Most articles and books about Social Selling relate to activities of a supplier using social media as an integrated approach to eventually offer products or services to prospective clients. But rarely this covers selling via partners.

Social Selling means for me a set of social media activities conducted by educated and enabled sales teams that create meaningful moments to build and nurture relationships.

From an indirect perspective, which are critical constituents of a great channel partner and how one can use that for social selling?

In business to business situations customers do not just purchase products; they buy an outcome or something that can help them overcome a challenge.

Sometimes these challenges or the required outcome cannot be achieved or overcome by the capabilities of a single supplier. That's why most vendors utilise the power of channel partners who can glue different solutions together to help the prospect overcome the mentioned challenge or achieve the desired outcome.

I call this a Triple Win Approach between the partner (Reseller, Referral, and Ecosystem), customer and the vendor revolving around solving customer challenges at the centre.

Channel partners could also create a social media ecosystem that allows listening to the target audience, learn about them, deliver the right content at the right time, and eventually pitch the product when the leads receive an adequate amount of nurturing.

There are various ways how vendors can help their partners to use Social Selling effectively:

1. Foster Engagement: Improve social media capabilities of partners through up-skilling and collaborating with them on social media.
2. Social Selling Program: Vendors talk about their topics and people confidently on social media showing how they understand the concerns of end customers.
3. Social Listening: Utilise various methods to actively listen to the market and use user-generated content (UGC) to build credible content together with the partner to develop a better understanding of each other for the benefit of prospective customers.
4. Employee Advocacy Program: Combine the capabilities of partners and vendors to post purpose-made content turning into conversations which further convert leads to deals.
5. Reverse activities: Engineer the process between vendor and their partners backwards to become a product evangelist. Check what worked and what didn't work. Work alongside the partner to create a successful workflow or a success model. Tweak and replicate it with other customers to enjoy lasting success based on great partnerships.

I talked about this topic at a presentation for a virtual conference hosted by Ampliz, a B2B Data Intelligence platform known across Asia Pacific. Now available as podcast, I shared the best ways to choose a partner based on the qualities to look for in a partner, benchmark their performance, and how to build a lasting mutually beneficial relationship. I also shared the key metrics vendors can use to measure the effectiveness of the channel partner's Social Selling activities, and how to work along with them to improve gradually.

Enjoy this episode on this link

Or listen directly on Spotify: