What Is Social Selling?

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.”

Why Is Social Selling Important?

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.”

Goals for Social Selling

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.

1. Fishing is what most people think social selling represents—simply pushing out content each day and leaving the breadcrumbs that leads hopefully find and follow. The problem is that this activity of broadcasting content as well as monitoring for new leads or buying signals only aligns with TOFU (top of funnel) elements of the sales process.
2. Hunting is the specific use of content and social channels to influence a specific person(s) within your pipeline. An example would be sending a private LinkedIn message to one of your prospects in the evaluation stage that includes a contextual message and link to a buyer's guide comparing you with your head-to-head competition.

Who Should Own Social Selling?

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.

The Social Selling System

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

1. Presence—it all starts with establishing which social channels you will be active on and creating a consistent and polished footprint on those channels.
2. Adoption—ensure sales reps have the right training and right tools to be successful. You will need a way for reps to quickly access sales-ready content, share, engage, and track their activities. A fool with a tool is still a fool—but a sniper without a gun is DEAD.
3. Influence—engage with each prospect according to their placement in your funnel and don't just use social media to stay top of mind…use it to strategically shape your buyer's needs and vision.
4. Revenue—track your sales activities to your CRM system to understand the exact impact on leads, opportunities, revenue, sales cycle time, and other key sales metrics

With proper tools, training, and implementation, sales reps who adopt social selling will be able to:

• turn cold calls into warm leads with superior prospect insights,
• go beyond just being a vendor and begin to establish yourself as their trusted advisor,
• build a bigger pipeline and drive more revenue,
• attribute social-selling actions to revenue through reporting,
• network and attend events remotely through various social interactions and hashtags, and
• identify buying signals that capture purchase intent from your prospect.

Social Selling Implementation

1. Step 1: Have each member of the sales team create or update a LinkedIn and Twitter profile.

   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.

2. Step 2: Connect with everyone in your company.

   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.

3. Step 3: Join 10–15 LinkedIn groups

   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.

4. Step 4: Ask your past and current colleagues, customers, or vendors to recommend you. You'd be surprised at the importance a short recommendation can hold. Potential partners or prospects are likely to check out your profile when considering doing business with you.
5. Step 5: Interact at least once a day through your activity stream. Most of your home page is taken up with updates from your connections. There are several ways you can interact with these updates, depending on the type.
   • Send a message—When your connections make new connections or take several actions on LinkedIn, this information shows up in your activity feed. You can send your connection a message to reengage them.
   • Retweet or Favorite—Posts from other social media sites often enable you to favorite the posts. For Twitter posts, you can retweet or reply as well. This is a great tactic to do right before a call to nudge the prospect via a notification to their mobile.
   • Like/Comment/Endorse—Jump in and engage with prospects regularly through these mini actions to stay relevant and avoid a dark period of the sales process to take hold. It also shows you as a value-add and someone who walks the social selling walk.

Social Selling Challenges

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 (ABM)

“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

1. Company size:
   • 45 percent less than $100 million are using ABM
   • 18 percent between $101 million and $1 billion are using ABM
   • 36 percent more than $1.1 billion are using ABM

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.

1. Customer type:
   • 75 percent enterprise (more than 1,000 employees)
   • 21 percent medium (101 to 1,000 employees)
   • 11 percent small (100 or fewer employees)

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.

Five Steps to Develop an ABM Program

1. Identify target companies
2. Develop personas
3. Find or create the right content
4. Integrate your ABM into your multichannel strategy
5. Measure and optimize

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.