look like on social media?
17:10
Alejandra Camacho
So one thing that we have to think about is that our LinkedIn profile is not static. It's not your CV. It's not something that is going to be. If you're going to do social selling, it shouldn't look like a CV. First of all, actually your LinkedIn profile, you can visualize it as your digital business card. It should really tell the people that see your profile who you are and what you do and what you stand for and what industry do you work for. It should really convey in very basic terms what do you do. So for example, at the beginning I said my role is senior client solution manager that doesn't tell anybody what I do. So I don't have that as the title on my profile. I actually have B2B marketing consultants for clients, for enterprise clients in there. You see. Okay, I can, I can understand a little bit better what she does. So try to make it, break down what you do and make it understandable for other people and don't be afraid to post something. Like Lena was saying, look, nobody is going to get thousand likes after a week or a month or a year of posting. That's a very slow process. And there is something that we should not feel ashamed or be on, you know, lose courage or anything like that. But if you are having difficulties, to start from fresh, something that you can do to ease into it is to start commenting and try to see like am I, what are my views on this? I do. Or you see something that you really like and you repost it with some comments above it. I would say that's the way that you could start when you're trying to create your social media or your social selling with your profile.
19:16
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And it can help you bring, build that presence and meet more people and grow your network. And you said before that your LinkedIn profile is like your digital business card. And I love that because it's so important. You want to get the main message across that you want your target audience to understand, you want them to understand what you do and. But more important importantly, how you can help them. So thank you for going through that because I feel like there's a lot of useful tips. Everyone can go and take their sales teams. The next question I want to ask both of you, what are some of the common pitfalls that marketers fall into when trying to gain their sales teams buy in? Alejandro, I'm going to start with you on this one.
19:54
Alejandra Camacho
One of the things that I definitely see on one side is it looks daunting, like, what am I gonna do? You're gonna give me a schedule. I have to post every day. I don't have enough to say. So I would say don't feel like you have to do it every single day. You don't have to really make a whole big schedule of what you have to do. I would say start small commenting, build from there. What, analyze what has worked for you and how can your marketing team support you as a salesperson? What can you do together to bring. To bring you to the. To the next level? You already did the trainings. Like Leona was saying. You have now a plan. Now let's work on it and be flexible to change both marketers and sales. On the other side that I see some pitfalls from the marketing side is that they are way too focused on the branding and the PR message and they're quite unflexible on. On messaging. So I would say if you're going to let your sales team be part of social selling, you should allow them to be themselves. Of course, you can give them a guide what to say, what to avoid, and of course, be quite strict on what to avoid. But try to let people breathe and be themselves on LinkedIn.
21:29
Alina Dallal
Absolutely super important. And Lena, how about you?
21:33
Lena Weber-Reed
Yeah, Alejandra, you kind of mentioned the big problems. I think I'd probably add that you might often get salespeople trying to shortcut the process. So I kind of get into it. They start posting a little bit. It doesn't really get any traction. And Then they just start hammering the emails. That is not social selling. So I think this is a big problem that even you've done some, some really good solid training and you're focused on the organic side of it. People still kind of go out and try to kind of jump the months off connection building, community building, adding of value and kind of go straight into it. So I, you know, what I've always done in the past is have regular meetings with my sales team in the beginning, weekly, bi weekly to talk to them one on one. What's working, what's not working, you're struggling with. What's the problem? Tell me, ping me. If you don't know how to comment on this, let me know because I'm looped into how we want to position ourselves. I know how we would respond from a company's perspective. I can give you some pointers, I can give you some tips if you're struggling. So kind of preempting that sort of gap that they fall into. Just have touch points all the time, keep your doors open.
23:00
Alina Dallal
And just to add to what both of you are saying and you're saying keep the door open the entire time, it's really important when implementing this, not to implement it and walk away. You're going to need to be there the entire time. As you said, both of you said you need to be there for feedback. It's super, super important and it will really make the difference and that's a big hurdle that you want to avoid. So I want to ask Lenny, you mentioned before and I feel like it deserves its own section but so we know that social selling isn't just posting content on social media. It's about building these meaningful relationships which what we've spoken about and engaging with comments and connecting with like minding like minded professionals and personalizing your outreach. So what tips do you sales teams to help them do this effectively?
23:44
Lena Weber-Reed
Alejandra has already touched on that. But your biggest asset is being yourself because nobody else is. You're coming to this with your, your own unique experience, having worked in sales, of understanding the industry, of understanding better than most other people what your customers, what your target audience really wants, their pain points, the problems they have. And that's the conversation you're going to focus on. You in your perspective, you're coming in and you're having a conversation with people ideally. So I really think that's, that's the most important aspect you can, you can ask your sales team to bring. Just be yourself, don't be afraid of being yourself. That's the biggest, the biggest asset you can bring. And aside from that, I think it's just salespeople or often I find that salespeople understand this concept when I compare it to an event. Imagine you go to a big expo, you have a store and you just natural start talking to people. You wouldn't be afraid or nervous about it because that's exactly the same thing, just digital, just on social media. But it's exactly the same thing that often helps to kind of understand what they should be doing.
