Winning the Challenger Sale, Episode 2: Social Selling: Your Secret Weapon in 2022: A Wrap Up

Our popular Winning the Challenger Sales Series is now entering its third season. This monthly live webinar invites sales professionals and commercial leaders to join us Thursdays at 11 AM ET as we open up the Challenger™ playbook.  

More than just a webinar series, sellers, managers, coaches, and sales leaders can get practical advice and actionable insight for the day-to-day execution of the skills and behaviors proven to win in complex selling and buying environments.

Our second episode with Mike Randazzo and Jen Allen aired live on March 10 and covered “Social Selling: Your Secret Weapon in 2022.”

So, what is Social Selling? Social Selling is a marketing strategy that allows your organization to target business prospects on social media and develop a network of potential leads from those posts.

Throughout the Social Selling webinar, Jen and Mike shared tactical advice on how Challenger brings the Challenger choreography to life in social, tips and tricks for your social presence and content, as well as pitfalls you can avoid and best practices you can start doing right away to bring a credible source of insight to your customers.

To kick off the webinar, Mike and Jen shared an interesting stat: You only have 5-6% of your customer’s attention, and even if you have it, you’re probably asking the wrong question. Double bad news, right? Surprisingly – no. The reason customers are out there is to learn— to seek out opinions or facts—not buy.

“Today’s buyer journey is rarely linear,” say Mike and Jen, “and buyers are learning without us. Rather than move left to right along a purchase process, customers seek validation and input from a variety of sources—both internal and external.” To corroborate this, Challenger’s analysis of buyers shows that 83% of the buying group’s time is spent without the seller (i.e. meeting with the buying group, researching independently online or offline).

While many sellers respond to this trend by turning up the noise (i.e. more emails, more cold calls), a small segment of sellers understand that customers are actively seeking to learn about the problem they’re looking to solve in social channels – which means you should sell your prospective customers on the value of your company or the value of your solution.

Sellers need to change the goal. Instead of selling when your customers are trying to learn, teach when your customers are trying to learn.

By using social content, you build mindshare with potential buyers to increase the likelihood that your company will be top of mind when a non-buyer becomes a potential customer of your products or services.

So, what are some social tips to get started today?

1. Update your profile.
2. Set a weekly connections goal.
3. Comment/engage with other posts.
4. Set a calendar invite to write at least 1 post a week.
5. Build your reframe.

Concerning that last tip, “Build your reframe”, near the 15-minute mark of the webinar, Mike and Jen talk about leading with customer problems and insights—that your simple social posts need to be Surprising, Sizable, and Solvable (the 3 S’s). And around the 22-minute mark, the hosts share a social content cheat sheet, which is headlined by 4 pillars: Posting, Sharing, Commenting, and Connecting.

In a nutshell, as Jen and Mike point out: “Sellers should support the learning journey in social media by teaching not selling, sharing content that is helpful, and attracting customers to learn not buy.”

The Challenger way of thinking is to lead with insight, a way of thinking. The customer’s main question is asking whether you’re going to help them on their journey . . . and that answer should always be a resounding “yes.”

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Our next webinar, which is on the second Thursday of every month, is “Email Pitfalls to Avoid,” which will air live on April 14. Register for this episode and the full series here.

If you missed this webinar on Social Selling, you can watch it here.

Want more ideas on how to win? Catch the latest Winning the Challenger Sale podcast here.