90% of customer buying decisions are starting online.

—2011 by Forrester Research

The above statistic is already five years old, but it couldn't be truer. The average buyer in business is just like you and me at night, on our couch, surfing the Internet. Buyers purchase clothes and televisions, and build their future vehicles online. What makes you think they don't also research software, HR best practices, insurance, or corporate healthcare policies?

My business, our clients' businesses, and your business have already forever changed because buyers have changed. Buyers are arming themselves with more information than ever to make informed decisions. They can now connect with their peers on social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to learn about the challenges, pitfalls, and successes of any solution implementation. In 2012, other statistics began to emerge on the change in buyers' behavior that progressed social selling:

• Fifty-seven percent of the buyer's journey takes place before a sales professional is involved.¹
• Seventy-five percent of business-to-business (B2B) buyers use social media to research vendors.²

In 2011 and 2012, these core statistics awakened progressive companies because their sales professionals saw the vital importance that social media played during activity at the top of the sales funnel. Sales and marketing departments would need to change their ways to become resources for buyers before a sales professional would even know an opportunity existed. I can personally count dozens of clients over the last four years who attracted bluebirds (B2B clients) into their sales pipeline through social. At first, I would chalk up these seemingly serendipitous opportunities to great fortune, but it has become very clear that providing value to someone has been the catalyst. In May 2012, Aberdeen Group presented a finding about social sellers: “79% of sales professionals achieved quota in their last calendar fiscal year, compared to the 58% non–Social Sellers who were Average to Laggard in their industry. This had a 16.3% increase in their companies’ overall revenue.”³ Such empirical evidence was hard to ignore.

In 2013, Craig Elias, the author of Shift, presented me with this mind-blowing statistic from Forrester: “74% of buyers are choosing the sales professional and company that was first to add value and insight in the buying journey.”⁴ What does that mean? It means that long before you think about adding value for a prospective buyer via phone, email, or presentation, the buyer has been learning without you. Buyers have been collecting enough information to be able to select which vendors are best for their business. They do all this before ever speaking to a sales professional. Then, as buyers make decisions about vendors, they typically choose the first one who presented them with new ideas, concepts, and road maps. This is scary because all this education is happening without you! Your competition has been teaching your prospective buyers with their blogs, videos, infographics, ebooks, webinars, and success stories. Your buyers are shifting their priorities before you've even called them for the first time. Think about this scenario: You're about to conduct a huge presentation in the buyer's boardroom. You've been preparing statistics, ROI calculations, and reasons why your company is the best vendor for the project. The problem is that when you start your presentation, it doesn't go anything like what you planned in your mind. The client seems completely educated on your market—the features, implementation strategies, best practices, and pricing. In fact, the flow of the conversation seems like a grand inquisition, as the buyer has been prepped with landmine-like questions. Guess what? I, the social seller, was the one who set up those landmines! I, the social seller, had been sharing best practices, implementation road maps, and pricing scenarios to the buyer for months. The buyer now uses my solution as the benchmark and, because I taught him or her all the pitfalls to look out for, your solution seems to feel like it's been sold into the business, rather than being a right fit. While this is a simplistic description of social sellers impact, this is how social media affects buyers—and you.

It's time to take an objective look at your business. Has it become more difficult to reach decision-makers over the phone or via email? Are these time-tested ways of reaching out having the same effect they did even a few years ago? Also, the buyer is not just one person anymore. According to the CEB, “There are now on average 5.4 decision-makers, champions and influencers, all part of the buying decision.”⁵ Are you effectively nurturing and influencing these five or six champions, influencers, and decision-makers in the organization with the phone? This is another reason social media has become a tool for sales professionals. With one article shared socially, I'm able to educate and become a resource to an account's 5.4 decision-makers—and thousands of others—instantly. This kind of scale is unmatched by the phone or email.

In 2014, LinkedIn did a study of 5,000 buyers in leadership positions and found that “92% of buyers want to deal with the sales professional who is the known thought-leader in their industry versus 17% of buyers who still don't mind being cold called.”⁶ By 2015, a new analysis had emerged: 34 percent of all B2B researchers are Millennials.⁷ While the decision-maker might be a Gen Xer or Baby Boomer, the functional users and champions who support buying trends are digital natives.

Where does this leave you and your organization if you're not leading the customer conversation? You're a ghost, lost in a sea of screaming voices. What is the probability that you'll be found? You are working at a Fortune 2000 company and, for a brief moment, roll your eyes and think, “This doesn't apply to me. I work at XYZ Company, and we have a brand as the market leader.” If this is your reaction, your future is in even more trouble! At a macro level, Forrester studies suggest that one million sales roles will be wiped out by 2020. These declining roles will be order takers (decline by 37 percent); explainers, sales professionals who demo (down 27 percent); and navigators, relationship-nurturing sales professionals (down 17 percent). All these roles are reduced because they do not present a face for the industry. You're not the consultant shaping the buyer's journey; you're only answering questions along the way. At a micro, personal level, people who work at a big business are not very nimble. They can't start guerilla marketing campaigns like their smaller competitors.

Don't think for a moment that because of your business card, you're an obvious vendor choice. People buy from people first; then they buy into the solutions that a person represents. Your corporate business card might get you a few more meetings than competitors at smaller companies but, many times, the value ends there. Nimble, smaller competitors can unleash ground-breaking insights that disrupt your sales cycles. Now your buyer is armed and dangerous with market information, so how are you going to stand out? Why do they need you?

If an information technology or telecommunications company is not executing social selling at global level in 2016, it's no longer an early innovator—they're late to the party. As LinkedIn mentioned at its 2015 SalesConnect event in Las Vegas, 2016 to 2020 will be about crossing the chasm for many technology-focused companies. For those of you in other industries such as professional services, health care, finance, or manufacturing, your markets are changing rapidly! This isn't a scare tactic, but a reality check.

You need to change your mindset more about social selling's involvement beyond the sales role. How are sales operations, sales enablement, and, especially, marketing influencing your digital interactions with buyers? The size and scale of your organization is irrelevant here. Throughout this book, we'll use the word global as a ubiquitous term for all of your organization. What's most important is that you change your mindset from me activity to we activity, taking a global view. We is only important if it improves your entire organization's ability to serve your buyers. That's it! Nothing else matters with social selling or any type of innovative sales process. Your sales approach must have a positive impact on your ability to enhance your buyer's experience. I've seen B2C (business-to-consumer) companies change their digital approach years ago to enhance a buyer's experience. Unfortunately, B2B (business-to-business) companies have been approaching social selling as a series of individually executed sales hacks to create quick wins, but they have done little to improve long-term trust within their buyer-to-seller interactions.

I know it's hard to think of the long game here. I get it: You're measured with monthly or quarterly goals that make it difficult to think about your commercial approach two, three, five years from now. You're looking for a material impact to be made this quarter, and social selling tips, tricks, and tactics will book you immediate meetings and create quick opportunities. I can relate to this directly because it is how Sales for Life started its social selling training in 2012. But I promise you, the metaphor that constantly pops into my head will hold true: Picture a massive wave approaching your dam, which represents your company. As your buyers leverage social and digital media to make informed buying decisions, it becomes clear that the wave is inevitability going to hit your dam. Your approach to mending your cracking dam is using social media hacks. This is like using concrete filler for the cracks in the dam. These tips, tricks, and tactics can keep your dam together for the short term, but the engineer in you knows you're doomed if you don't find a long-term, scalable solution. Please don't throw up your hands and say, “That's not my job.” Perhaps you can't fix the dam alone, but don't dismiss your ability to be a change agent for the construction of an entirely new structure. You bought this book to help give your company a road map and playbook to social selling and, within the book, we help you identify the key players necessary for success within your company. The key takeaway here is that social media tips, trick, and tactics, when used within tools such as LinkedIn, are great at establishing buy-in for social selling. But you're not reading this book for buy-in, you want a global Social Selling Mastery program that scales beyond a few high-performing sales professionals. If that truly describes you, then you must first shift your mindset toward the long play for your organization. The long play is going to require teamwork.

What's included within the mindset shift to scaling social selling? First, you gather executive buy-in and make each role accountable for executing against a predefined set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that all align to one corporate goal.

What departments will be involved in a global social selling deployment?

• C-Level Commercial Leadership (Revenue Officer)
• VPs/Directors/Frontline Sales Managers
• All Sales Professionals from:
  • Demand/Lead Generation
  • Quota-Carrying Sales Closers
  • Customer Success/Account Management
  • Channel Partnerships
• Sales Operations and Sales Enablement
• Digital Content Marketing

Most Level 1 and Level 2 organizations that are executing some form of social selling are not thinking about all these departmental chess pieces. When I meet these organizations, they might be running pilot programs within inside sales or they might have a business unit or product group in one geographic region testing social selling. There is little to no inclusion for a joint task force of sales, marketing, sales operations, and enablement planning and executing together. The results are highly predictable as their social selling programs have minimal impact on revenue. Sure, they appear successful when they cite other KPIs such as increased engagement or more leads. But did their efforts really move the needle for the organization? The bigger challenge with this lack of departmental involvement is disruption. Certain business units are running a playbook that doesn't align with other business units' goals, especially when marketing isn't involved. You're, in essence, selling in a vacuum.

Collecting these stakeholders (e.g., sales leadership, marketing leadership, and operations/enablement leadership) might seem crazy as you first gather them into alignment. But it's absolutely the very first thing that Level 3, Social Selling Mastery, companies have done. These companies recognize that selling in a vacuum is ineffective and each department understands that working as one cohesive system will have a far greater impact on their respective business unit's success. Like a house of cards, remove one pillar, and the entire house falls to the ground.