25:02
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I love that comparison and it's such a good one because they understand what that means. So for a lot of them that don't have experience in posting on social media or how marketing works, it's a very good way to compare it and show it to them in a way that they can understand and digest in terms of their role. So I love that comparison. Alejandra, I'm going to move over to ask you this question. I'm really excited to ask you. What features does LinkedIn have that can help with social selling that our listeners can use in their own social selling programs and takes their sales sales teams?
25:31
Alejandra Camacho
Well, Elena already actually kind of sprinkled it in so across the, the conversation. But there is of course on one spectrum we have Sales Navigator. This is like the full blown tool for, for salespeople. It is, it has, it is behind a price. So there is like a little firewall on that one. But if it is a large corporation or even if it is a medium sized company, you can connect it to your CRM and you can really work on your ABM campaigns and have all those little features that hunting land, expand. You can have all of that included into the Sales Navigator. Now if we go to the other side of the spectrum, one thing that we have available for everybody, which is actually for free and you don't have to even have premium, is to be a creator on LinkedIn. And being a creator means that actually you can have your own articles and you can write your own stuff. You can actually have your mini webinars, your mini podcast on LinkedIn. So that's really something that you can do right now. You go to your LinkedIn profile, you go to your settings in your profile page and you just enable creator mode and you have access to all of this. One thing that a lot of our social selling teams start with is creating articles. Because one key thing is that when you're talking to the audience, you're trying not to shout into the voidness of anything you want to Provide something you want to share knowledge. So that's why long formats of content like an article are very good. And once you have like a theme around it, you can create actually a newsletter as a single person. So definitely that's a feature that I would encourage people to do. If you are more like a writer, if you are more like a talker, a little bit more like, more like me, definitely I would encourage you to use the video features. So it is slowly being rolled out across the globe. So maybe some of you have it, some of you don't have it yet, but there is a video tab on LinkedIn where you can really scroll up and see all the videos. So just go talk to the camera and talk about what you want to do. And lastly, one of the features that personally I find the most underrated is like Lena is saying, like you have a conversation with people like going back and forth and sometimes you just want to jump on a call and solve the issue. But it is like, oh, should we schedule a call? Give me your number. Or do you have zoom teams? What do you have? Actually LinkedIn has a feature on messages. You can go to messages and on the top, on your phone or on the desktop, I'm talking in the desktop form. You go to the top of the message on the right and there is a little video camera with a plus and you can create an instant video call with somebody in a native LinkedIn video form. And you can just jump in a call right now or schedule a call with somebody that is actually engaging with you. So this is like I'm showing you like the broad stuff that we can do. There are a bunch of other things that you can actually utilize LinkedIn with. But just keep in mind what is true to yourself. If you're a writer, be a writer. If you're more, you know, you want your numbers, show the numbers. If you're a talker, don't be afraid. Talk to the camera. Try to find what better works for you.
29:16
Alina Dallal
Yeah, that's such valuable and helpful advice and the phone call and I'm not sure if a lot of people know about that with the video calls. That's super helpful. So I'm going to move over to the last question now. You've both worked with sales teams to support them through social selling programs. You've experienced the successes, you've experienced the challenges and you've overcome them. So the last question I want to ask both of you is from your experiences, what advice would you leave our audience with for getting buy in for social Selling. Oh, Lena, I'll start with you.
29:49
Lena Weber-Reed
I like to set really, really clear expectations. I've even gone out and asked for sort of mini sla, the cursor agreements between sales and marketing so that everyone knows in writing what they can expect from marketing. X amount of posts, content, training sessions, feedback sessions, monthly meetings, we have help with reporting, whatever. But at the same time, I also have clear expectations from the sales team. X amount of time spent on the platform. I want you to post this many times, I want you to leave this many comments, whatever. However you define this program, put it in writing, you both sign up to it and if it makes it so much easier to have that awkward conversation when things don't quite work out the way that you thought it should have worked, you can kind of come back to what you've agreed to and have a conversation around it. Also, if you have salespeople who for whatever reason don't stick to it, you know, you can kind of approach them, say, look, this doesn't really work out. I want to give your Navigator license. Someone else, I want someone else on the program and it makes it a lot easier to have that. So again, really clear expectation setting. Be completely honest that this is a long term program. This is not going to translate into anything in two months, three months, maybe not even six months. You know, I work in, in industry sectors with very, very long buyer journeys and sales cycles. So this is a long term program. You have to be realistic about it. But also, you know, talk to your sales team about what success actually looks like. What do they want out of that? Well, success is such a. Can be interpreted in many different ways. Maybe it's about contacts you've made, conversations you started. Again, it'll be really specific to your industry, to your audience, to your potential buyer group. Yeah, I think honesty is the most important thing element to this on both sides. It's a, it's, if it works, it's great. And it's been one of my favorite programs for marketing and sales really work together.
32:08
Alina Dallal
Amazing. And Alejandra, do you have similar advice? Do you have anything different? What would you leave us with?
32:14
Alejandra Camacho
I think the best thing is sales and marketing should work together. Like Elena was saying, it should be a collective effort because at the end of the day the person that is receiving the information is not going to say, Alejandra said this. It was LinkedIn, you know, so this is something that we have to keep in mind when we are creating this. Because when people are making those B2B buyer decisions, there are Two things that are the most important ones, brand reputation and price. Do I know this brand if I already know it? It's kind of an easy, easy decision. There is one of the biggest slogans that there are like, I don't recall exactly, but it's. Nobody got fired for, for hiring IBM. So the idea behind it is that people trust other people. I trust that if I'm going to talk with somebody from IBM, IBM, I trust them, you know. So try to create that trust. And when you're doing those posts and everything, don't be, don't be too, how do I say this? Don't be, don't try to be anybody else. Be yourself. Because when you are creating this social selling Persona, you, you should keep in mind to be empathic. Empathic, you should be authentic and use a lot of logic because what we see on LinkedIn is that people are quite logical and rational and they want facts. So when you are talking to people, try to stay on those three, you know that, that trust triangle, let's say.
34:03
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I love the advice you've left us with, both of you. So with that we're going to move over to the Q and A. I can see some questions have already come through, through. So if you haven't dropped your questions, drop them in now. We'll spend around 10 minutes now on the Q and A. And if you want to continue the conversation, please feel free to connect us on LinkedIn. You can scan the QR codes up on the screen and it will take you to our profiles. So we have a question that came in from Lauren. She says do you have any specific examples or tactics you use to get your sales team members to start posting on their own channels? I create graphics copy for them, but they don't want to share. So do either of you want to take a stab at this one?
34:46
Lena Weber-Reed
I can, I can talk to that. I, I will probably start smaller because I, you know, to some salespeople, having to post a graphic is already a lot. So I would really encourage your sales team to start with really simple post text only. You know, just really, really, really simple. If, if even coming up with a text only post too much, maybe you have a really good solid brand LinkedIn account. Get them to share a post with their own commentary or get them to share a post from another relevant person that would be interesting to their target audience with a commentary. Get them in small or if even that is too much, get them to comment. Just get them to comment on some posts, get them to set them a task I want you to like or engage with five posts this week. Start them with like baby steps. I think that could be, that might be an easier way in. Generally, I have to be honest, I very rarely give the sales team graphics or pre prepared content because again, it's about them being themselves and having their own perspective and, you know, showing their personality. It's not so much for me about them sharing company assets or branded assets. It's really just for them being themselves.
36:19
Alina Dallal
Yeah. Alejandra, is there anything you'd like to add?
36:22
Alejandra Camacho
I would agree a lot with, with, with your last point, Lena. So I think everything you said, plus one, but I want to expand on that one. And it is, I would go back and ask why don't they want to really share it? And I think that comes back to the point of authenticity. It feels like I wouldn't say it myself. I would recommend you in this regard mainly to maybe post those stats and all that information on your company page and encourage people to repost it and put their two cents around it, but let them run with their own stuff and see what does it work. What have they posted that had good engagement and try to support them on that avenue.
