“79 percent of sales professionals that used social selling over the past year achieved quota vs 43 percent of those who did not.”
—Aberdeen Group1
Much like other departments in a social business/organization, a social sales team starts with establishing forecast objectives that line up to the major business goals and the vision. Then you build your road map, acquire staff, train the staff, and then define a set of department KPIs directly related to the overarching business goals of the company established and cemented in your EMF Vision Layer.
Along with marketing, customer support, and HR, sales is one of the first departments to adopt social media within a social organization. Since your sales team is customer facing, as well as revenue generating, having a well-trained team with digital sense is crucial. Your sales team oftentimes represents the first humans in your company, aside from your content marketing team, to actually touch and communicate with a potential customer or buyer. Since you can't change a first impression, it's critical to ensure salespeople represent a consistent company brand, use proper etiquette, and understand how social media both feeds into and accelerates the sales pipeline. This is where the effort made in going through all layers of the EMF pays dividends over and over as both a form of governance and repository of key learnings from your front line feedback that can improve future messaging.
Social selling is the layering of high-value social media activities over your existing sales communication process. Social selling was born from a need to adjust communication strategies with today's modern buyer, who happens to be mobile and digitally available 24 hours a day with their smartphone. In going with the mantra “be where your buyers are,” sales reps have had to adjust the way they engage, interact with, and nurture their buyers as a result.
Julio Viskovich, VP of Marketing for rFactr, a B2B social selling platform, and one of Forbes's top social-selling influencers, has this advice for sales teams: “Never use social media for the hard sell, it's for building relationships, value, trust, and credibility.”
Our friend Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, said this about social selling: “Social Selling is a natural evolution to the effects social media has had on the way customers make buying decisions and the way companies and salespeople need to sell. It has evolved the sales process so it's focused on buyers needs and leverages technology to put sales reps in front of the right prospect—at the right time—with the right message.”
Social selling is just selling with a shiny name, but the name has significance because it calls attention to a huge gap in skills that need to be developed within a company. Just as you would train your salespeople how to give presentations or guide a prospect through a sales cycle, you need to train your salespeople how to make use of the technologies that can generate pipeline.
“The natural reaction is to buy the bright shiny object; not do the hard work of strategy, planning, goals, and tactics,” offers Jill Rowley, former Social Selling Evangelist at Eloqua. “It's all too easy to take a silo approach versus embedding Social Selling into existing processes, methodologies, systems, metrics. Culture and executive buy-in/sponsorship are critical.”
There could be many different objectives for the sales team, but typically they are to generate more revenue, increase overall sales pipeline, increase contacts, and add more data on your leads and opportunities from social into the Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM).
“For any company building a social business strategy, it's important to stretch that to any customer facing employees, specifically sales professionals.” Koka Sexton, former head of social for LinkedIn and founder of Social Selling Labs, says, “All research shows that employees sharing corporate messages get engaged higher and have an exponentially larger reach. If this is the case, then companies that fail to involve their sales team are effectively leaving actual money on the table.”
Now that we are talking about leads and opportunities, here is a mind-bending statistic, from SiriusDecisions. Of qualified leads, 70 percent make it to sales get disqualified or discarded at some point. Up to 80 percent of those “dead end” prospects will ultimately go on to buy from you—or from a competitor—within 6–12 months.
Just because that lead or prospect isn't a sales-qualified lead—SQL—or a sales-accepted lead—SAL—doesn't mean that lead is worthless. It just needs to be nurtured before your competitor sells them. You have to keep the funnel growing and you have to engage those already in your funnel. If they aren't SQLs yet, and they are an important prospect, you'll definitely want to continue engaging them and adding value to them. Social selling can be broken down into two specific activities, fishing and hunting.
Social Selling is NOT a marketing campaign. The program should be owned by sales leadership. The formula for successful Social Selling: Marketing + Sales Leadership + Sales Enablement & Training to align = SUCCESS!
You also need HR to rethink the capabilities and competencies of the sales hires—at all levels—leadership, manager, and individual contributors. This will be covered in depth in the chapter on Social Business Strategies for HR.
