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tags: A2, Prospecting
---
# Introduction: The art of social selling
## The why
Once only a nice-to-have, social media has become a must-use channel in a high-performing sales professional’s toolkit.

:::info
:bulb: 75% of buyers use social media to research and become well-informed about the vendors they choose to work with. **This makes social selling an imperative when selling B2B!**
:::

Why use social media? **In short, because it works: 98% of sales reps with more than 5,000 LinkedIn connections meet or surpass their sales quotas, according to Sales Benchmark Index.**

Koka Sexton is a recognized social marketing expert, former head of social selling at LinkedIn and a social selling innovator. He gives a brief introduction to what social selling is really about and why you need to learn to master it 👇

{%youtube tHRX1NH-UzY %}

 
## The what
Ok, you know that social selling is a key component to how modern B2B sales is done. Now you may wonder:

**:bulb: What does social selling actually mean?**

Social selling is a bit of a buzzword. It can mean different things to different people. **In essence, it's establishing a presence on social media platforms to attract and interact with relevant leads.**

Here's how to do social selling right:
:::info
**The social selling process**
1. You craft a **compelling profile and regularly post and interact with interesting content** that's attractive to your target audience
2. Gradually, you become a **trusted expert** in the subject matter
3. This brings you **inbound** leads who directly approach you
4. It also makes your job easier when contacting **outbound** leads, as you have a strong profile and content they find interesting
:::

[This guy](https://www.linkedin.com/in/realsamnelson/) and [this guy](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christiankrausesalesforce/) are great examples of social selling done right (make sure to follow them!)

It's about establishing a social presence that allows you to connect with inbound and outbound leads.

Easy, right? Let's see how to bring it to life 👇

 
## The how
As many before you have done, you might be wondering... great, but where do I start? 🤔

In the following lessons, we're going to take you step by step through the social selling process.

1. **First, we're going to show you how to become a trusted expert,** by consistently posting and interacting with great content that adds value and resonates with your target audience.
2. **Then, we will focus on showing you how to generate actual outbound leads** on LinkedIn, our favourite and most widely used B2B social network.

*And what about inbound leads??*

Continuously posting and interacting with great content will attract great leads... in time. This will likely not happen overnight.

Regardless, we want you to be ready to do so! **For this reason, in this course we will also show you how to deal with inbound leads.**

Ready? Let's go!
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