37:18
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. And I would add if, if they don't want to share and you, you ask them why, which is what you're saying, and that then you can maybe talk to them about what they want to post. So you sit with them and they say, I want to talk about this and you can sit with them and help them write it. So really having that communication with them will make the difference when it comes to them wanting to share. We also have another question and if we don't know them by heart, that's fine and I can follow up with you, Lauren, but she asked, do you have some specific statistics that I can mention to the sales team to prove that social selling works? And I know up on the LinkedIn website, which I can send over to you, it says 51% of social selling leaders are more likely to reach their quota and 78% of social sellers outsell their peers who don't use social media. So those two are very powerful ones. I don't know if you guys remember any off by heart, but I can follow up. That's okay. I can follow up with you and send you some more of these stats. The next question we have from Rod is how frequently should Sales post on LinkedIn? Leonard, you want to go for this one first? Alejandra, if you want to jump in
38:22
Lena Weber-Reed
after, feel free to, I think from My own experience of posting a lot on LinkedIn, on kind of building my own profile. Posting three to five times a week gives you probably results the fastest. Again, you have to be consistent and, and you have to kind of get a rhythm into it. Suppose roughly around the same time so that people will follow you expect your post at a certain time on a certain day. But the kind of, the more regularly and the more often you post kind of more the algorithm picks up that you are a regular content creator on a specific, specific topic, saying that if you don't have anything to say, then that's probably not the best strategy. So you really have to generally have something interesting to say for your target audience. You don't have to have a million different viewpoints. You can maybe just say two or three things that you really generally are an expert in, but say them, give them a different angle, give them a different kind of viewpoint and repeat them over and over. But yeah, my advice in my experience would be three to five times a week to begin with. See what works. Post at the same time, but only really do post if you have something to say. Definitely.
39:47
Alina Dallal
I think that's really important. Alejandra, is there anything you want to add to it? If not, you can move on to that.
39:52
Alejandra Camacho
I agree. Quality above quantity, that's really very important. Be consistent. Try to find as well if it is not the company branding, something that identifies yourself, something that you can, that a style or something that really can jump to the eye and make you identifiable because there is a sea of content. And don't be afraid to repeat yourself in different ways. So one time you have a static, a static image. The other time you have a video, try to jump around on formats and see which one is the most engaging one and then try to, you know, stick to it and experiment. I would say that's the biggest thing. And don't concern yourself that, oh, I didn't, I didn't do my post today. It's fine, do it tomorrow, but make it count.
40:49
Alina Dallal
The last question that we have here is from Maya. How would you advise on creating a guideline for a sales team on what to post and what not to post? I work for a regulated insurance company, so there needs to be specific guidelines on what they can say.
41:06
Lena Weber-Reed
Happy to talk about that. Having worked in very heavy regulated finance before, I feel your pain there. I, you know, obviously you can't kind of talk about your service offering or your product offering, but you can talk about your customer pain points. I don't know what kind of type of insurance you're working and who you're selling into. But, you know, insurance for me is quite, there's quite obviously a lot of clear pain points and how people buy insurance, what kind of business outcomes or outcomes in general they want to have. That's something your salespeople can definitely address and talk to what are the problems that people are facing, but also talk about the kind of the category, entry points. What prompts a person or a business to buy your insurance? What happens that they suddenly go from, I'm not interested, I'm not looking for a vendor. Oh, but now I am like, what is that? Try and work that backwards. What happened beforehand that prompted people to start looking? So very generally speaking, what are people's pain points? What prompts them to buy? I think this is stuff that you can talk about, but also about your company. What is, you know, your sales team, what is the experience like working for you? You want to give people a feeling of that culture and, and what kind of relationships you guys have because ultimately you want them to build a relationship with you.
42:42
Alina Dallal
Yes, absolutely. And Alejandra, is there anything you'd like to add to this question?
42:47
Alejandra Camacho
I would align, you know, the company's vision and mission and what are the core topics of the company and try to, you know, move from there some key subject, if it is sustainability or if it is, I don't know, in insurance, you know, trends that people are seeing. Be more of a overall speaker around the topic, be a thought leader on this specific type of insurance than just talking about the specific products. Because I understand that you can fall into the pits and falls of. We don't, we don't offer that. We are not allowed to say this. So be clear on what people should not be talking to. But it is like, oh, don't, don't think about the blue elephant. You're going to think about the blue elephant. I would say more like focus on what can you say and guide them through it and, but still give them room to, to be themselves. Just build something from your mission and vision first.
43:56
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm also going to add to this one, as both of you are saying in your trainings, you can really guide them and really drill down and explain to them what they can speak about, what they can't speak, speak about. And always be open. Make sure you're always open if they need to come to you and ask you more questions. This thing, I'd add shameless plug here. But if you're using, if you're in a very regulated industry. And you're going to use an advocacy platform to. To provide this content for them, because they can't always go off and write their own content. With Oktopost, you can ban keywords, you can ban phrases, and you can make sure that that doesn't happen and that you stay compliant and. And you meet your industry regulations. So I thought I'd just throw that one in there. So that brings us to the end of the Q and A and the end of the webinar. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. And a massive, massive thank you to Alejandra and Lena for sharing everything you have. I knew that you guys would smash this panel, and I've learned so much from you, so I'm sure everyone else has as well. So thank you.
44:54
Lena Weber-Reed
Thank you.
44:56
Alejandra Camacho
Thank you so much for having us.
44:58
Alina Dallal
Bye, everyone.
45:00
Alejandra Camacho
Bye, everybody. Thank you for your time.
