How Can you Really Make Money on Social Media?

Before we begin, let’s take a look into some stats about selling on social media. 

According to LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index: 

• Social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with a lower social selling index
• Social sellers are 51% more likely to reach quota
• 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media

The data indicates people who use social media to sell are likely better off than people who don’t use social media to sell their good or service. 

More alarming sales statistics from Opt-In Monster

• 84% of C-Level executives use social media to make purchasing decisions
• Companies with consistent social selling processes are 40% likelier to hit revenue goals than non-sellers 
• 53% of customer loyalty is driven by a salesperson’s ability to deliver insights, often done through social media. 

How Selling Used To Be

The previous way of generating revenue was to cold call and cold email executives to book a meeting. The salesperson would meet with the executive, run a discovery call, and see if it was a mutual benefit to work together. 

With the rise of email automation and Apple’s feature of silencing unknown numbers, it’s harder than ever to book meetings and companies are starting to take notice. 

Sales is, to put it simply, a numbers game. 

When executives were putting together their revenue forecasts, they used math to come up with their targets based on growth expectations from their board of directors. Sales managers then broke down these revenue goals into small actionable steps for their sales reps to follow. 

Example: 

If Company A needs $1,000,000 in revenue and they have an average sales price (ASP) of $10,000, then they need to sell 100 units of inventory or subscriptions to achieve their goal. 

Say a sales rep is able to land 10 qualified meetings in a month with only 2 that result in a sale, that’s a conversion rate of 20%. 

Let’s do some quick and easy math – (100 units/20% qualified opportunity conversion rate) = 500 meetings. 

That means to sell 100 units of inventory, they would need 500 qualified meetings set to achieve their revenue goal. 

To set 1 meeting, it would take 100 cold emails – assuming the SaaS industry average of 1% conversion rate for cold emails (The VP of Growth at Drift had a blog post on Clearbit’s website). 

Quick and dirty math again – (500 meetings/1% conversion rate) = 50,000 emails. 

In simple english, it takes about 50,000 emails to reach your goal of 500 meetings to sell 100 units of inventory to reach your revenue goal of $1,000,000 with an ASP of $10k. 

The average sales rep sends about 36.2 emails/day. For 1 sales rep to send 50,000 emails, it would take them 1,381 days or 3.78 years. For a team of 5 sales reps, it would take 276 calendar days to send 50,000 emails. 

With only 252 working days in a year, it means that it would take a team of 5 sales reps over 1 year and 24 days to book enough revenue to simply hit their target. 

Don’t take it from me, but social media is way more effective than sending cold emails. 

A lead enrichment tool, ZoomInfo aggregated some stats on sales effectiveness: 

• Nearly 82% of buyers viewed between 5-8 pieces of content from a winning vendor
• 65% of buyers agree that vendor’s content has a significant impact on their buying decision 
• 80% believe their salesforce would be more productive with greater social media presence but ⅔ of companies have no social media strategy for their sales organization. 
• 61% of US marketers use social media for lead generation
• Social sellers generate 38% more opportunities than traditional sellers

What Can We Learn?

What are some of the key takeaways from analyzing the data? 

Simply put, you can do a few things to increase your sales on social media. 

1. Built a lead list of targeted ideal customer personas (ICP’s). You can do this with Social Cycle’s Social Search engine. Complete actions with Social Cycle’s workflow cards. Watch your sales grow as you complete tasks and start forming genuine connections
2. Post relevant content for your niche. If you’re a SaaS company for payments, you should be posting content that talks about some common problems buyers for that industry. 
3. Content should be posted frequently. Remember, decision makers usually view between 5-8 pieces of content. The more you can post about different topics (but still keeping it relevant), the higher likelihood a decision maker is going to see it and go with your company as a vendor.