The Four Pillars of Social Selling: Pillar #2

Listening, the path to better understanding.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve shared information about the four pillars of social selling and creating an online brand and reputation for yourself.  If your brand and reputation is your foundation, listening is the framing of your social selling “home”.  Your frame (I.e., listening) sets the structure of your engagements.  It gives you a “framework” (do you like what I did there?!?) to set up your engagement on the platform with.  Listening is by far one of the easiest ways to learn about what clients and prospects are saying.  You can gain valuable insights into their needs, challenges, and interests. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of listening to your clients and prospects via social media and how it sets you up for the next pillar.

Understanding Needs and Challenges:

Social media provides a direct line of communication between businesses and their clients. By monitoring conversations, comments, and direct messages, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience's needs and challenges. Whether they're discussing pain points, seeking solutions, or expressing opinions, this feedback can be invaluable for improving your products or services. Through careful listening, you can identify trends, patterns, and common threads, allowing you to tailor your offerings and conversations to better meet the demands of your target market.

Don’t stop there:

Understanding the needs and challenges of your clients and prospects is a great starting point, but it isn’t the only thing that you can learn when you spend time listening.  If you read “between the lines” you can often get insights into the personality of the prospect, which can help you as you approach them.  Are they always using sports analogies? Perhaps they are always asking questions about a particular aspect of a solution – is it the financial side, or maybe more on the resource requirements?  Either way, this can give you great insight into how to be most relevant to them when you comment on something they’ve posted, make that first approach and/or in that first meeting conversation.

Look for ways to connect human-to-human:

When you’re reviewing their social media profiles, look for insights into who they are as a human being.  Do they volunteer with a kids or special needs charity? Perhaps they are on the board of a hospital?  These things give you great insight into what is important to them at a human level.  I would never condone using this information to manipulate the conversation, but if you have a similar interest or are just curious about their experience, you can leverage it to connect human-to-human.  When we connect on that human level, we build a great foundation for relationship, and sales is all about relationships.

In today's digital landscape, listening to your clients and prospects via social media is no longer optional; it is essential. Embrace the power of social media as a listening tool, and leverage the insights gained to propel your business forward. Remember, it's not just about what you say on social media but how well you listen.