How to use X for social selling

By Nick Reese
Trends and insights

When it comes to selling, cold calling no longer cuts it.

Businesses are instead using technology and data to find prospects and sell more effectively. However, in this era of digital transformation, relationships are more important to selling than ever. In fact, with the speed that today’s cutting-edge technology becomes tomorrow’s commodity, the human touch has become a strategic advantage.

Enter social selling. Combining technology with old-fashioned relationship-building, social selling is the practice of identifying prospects, generating leads, and maintaining customer relations through social media. Since both you and your prospects are already on X, a strategic social selling effort can be both easy and profitable to implement.

In addition to X brand best practices like creating a quality profileeffectively using hashtags, and writing engaging posts, here are three ways you can incorporate social selling into your sales strategy.

Hyperactive social listening

In traditional sales, you never lead with your pitch. Instead, you take the time to listen to the prospect’s problem to identify an opportunity your product can solve.

With social selling, listening is just as critical. With X, you can listen to thousands of prospects simultaneously as they share what’s on their collective minds.

Use X Lists to group prospects in ways that make the most sense for your sales strategy.

Here are a few categories to organize your lists around:

  • job titles
  • companies
  • geography
  • people you’ve met in person

Engage, don’t sell

Once you see a prospect post, you can just post them your pitch, right?

Not necessarily. If you come out of nowhere asking for the sale you’re basically using the same cold calling method that no longer works. Instead, take the time to become a familiar presence to your prospect. Engage with your prospects by replying to their posts when you have something relevant to add.

With this interaction your prospect will likely follow you back, getting your posts in their timeline, while recognizing your name when the opportunity to start a sales conversation does finally present itself.

Put the social into your selling

Speaking of getting your posts in their timeline, think about the type of content you post. Your timeline should convey both your industry and product expertise while still being helpful to your followers.Success in sales is often about building relationships. Use X to augment your selling efforts and build relationships at scale. You can then leverage these relationships when the time is right to have a sales conversation.

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