B2B Social Selling in the Cannabis Industry – Tips and Best Practices

Social selling first gained popularity more than a decade ago with the proliferation of the use of social media. In 2014, a study by IDC found that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-Level/VP executives use social media to make purchasing decisions. A year later, in a Forrester study, 74% of business buyers said they do more than half of their research online before making a purchase offline.

Fast forward to today, and social selling is even more important for businesses to reach their sales and revenue goals. According to LinkedIn, social selling leaders generate 45% more sales opportunities and are 51% more likely to meet their sales quotas. In fact, 78% of companies that use social selling outperform companies that don’t use social selling.

The data shows that social selling has become a fundamental part of a company’s sales strategy. With this in mind, B2B companies that sell products and services in the cannabis industry should prioritize social selling.

What is social selling and what are the benefits?

Social selling involves connecting with potential customers through social media platforms to directly and/or indirectly sell a company’s products and services. Note that social selling includes both direct and indirect selling. This is extremely important.

The direct sales approach via social media channels is only one part of social selling. As a seller, indirect social selling comes first – always. The reason is simple. Social selling is a long-term strategy. It’s not about closing deals immediately – after a single contact.

The most effective social selling starts with building relationships—connecting with the right people, sharing useful information, communicating without ads, and proving you’re a valuable resource. Direct selling through a social media channel should be done after the relationship has been established and you have determined that the person is a good match for your product or service.

Social selling helps you find more leads and opportunities, and determine which leads you can best focus your time on. When it’s fully integrated with your other sales efforts and marketing initiatives, you’ll undoubtedly close more deals. Additionally, social selling gives you opportunities to build your brand and personal reputation as a thought leader.

Tips for creating your B2B social selling strategy for the cannabis industry

Social selling doesn’t have to take a lot of time every day to be successful. All you need is a strategy that will help you achieve realistic, achievable goals. No, you’re not going to reach out to someone on LinkedIn, tell them about your amazing product, and get an immediate response that they’re ready to buy. The higher the price or the longer the sales cycle for your product or service, the less likely you are to get a positive response to direct sales messages via social media.

Therefore, you need a strategy that identifies the specific audiences you want to target, which social media channels you invest your efforts in, and how your investments lead to your specific goals, e.g. to move leads to the next stage of the funnel, increase inbound sales requests, increase demos, trials or sales and so on.

Once you have identified your strategy, you can develop a plan to implement the strategy and achieve the goals set. This is where the Cannabiz Media License Database comes in. With the leading source of verified cannabis and hemp license holders in the United States, Canada and international territories, you can determine exactly who your best target audience is and set goals and objectives to engage and sell to that audience .

Because direct links to contacts’ social media profiles and pages are included in records where the data is available, you can connect with leads across social media platforms without leaving the Cannabiz Media License Database!

Best practices for B2B social selling

To be successful in social selling, you need a plan. However, your plan must incorporate current B2B social selling best practices or your efforts will not work. Below are some of the top B2B social selling best practices to keep in mind.

Find your target audience

The first step to implementing your social selling plan is to make sure you’re spending time connecting and communicating with the right audience. In the past, sellers had to manually scour social media platforms to find B2B leads in the cannabis industry, but the Cannabiz Media License Database has changed that.

Today, License Database subscribers can find their target audience on social media using the search filters available to them. For example, you can search the license database of LinkedIn profiles for active license holders of cannabis dispensaries in the United States and get a list of people who meet those criteria. The link to each person’s LinkedIn profile is included in the contact’s record so you can click and connect. It saves so much time and effort!

listen and learn

Once you know who your target audience is, you need to listen to them and learn what’s important to them. So you know what kind of content to share and what communication to start with. It is crucial that your content and communications are highly relevant to your audience, otherwise they will not pay attention to you.

In the past, the only way to get this information was to analyze the type of content and conversations your audience is actively engaging with on each social media platform. Today, with the Cannabiz Media License Database, the process is better, easier and faster. Now you can collect more interaction data from the communication and email marketing campaigns you send to your target audience using the email marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) tools in the license database.

For example, you can track the topics your audience is interacting with based on the email marketing campaigns you have opened and the links they clicked on in those messages. You can use lead scoring to determine which leads qualify for marketing or sales. With this information, you’ll know which leads you should continue to nurture by sharing content and engaging in conversations across social media platforms, and which leads are ready for direct outreach via social media, email, or a call.

Share first, sell later

Social selling starts with socializing first and selling later – after you’ve built a relationship and determined that a lead is qualified to sell and ready to receive a message or a call. If you sell on social media platforms first, you’ll be ignored at best and labeled a spammer at worst – neither of which will produce the desired results.

Start positioning yourself as a source of trust, thought leader and expert. Answer questions, share useful information, comment on content others are sharing, and be active in groups and communities where your audience spends time.

Before you start sharing, posting, and commenting on others’ posts across social media channels, take the time to optimize your own social media profiles. Add your photo, company, job title and experience to establish credibility. Also, make sure your company is present on at least the most popular social media channels (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube). This is crucial as it shows that you are working for a genuine, verifiable company. You want it to be as easy as possible for people to validate your expertise and credentials.

Engage and build relationships

To build relationships, you need to be authentic in your social media communications. People can quickly spot a seller who takes the time to showcase their product or service. Yes, you want to close a sale, but for social selling to work, you need to prioritize relationships over sales. You have to be patient and only pitch when the time is right. It takes time, but the results are worth it.

Think of it this way: Most B2B selling decisions require input from multiple people. No one wants to make the wrong decision and jeopardize their career. With so much effort on the buy-side to make a purchase, it should come as no surprise that a lot of effort is also required on the sell-side.

By building a relationship up front, many of the hurdles to making a purchase decision will be overcome by the time a buyer advances to the later stages of the buyer’s journey. Since you’re already in a relationship thanks to your social media efforts, the buyer will already trust you, believe you’re an expert, and know you can help them.

With these words, you can improve your relationship by learning all sorts of things about your potential customers. Use insights from your social media engagement and data from the Cannabiz Media License Database to improve and strengthen relationships with your prospects, and the sales process becomes more streamlined, effective, and successful.

For example, track the email marketing campaigns your prospects open to better understand their interests and set up alerts when prospects appear in the messages. A relevant message about a company, state, or local community could be a perfect subject for personalized outreach to a hot prospect.

Key takeaways on B2B social selling in the cannabis industry

B2B Social Selling is a long-term strategy that prioritizes relationship building. So when the time is right to implement short-term tactics to boost sales, your social media audience is receptive to direct sales communication. Just like email marketing, before you try to sell people you need to nurture and hit where they are in the buyer journey. Avoid trading too quickly and you have a much better chance of getting more closed deals.

Want to see how subscribing to the Cannabiz Media License Database can help you close more deals and improve your social selling? Schedule a demo to see it in action.