B2B Social Selling Explained

B2B or business-to-business requires a deft hand when it comes to sales. There are many strategies that you can use to find success when it comes to outreach:

Cold email, cold calling, and, the best way, multichannel outreach, to get the best results.

And one of the ways to get these results is social selling. Why focus on social media?

Well, maybe because an IDC report found that 75% of B2B buyers are influenced by social media during the buyer's journey.

It's is why in this article, we will go over what social selling is, the importance of including it in cold outreach, the advantages it provides, and sales tools to help you improve and implement it in your business.

Let's go!

Social selling in B2B is when salespeople make use of social media to connect with prospects. Examples are social networks such as LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Reddit and even Instagram to find prospects, establish relationships, and build the trust required to close on a sale further down the line.

You're seeking to build a relationship with like-minded people who will benefit from your product or service, and a great way to establish this is by interacting with them on social media. Even if they're not currently a fit, or never will be, they can still help you further understand your industry and propel you to other prospects.

Done correctly, social selling relies on the creation of thought-leading, educational content: blog articles, videos, podcasts, case studies, and more, that are then shared to your social networks in both written and visual form, such as carousels. You want to establish yourself as an industry leader who educates, generates conversation, and is leading the pack on this particular topic.

Social selling is a crucial part of a complete outreach strategy for any business nowadays because of the possibility it provides salespeople to build a relationship with prospects organically. It is not as in-your-face as a cold call or even a more passive email, and it works particularly well in the world of enterprise.

It allows qualifying to happen organically, and for your prospects to find you just as much as you find them. You can also connect with other salespeople or individuals in the industry who may be able to provide you with key insights and further improve your knowledge and reputation in that specific field.

But don't just trust our word for it, here are some statistics from a recent survey on B2B social selling that illustrate its importance:

• 73% of salespeople are using social selling to outperform their sales peers
• Mixing social selling into their sales process has helped salespeople exceed quota 23% more often
• 96% of sales professionals use LinkedIn at least once a week
• 79% of salespeople achieve their quotas using social selling techniques
• 91% of executives rate LinkedIn as their first choice for field-related, professional content

And that's not all.

Here are some advantages of social selling for startups:

Social selling results in improved prospect engagement as you are providing them with content that is relevant to them at the right time. By sharing, posting, commenting, or interacting with relevant posts, you will find the prospects that are actually interested in your product or service coming to you a lot more readily.

Your brand reputation will also increase accordingly over time, reaching a wider audience organically, that would otherwise not have heard of you.

Thanks to your improvement in engagement, your lead generation will also improve without you having to spend more. Because your brand visibility increases, and you become a thought leader in your industry, your name is mentioned more and more in the right circles.

Over time, these leads start coming to you, and they're highly qualified and targeted for what you're after.

Social selling means directly acknowledging the problem and demonstrating how you fix it to a wide audience. This information is then shared and re-shared constantly through various networks.

When those qualified leads are knocking at your door, they know exactly what you are offering and how important it is to them. The nurturing process has already taken place, leading to the overall sales cycle being a lot more accelerated than usual in cold outreach.

Social selling is centered around trust building. The content you share or create, the questions you ask, the brand you build - they are all ways in which you are building trust with your audience and future prospects.

Your salespeople do additional work by connecting with relevant targets that will see these posts and interactions, and invite them to follow along as you demonstrate the importance of your product or service to them.

As with cold emails or calls, social selling provides data-driven insights that are useful when it comes to building the company outreach strategy.

You can see and study what your followers respond to most on social media, and what niche is the way to attract their attention, and then you can further nurture them with additional content over time.


Tracking this is easy, thanks to how social media platforms are built to help brands build followers. From there, you can also adjust your other approaches, such as email copy or call scripts, accordingly.

It's not enough to simply join a social media platform, you need to go in with a plan if you want to find success in social selling.

Remember always that it takes time and effort to build a good social selling strategy, but that the end results are well worth it so long as you keep an eye on adjustments that need to be made.

As with any sales strategy, you need to define your target audience. Just like when you're creating a buyer persona or an ideal customer profile, you need to determine who you are aiming for as prospects. Who are you seeking to nurture over time, and who will benefit most from your product or service.

In the case of SalesPipe, for example, we are primarily beneficial to sales leaders in the world of SaaS, and this is the target audience we want to build with our content. Similarly, you need to determine the target audience for your product or service's social media presence.