Successful and advanced social selling teams that hit KPIs and measure success effective mature with the following system, based on the work of Julio Viskovich:2
With proper tools, training, and implementation, sales reps who adopt social selling will be able to:
Ensure that every rep's profile is 100 percent completed. This includes having a professionally done photograph. Marketing should give some guidelines on language used.
This will allow each rep access to the rest of the organization's network and increase the number of second and third degree connections. Having these are crucial not only for network growth but also getting referred or introduced through trusted sources in your company.
Groups allow you to send messages to those who aren't your first degree connections, and allow you to join in the conversation with your prospects. Follow the four-to-one rule: comment on four posts for every post that you write.
The greatest challenge for the individual is behavioral change, especially for salespeople, who are not historically digital savvy. The greatest challenge for the organization is culture change. Cross-functional collaboration is not optional. This is a change management initiative. (This is why chapter five and understanding the stick-person is so important.)
There are major cultural differences between the Baby Boomer generation and Millennials. Geoffrey Moore says it best: in his generation, collaboration was called “cheating and you got expelled for it”; whereas, the Millennials are used to living their lives out loud on the web, sharing everything with everyone. Although Millennials lack some of the business pattern recognition and experience of their Baby Boomer and Gen X peers, they are definitely more transparent, collaborative, connected, and digitally savvy. We're now living in the age of empowered customer, where buyers are digitally driven, socially connected, and mobile with multiple devices that give them nearly unlimited access to both information and people.
The modern buyer is proficient in utilizing their own device as a personal life-remote control, but many sales organizations have been slow to adapt and evolve their processes, training, and systems of selling to the way most people want to buy today. This is the BIG opportunity for those of you who take this serious and implement.
“Account-based marketing: a strategic approach that coordinates personalized marketing and sales efforts to open doors and deepen engagement at specific accounts.”
—Jon Miller, Engagio
According to Wikipedia, account-based marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to business marketing in which an organization considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one. Account-based marketing is typically employed in enterprise level sales organizations.
Forrester Research states that less than 1 percent of leads turn into revenue generating customers. Because of this, it's time to challenge the status quo and focus your time, budget, and resources on generating quality leads vs. quantity, especially in B2B.
In business-to-customer marketing and sales, B2C, it's more of a shotgun approach; you are casting a wide net from a large demographic of people. In B2B marketing and sales, it's a laser approach. You know EXACTLY the name and job title of your target.
Say, for instance, you're trying to sell to the CEO of Facebook, and you know that his name is Mark Zuckerberg. But Mark isn't the only one we have to talk to get the sale. We may have to talk with influencers, some members of middle management, and end users before we can get to the decision maker. In some enterprise businesses, there could be up to 17 people that you need to connect with before getting a yes from the decision maker. Now, how do you reverse-engineer a relationship with those people? That's where ABM comes in.
B2B companies are typically forced to “hunt and fish” to a narrow list of prospects. They use a combination of inbound, outbound, and account-based marketing techniques to make the magic happen.
Megan Heuer at SiriusDecisions has a great presentation on ABM where she goes over the “new reality” of B2B marketing. She profiled the companies already using ABM, as well as those thinking about starting this year.3
It's interesting to see that nearly half of the companies that have $100m or less in revenue are using ABM to target decision makers on their narrow list of prospects. Over a third of companies with $1 billion or more in revenue use ABM, but less than 20 percent in the $101 million–$1 billion range use ABM.
The vast majority of ABM-practicing companies are enterprise-level brands with more than 1,000 employees. Smaller companies can benefit from it, as well.
The result? We targeted 4,100 employees in San Bruno, CA, and Bentonville, AR, with a sponsored post of this article on Facebook, with an image of the CEO of the retail company. We drove all of the traffic back to the client's site, where our custom tracking pixel fired. In fact, we drove 1,108 people to site, all top employees of this retail company, due to our initial ad targeting. They were all added to a custom audience and we targeted them all over. Many key employees within that retail company filled out a lead-gen form, then marketing and sales began nurturing the relationship. The sales rep eventually closed a $700,000-plus deal, for less than $700 in total ad spend. Is that a good return on ad spend (ROAS)? The bottom line: B2B account-based marketing and advertising, with paid social amplification of relevant, targeted content to targeted prospects, can be a very potent combo in your social selling arsenal.
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