It has been more than a year since content discovery tool Trapit pivoted into an AI-powered social selling platform, and today the company has launched a new service that it says will allow salespeople to directly engage with prospective customers from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom.

With over 1.09 billion daily users on Facebook alone, social media has become one of the easiest ways for businesses to connect with potential customers, but according to Trapit Inc founder and CEO Hank Nothaft, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about social selling.

“Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook can tell you when someone has a birthday, but wishing happy birthday after you receive an automated alert is completely empty, and customers can see it,” Nothaft said.

Rather than giving salespeople superficial information about customers’ birthdays or where they went to school, Trapit allows users to create custom content discovery and sharing engines that can home in on industries and brands, as well as on specific people and even products or hobbies. According to Nothaft, this gives sellers the ability to engage prospective customers in an authentic way that could translate to closed sales.

“We think this is really important because buyers have more power than ever,” Nothaft said. “The seller has become almost obsolete, and many are doing little more than taking an order from a customer who has already made a decision. Trapit allows the seller to get involved much earlier in the customer journey, which had previously been controlled mostly by the marketing team. We’re putting these empowering tools in the hands of the sellers directly.”

Nothaft said that Trapit’s new account based selling tool makes sellers better informed about industries and businesses by allowing them to follow related news and and join in ongoing social conversations. When those sellers actually reach out to make a sale, Nothaft explained, they will already be better informed and have a degree of respectability that comes from those authentic interactions.

“The top salespeople already understand how to navigate social and digital relationships and how to use them to drive engagement and sales,” Nothaft said. “Trapit not only makes it easier for those sellers to do what they are already doing, but it also gives others an easy to use platform specifically designed for making social sales.”

Image courtesy of TrapIt