SaaS social selling with Brand24

Tom
July 25, 2019 ・ 4 min read

It comes naturally that social selling is a must-do sales tactic for SaaS companies. After all, it’s the Internet where you acquire customers via various online channels: organic, e-mail marketing, content marketing, paid advertising, or video marketing. Make sure you cover all its corners, including social media. The way to do it is through social selling.

Adryanne is asking on Twitter for CRM recommendations.

As a CRM SaaS business doing social selling, you will be able to spot and such queries, reach out and close deals.

Social selling has numerous advantages over other sales techniques.

  • Provides incomparably better customer experience 
  • Delivers higher conversion
  • Generates more informed customers of higher livetime value

Social selling has many layers to it: from setting up and optimizing social media profiles, joining relevant groups, to building a network of connections.

While we cannot help you with all of them, we can surely help you with one inherent aspect of social selling – finding customer queries asking for your product online.

How does it work?

Using Brand24, you will monitor some general customer queries as your keywords, for example looking for.

Next, you will use internal search to look for relevant queries within the general queries you already you monitor.

How to do it?

1. Create a project for social selling

As keywords, provide questions consumers might ask online, for example:

  • Looking for
  • Can anyone recommend
  • Can anybody recommend
  • Can someone recommend
  • Can somebody recommend

2. Save your project

Brand24 now starts collecting all online mentions of the customer queries

3. Open your project and go to the Mentions tab

This is where your mentions arrive, where the internal search is and where you can create filters to quickly access saved search patterns.

4. Use the internal search

In the Mentions tab, go to the search box where you will look up keywords strictly connected to your business.

The internal search supports Boolean search – it means you can use search operators to search more precisely, for example:

  • {is}
  • {or}
  • {not}

Assume you run a CRM SaaS business. Then, your keywords for finding relevant customer queries would be something like this:

  • crm {or} customer relationship management

This is how you find customer queries relevant to your business.

5. Save your search patterns as Filters

With Filters, you can save your search patterns and quickly access them when you open Brand24, or use them in notifications.

As you establish the right keywords to find consumers looking for your product, save them. To save your search, go to the right of the Mentions tab and click Save current filter.

Your saved filter will appear in Saved filters section.

6. Set up notifications

With notifications you stay up to date with new queries being published on the Web. You don’t need to open Brand24 and look for them manually.

There are two kinds of notifications that will work good in this scenario:

  • Slack notifications
  • Email notifications

Slack notifications

  1. Inside your project for social selling, go to Integrations and choose Slack.
  2. Choose a project.
  3. Choose a filter.
  4. Click Add Slack integration.
  5. Choose a Slack channel.
  6. Click Authorize.

There you go. New mentions will arrive to one of your Slack channels. Like this:

Email notifications

  1. Inside your project for social selling, go to Project settings.
  2. Go to the Notifications tab.
  3. Click Add more notifications.
  4. Choose an email address you want notifications to arrive to
    • Choose frequency between:
      • Real time
      • Every hour
      • Every six hours
      • Every 12 hours
      • Once a day
      • Every week
      • Every month
    • Choose the filter
    • Choose the number of new mentions to trigger notification
    • Tick Email
    • Click Save

From now on, you’ll be receiving email notifications about new mentions containing customer queries.

What’s next?

As everything is set up and relevant customer queries arrive to your project, you can take care of reaching out to your prospects.

Just before this, make sure your social media profiles look tip-top. 

  • Use a professional picture that inspires confidence
  • Use a timeline image if possible 
  • Write a short bio 
  • Link to your business website

Connect

As everything seems to be in place, you can start reaching out to people looking for the product you offer, or, as sales jargon calls them, to prospects. 

In order to approach a prospect (what a dehumanizing term, isn’t it?), you need to craft an appropriate message, delivered either as a private message, or a comment. In any case, it’s not that obvious. There’s a few reasons for it.

First of all, some people will consider this form of reach-out creepy. No wonder as not everyone enjoys being approached by strangers. You’ll never know until you try.

Be delicate.

Secondly, selling by not being salesy might not come easy to every sales person. Social media is where people expect friendly, loose and social conversations. A long, pushy and one-size-fits-all sales pitch is the last thing they want to see in their social media. 

Don’t be pushy.

Feel free to ask us for help

If you have any problems, questions, or uncertainties, don’t hesitate to contact our legendary customer support.