Social Collaboration vs Social Selling

Social Platforms such as Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook can be an effective tool for finding new prospects or to get your message to potential buyers. However those tools will not help you to engage with your customers in the B2B environment or to guide you through the sales process.

Nowadays customers control the buying process and need to feel that they are understood. They want to feel engaged in all steps of the process. For this you need more than social platforms, you need enterprise social networks, collaboration platforms or even communities.

Those social platforms need to be placed in a secure environment where both customers and sellers can engage in the deal or project at stake. Post presentation documents, key stakeholders contact details, discussions and full history of the proposal can be hosted here instead of on individual mail boxes and folders. Not only will those collaboration platforms smooth the process and understanding of the ongoing deals they will also lead to better after sales account management. Besides using the platform only for customer and sellers interactions we can engage with other sales partners, marketing or product development when needed

In a nutshell; social platforms are a great tool for prospecting and creating brand awareness, but in the social era we will make a difference when we build collaboration platforms between employees, partners, prospects and customers !