Are you struggling to motivate your sales team to use LinkedIn? This is how “Social Selling as a Service” works.

In order to generate interest among your customers with content, B2B companies must adopt the customer’s perspective. To do this, you should proceed as follows:

1. Identify all relevant pain points for your target group that you can solve with your product.
2. Then identify the consequences of these pain points for specific job profiles that you would like to reach within your target group.
3. Next, quantify the results that your target group can achieve with your product, define barriers to purchase, and gather arguments to overcome these in your communication.
4. Finally, you collect references for your company.
5. These points can be used to develop an argument (a “message”) that generates direct product interest and, as a side effect, also delivers genuine and lasting awareness. The reason: the customer can now link the added value of the product they have learned about with your company name.We have standardized this process for our customers with our ReThink180 methodology and achieve 50-200% better performance than the LinkedIn Agency Benchmark with the content generated in this way.

You can use this messaging as a storyline for a wide variety of content formats—for our case, we’ve created “expert articles.” To do this, we’ve created a simple template consisting of the following elements:

• Summary of the article as an intro: If you answer the questions of why someone should read the article and what they can do afterwards right at the beginning, you will have given the reader the best possible introduction.
• Adaptable basic structure: Briefly describe the problem, then dive right into the solution and explain how your product can be used to solve it. Each article should end with a CTA (“call to action”). Include one or two more in the text to give interested readers with limited time an immediate opportunity to contact you.
• “Descriptive subheadings”: Many users initially scroll through the article to get an overview. Give them the opportunity to see what content you are specifically addressing when they skim the headlines.
• Social media visual with key message: Get to the heart of the matter to trigger a “thumbstopper effect,” meaning that decision-makers from your specific B2B target group will simply have to stop and read on.

This structure allows you to immediately generate interest and create lasting awareness because readers remember the solution to a problem that is important to them. This generates leads immediately because those who want a solution now will contact you.

In contrast to a general blog article, not only does the number of leads generated increase, but so does the quality of the leads. This is because if the customer already understands the added value they can achieve with a product, your sales team can enter the sales process directly (unlike when downloading a general white paper, for example).

These expert articles can then be easily customized for each employee by simply replacing the face in the social media posts, translating the article into another language, or adapting it to the target industry. This means that each of your sales employees has several articles of their own, including images, available for posting on LinkedIn without having to invest any time. We would be happy to take over content production for you, even for complex/highly technical products.

In the next step, the personalized content is targeted at the relevant audience—usually with 50-200x greater reach than an organic post:

1. First, an individual target group and campaign template is created for each sales employee in LinkedIn Campaign Manager, tailored to their sales territory and industry.
2. Then, the posts related to the employee’s expert articles are selected in Campaign Manager for promotion and then
3. delivered via paid advertising in the LinkedIn news feed to exactly the stakeholders who are relevant in the buying process – without any active involvement from your sales team.
4. Target groups can be created with a high degree of accuracy based on a wide range of criteria such as position, industry, company size, or even specific lists of target companies.Each employee is assigned an individual target group so that they appear as the sole author of the article within their cluster and are thus positioned as an expert.

Due to their wide reach, communication that is strongly focused on the pain points of the target group, and the description of attractive solutions and results, these posts generate not only direct inquiries but also a large amount of interaction, known as “social touchpoints.” This includes, for example:

• Likes
• Comments
• Profile visits
• Contact requests
• etc.

Together with our partner Teamfluence, we have developed an innovative solution that brings all touchpoints together in one software. The collected contacts are made available in a lead list (if you are interested, please contact us for a 30% discount code).

Leads can now be qualified either manually, with AI support, or fully automatically—not by your sales team, but by a separate team, which can also be provided by us if desired. Once a lead has been marked as positive, it is pushed to your CRM. We have also developed a standardized process with an interface and automation templates for different CRMs, which makes it very easy to transfer them to the CRM and create the corresponding contacts, companies, deals, and tasks.

The leads can now be contacted by the separate team (“I saw that you liked my colleague’s post on topic XY – what was it that interested you? Would you be interested in a quick chat with him about it?”). Direct calendar access allows you to schedule an appointment with the relevant sales representative and, of course, document it in the CRM system, including the relevant background information.

If you do not have dedicated internal resources for lead qualification, we can offer to take over the entire process of establishing contact and scheduling appointments completely externally.

With the approach described above, you can implement a social selling process without taking up any of your sales staff’s time or conceptual resources. Nevertheless, you will achieve many valuable goals:

• Visibility, reputation, and trust for your sales staff throughout your target customers’ buying center
• Additional appointments for your employees without them having to be active on LinkedIn themselves
• Higher response rate to emails from your sales staff
• Full focus on sales/closing
• Shorter sales cycles and higher closing rates

If your employees still do not want to make their profiles available for personal reasons or do not want to be on LinkedIn in general, you can also create and build ambassador profiles so that the process runs completely without your sales employees’ profiles.