It’s 2024, and if you’re not on the social selling bandwagon yet it’s time to get on board–or your competitors most certainly will.

Social selling is a game-changer for revenue teams looking to forge deeper relationships with prospects, win their trust, and ultimately, close more deals. In fact, research shows that 78% of businesses that use social selling outperform those that don’t.

While we could write all day about the benefits of social selling, our bread and butter is helping you prove social selling success. We previously covered the types of data and metrics you can measure to increase ROI on your social selling initiatives.

In this article, we’re going to provide a deep dive into another tool you can use– Influenced Opportunity Reports– and showcase how your team can use it to drive revenue, improve your social selling strategy, and most importantly, showcase the successful results of your social selling activities.

What is an Influenced Opportunity Report?

An Influenced Opportunity Report is a crucial tool for B2B organizations seeking to understand the tangible impact of their social media efforts on their sales pipeline. By offering a detailed analysis of the contributions of social media activities to sales, these reports provide teams with the ability to track the origin of opportunities within the sales pipeline back to specific social networks, and even posts. This capability is invaluable for businesses aiming to quantify the ROI from their social media campaigns and prove social selling success.

In essence, Influenced Opportunity Reports bridge the gap between social media engagements and sales opportunities. By identifying accounts that have interacted with content and linking these interactions to generated revenue, companies can not only justify their social selling expenditures but also refine their strategies to optimize for better financial outcomes.

Using Influenced Opportunity Reports to power social selling success

An Influenced Opportunity occurs when a Salesforce Contact engages with your social content for 14 days before the opportunity creation date and after its closed date.

By generating a dashboard that analyzes your influenced opportunities, you can see your top social sellers, the number of influenced opportunities your team has generated, your socially influenced pipeline, influenced opportunities by network, monthly influenced opportunities, your most active social leads, most recent activities, influenced opportunities by closed dates, and more.

These insights can help you refine your social selling strategy and prove social selling success. Here are just some examples:

Create social selling strategies for key social networks

Assuming the majority of your social selling wins come from LinkedIn is probably reasonable. But what if you see that 25% of your influenced opportunities come from X? If this is the case–it’s definitely worth investing time and effort in this platform, perhaps even coming up with specific content dedicated to your X audience and providing training to enable your sellers to learn how to guide conversations on this network.

Engage with the right prospects at the right time

Timing is everything when it comes to selling. And if your prospect is actively posting, commenting, and engaging with content on social media, they’re a good candidate to reach with social selling. The ability to see which of your open opportunities are most active on social media will enable you to focus your social selling efforts on prospects most likely to be receptive to your team’s social selling approaches.

Forecast revenue from social selling

Understanding where you stand in regard to your organization’s revenue goals is critical for piecing together your strategy and ensuring your team meets their targets. With the Influenced Opportunity Report, you can easily see the revenue attributed to each deal stemming from social so you can know where you stand and make adjustments to your strategy as you see necessary.

Understand which sellers are moving the needle

By reviewing your most active social sellers on your Influenced Opportunity Report, you know which of your team members are your social selling stars and which ones might need a little extra coaching. This way, you can create training programs for the right people, reward your best social sellers and encourage them to help those that are struggling. You can even match your top social sellers with your most socially active prospects to increase your win-rates.

Prove social selling success

As a revenue professional, your goal is to increase revenue for your business. The Influenced Opportunity Report’s sheer purpose is to showcase the revenue that your social selling techniques have driven. You’ll see how your social selling initiatives are influencing pipeline, where your deals are in the pipeline, and the estimated revenue tied to each of your socially influenced deals. What more can you ask for when you’re trying to prove social selling’s business impact on your organization?

Why Influenced Opportunity Reports matter in B2B

Especially in B2B, where building relationships is crucial to sealing deals, social selling stands out as a must-have approach. But when you’re using a social media management platform that lacks the ability to showcase revenue attributed to social media activities, it’s hard to prove your initiatives are actually working.

Enter the Influenced Opportunity Report. This tool offers solid insights into the revenue generated from your social media endeavors, making it easier to secure support from your organization. Armed with this data, you can also create effective social selling strategies that not only boost your win rates but also lead to more deals and higher revenue.

Leveraging a B2B social media management platform equipped with sophisticated analytics and reporting features, like the Influenced Opportunity Report, transforms social media from a marketing tool used to drive likes and comments to a powerful platform for next generation of revenue professionals.

Learn more about how you can measure your social selling success with Oktopost’s Influenced Opportunity Report and other specialized B2B metrics.