Key takeaways
- Buyers control the early journey – modern B2B buyers complete roughly 70% of their purchasing process before engaging with sales. Companies must establish visibility and relevance across digital touchpoints early to influence decisions.
- Social selling builds trust and accelerates revenue – implementing social selling as a structured, relationship-focused approach increases sales opportunities, strengthens connections with both visible and hidden buyers, and drives measurable business outcomes.
- Integration is key – social selling must be embedded throughout the customer journey—from awareness to retention—creating a continuous, authentic dialogue that enhances loyalty, supports decision-making, and differentiates companies in competitive markets.
Digitalization has fundamentally changed the sales process. Customers today interact via numerous digital channels, long before they contact a company directly. For the IT industry, this means that the traditional sales process is no longer sufficient.
How companies shape the customer journey across all digital touchpoints is crucial, and social selling plays a key role in strengthening this process.
The new dynamics of digital sales
The modern buyer is more informed, connected, and demanding than ever before. According to the “B2B Buyer Experience Report,” today’s buyers only contact suppliers once they have completed approximately 70% of their purchasing process.1 This finding underscores the importance for IT companies to rethink the sales process and deliver a holistic experience throughout the entire customer journey.
Social selling isn’t about pitching products. It’s about guiding buyers along their journey with trust, relevance, and authenticity. Companies that excel forge genuine connections well before any sales conversation begins.
Timothy Hughes
Digital touchpoints – from LinkedIn to specialist forums to personalized landing pages – are becoming decisive moments of perception. They shape trust, competence, and relevance. Presence creates proximity and credibility, even before a direct dialogue begins.
We’ve known that buyers spend the first two-thirds of their journeys researching solutions. But that is not just the “research” phase. It is already the “selection” phase.
As 6sense has reported for 2 years (and will again this year), the first phase, which represents the majority of the buying journey, culminates in a preliminary selection. That preliminary winner is the ultimate winner 80% of the time. The rest of the buying cycle (20%) is then based on validation of the decision.
You don’t want to be in 2nd place when you first speak with sales. If so, you’re making the world too hard for them. We have to get to the top of the short list before the buying group is even willing to engage directly. So, while the buying cycle is 12 to 18 months, the sales cycle is usually 3 months.
Social selling accelerates sales teams by helping buyers in the research phase spot them, and it provides a conversation framework that allows sellers to get meetings/leads with buyers faster.
Building relationships that drive revenue
Social selling is more than using social networks for sales. It’s a mindset: Modern sales teams build relationships through knowledge, trust, and relevance – not product offerings. The focus is on supporting customers through relevant content and authentic interactions, not pressuring them.
The most successful IT companies use social selling as a continuous dialogue. Through a targeted presence in digital networks, they can actively shape the customer journey and identify the right moment for personal contact.
According to a LinkedIn report, sales teams with a high Social Selling Index (SSI) generate approximately 45% more sales opportunities than those with a lower SSI.2
Social selling clearly shows that businesses that implement a social selling methodology gain a competitive advantage, driving more customer meetings and revenue. The challenge for companies is that more than 40% of deals are abandoned before completion, and it’s not because of competitors.
It’s because of a failure to convince hidden buyers – an often-forgotten group of process experts, such as legal or finance, who have a vital say in whether a business buys. But here’s the thing: you can’t persuade hidden buyers the same way you do target buyers.
A social selling framework that gives you the process to find hidden buyers and creates a platform for you to have conversations, build relationships, and trust.
You can learn more about the “The Hidden Buyer Gap” on LinkedIn.
Integrating social selling into the customer journey
The key challenge is not to view social selling in isolation, but to integrate it into the entire customer journey.
A structured approach can look like this:
- Awareness phase: Expert contributions, thought leadership posts, and thematic insights generate attention.
- Interaction phase: Individual conversations and relevant content build trust.
- Decision phase: Digital consulting tools and case studies support informed decisions.
- Retention phase: After the purchase, personalized touchpoints strengthen customer loyalty and promote cross-selling and upselling.
Social selling thus acts as a connecting element between marketing, sales, and customer success. It supports long-term relationships and makes the added value of IT solutions visible.
By having a clearly defined process, salespeople move away from random acts of socializing, which leadership quite rightly criticizes for adding no value. After all, these random acts are nothing but playing on social media.
A structured framework provides salespeople with a step-by-step methodology. This not only provides a method but also a platform for leadership to measure and gain visibility. Sales elders can see which salespeople are contributing to the pipeline creation process and which are not.
From digital presence to genuine partnership
For example, across our clients, the average salesperson gets five high-quality meetings with your ICP (ideal customer profile) a week. We have one AE (Account Executive) at Salesforce who gets eight high-quality ICP meetings a week.
When compared to cold calling, where you are probably getting two meetings a week. Rolling that out across your sales teams will accelerate your business and overtake the competition. A practical example illustrates the powerful impact of linking social selling and the customer journey:
A global IT service provider realigned its sales strategy by specifically fostering the social selling potential of its employees. Through an internal training program and clear guidelines for digital communication, organic customer leads via LinkedIn increased by 60%, and the closing rates of existing customer relationships increased by 20%.
The key to success lay less in new tools than in a change in mindset: Social selling was viewed not as a short-term acquisition strategy, but as a long-term investment in trust.
The future of sales is human and digital
In the coming months, the connection between the customer journey and social selling will become increasingly important. Companies that strategically integrate both will differentiate themselves through proximity, relevance, and trust.
The increasing integration of AI-supported analytics tools enables sales leaders to evaluate digital interactions more precisely and significantly deepen their understanding of customer needs. They don’t need loud messages, but they build authentic connections.
Companies that continue to consistently align their customer journey with the customer and view social selling as an integral component are actively shaping their sales success.
Marketers and sellers now have to take back control of the buying process. We all know the modern buyer has changed, so we need to change our sales and marketing. To do this, we need to stop thinking that random acts of social are somehow going to make any impact. We need to be authentic; we need to tell our personal and professional story on social media, and by doing so, we can facilitate conversations and establish authority.
By selling and marketing in a modern, structured way, you will drive more revenue, not less.
Sources
- 6sense, “B2B Buyer Experience Report,” 2024
- LinkedIn, “LinkedIn Sales Solutions Report,” 2024
Cover image: LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash (article is not sponsored)
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is solely the author’s opinion and not investment advice—it is provided for educational purposes only. By using this, you agree that the information does not constitute any investment or financial instructions. Do conduct your own research and reach out to financial advisors before making any investment decisions.
