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6 Essential Social Selling Training Courses for 2024
What is social selling?
Social selling involves leveraging social media platforms to expand your pool of prospects, opportunities, and information. It includes identifying, engaging with, nurturing, and converting potential customers and target audience members on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.
Why is social selling important?
According to Kepios, 5.07 billion people use social media globally as of April 2024. With that impressive stat in mind, think about how many qualified prospects are already interacting and engaging on these platforms. The best part? You already have access to all of these social networks. You just need to know how to effectively reach and connect with your audience.
Benefits of Social Selling Training for Reps
Our survey reveals that the top benefits of social selling include brand awareness, increased customer interaction, and precise audience targeting. Enrolling your sales reps in a social selling program can help them gain the knowledge they need to drive organic traffic to your website and content, increase engagement on the social platforms where your target audience members are active, boost your lead generation efforts, build deeper connections and relationships with prospects, meet qualified leads where they are, show your target audience that your brand cares about the same type of content they do, and tailor your current content so it resonates with your audience to get more engagement.
Best Social Selling Training Courses for Sales Reps
- Social Media Marketing Course by HubSpot Academy
Not to toot our own horn, but HubSpot Academy’s free Social Media Marketing Course is one of the best for sales professionals who want to broaden their social selling skills. The course has nine lessons, 38 videos, and 29 quizzes and takes a little over five hours to complete. It’s also available in five languages: English, German, Spanish, Japanese, and French. - Social Selling Certification Course by Hootsuite
Hootsuite’s Social Selling Certification Course offers five lessons that total around two hours. Once you complete it, you must pass a timed online exam to receive a certificate. - Social Selling Training Course by MTD
MTD’s Social Selling Training course focuses on LinkedIn as a powerful tool for social selling. The course covers a lot, including maximizing your LinkedIn profile and using your network to build other professional contacts. - Corporate Social Selling Training Program by Digital Marketing Institute (DMI)
DMI’s Corporate Social Selling Training Program impresses me with its interactive learning, dynamic videos, and practical exercises that offer a hands-on experience. - Social Selling with LinkedIn
The Social Selling with LinkedIn course has four chapters covering topics like creating a buyer-centric LinkedIn profile and engaging with buyers and decision-makers. - Social Selling Mastery Course by SOCO
SOCO’s Social Selling Mastery course attracted me due to the amount of detail the landing page provides before you enroll. The page even has photos of previous in-person sessions, which enticed me to take a look at the program.
Social Selling Pro Tips
Now, let me share some social selling strategies you need to remember as you train your sales reps.
- Provide education on the three C’s of social selling.
When training our sales team, I always include the three C’s of social selling: Context, Content, and Collaboration. - Promote rep-to-prospect connections and interactions on social media.
As a marketing manager, I know the importance of building relationships with prospects. It’s the only way to promote trust and familiarity between myself and my prospects. - Introduce reps to your social personas so they know whom to target.
My social personas are very similar to my buyer personas. The only difference is that my social personas are my buyer personas on social media.
Train Your Sales Reps for Social Selling Success. It’s clear that social selling is no longer optional — it’s a must. Traditional sales methods like cold calling and cold emailing alone won’t cut it. That said, for your sales team to succeed, they must get the proper training. The social selling training courses I’ve shared can give your reps the fundamental skills they need to build deeper connections with prospects.
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