Next, you need to research where your audience is found. For most folks in the world of B2B, including us a SalesPipe, the answer is easy: LinkedIn. But that's not the case for all industries.

Marketing or design folks may also rely heavily on Instagram, with its more visual approach. Journalists or certain brands tend to use X (formerly Twitter) more. It all depends on the audience you are seeking to cultivate and connect with.

Now that you've determined the audience and the social media platform that best suits your needs, you want to create valuable content in a strategic manner. This is easier said than done, and it is what may take time to see success, but your energy should be focused here.

For LinkedIn, a good strategy is writing articles such as this one, and, increasingly, couple it with visual content such as infographics or carousel posts. Instagram, being a visual-heavy social media, should always be image-based. Another example is the increasing use of TikTok by brands to establish a presence with younger generations.

You want to research and make sure the content you are creating is relevant to the audience you are targeting. Study trends and competitors to see what's interesting to them.

All of these are strategic decisions you make based on your audience and the social media platform you find them on.

As you start sharing content, you want to encourage your salespeople to interact with your posts and re-share them to their own audiences and networks. You also want to respond to comments or interact with prospects as a brand, further building your voice and directly engaging with your audience.

Over time, this helps you build relationships that will slowly lead to sales and prospects coming directly to you.

Always keep an eye on how your posts are doing. Measuring results allows you to adjust as things change, or to jump on a new topic that may bring in a new audience. Remember that social selling is constantly changing and evolving, and you need to change and evolve with it to find success.

Your SDRs need to be similarly flexible in their approach to it and be willing to change course or tactics as required.

Ready to get your business and sales reps out there social selling? Great!

Make sure you've provided them with the right tools for success. Social selling is a complicated web as it is, so the more help they have, the better.

Here are three tools our team at SalesPipe recommends for social selling for SDRs to find success:

ZoomInfo's ReachOut tool allows salespeople to simplify their social selling processes. Utilizing the Chrome extension, they obtain access to phone numbers and email addresses from their LinkedIn profile.

The profile can also be exported to tools such as Salesforce or Outreach, or a direct email can be sent.

B2B data and social selling are thus easily integrated into the existing sales processes and into any outreach strategy. It helps make sense of the noise and oversaturated platform.

Seismic has created a platform exclusively dedicated to social selling known as LiveSocial. It eases the activation of salespeople on social channels, helping to build trust and relationships at a new scale.

It enables customer engagement through continuously updated sales and marketing content made by professionals and experts in their fields by using AI to curate relevant content per individual seller.

This allows them to share, measure, and study where to concentrate their efforts to increase sales and revenue for their business.

Apollo.io's Chrome extension is an incredible tool when connected to LinkedIn. Using in tandem with Sales Navigator, you can build your lists directly from the platform and then enrich them with useful information such as their email addresses or phone numbers in the Apollo platform.

On a LinkedIn profile, you will receive updated information about each individual, helping you start a conversation with their AI writer or finding particular aspects of their profile that may be relevant to you if you want to reach out directly, or create target-specific content.

We've provided reasons to take on outsourced SDRs multiple times in this blog, but a key one is social selling and its growing importance in the world of B2B.

Outsourced SDRs are usually a step ahead of their peers in this category, as they often perform social selling for their own interests and for their own outsourcing companies. They're familiar with what needs to be done to be successful and are open to sharing their knowledge with clients.

Additionally, they can serve as an ally when it comes to building a follower base on social media sites by re-sharing or interacting with posts. They also know how to weave in social selling with other outreach tactics such as cold emailing or cold calling with ease.

The learning curve with an outsourced SDR is always shorter, as it is product or service-based and not tactics-based. The tactics and tools are already part of their daily tasks, they just need to incorporate your product or service, and soon you'll find yourself with a strong pipeline.

While at first, it may have seemed like a fad or uncomfortable, the reality is social selling is here to stay. And if you're not engaging in it, you're falling behind as a business.

It is also a lot less complicated and daunting than many seem to find it, it's merely about getting started and building the blocks. Social selling is a long game, which is the norm in the world of B2B, but it requires a different approach.

Creating content and planning how to share it takes time, but it is well worth it when sales are eased three or six months later thanks to your current efforts. Social selling goes even further when successfully combined with other techniques such as cold calls or cold emails.

If you're looking to grow your social selling and need outsourced SDRs well-versed in it, do make sure to get in touch with us here at SalesPipe!