Social Is Sales Caffefine! Get Bold!

Get Bold!  Use Social To Drive Up Your Sales Results!

Social media is changing everything.  I don’t have to tell you (or Jeff Gitomer who wrote Social Boom!) that Social media will change the way we live and work.

Get Bold is a Must Read because:

  1. It shares advice from a business leader who has leveraged Social Media to drive ROI in her businesses.
  2. It has an actionable framework to help you do something, not just read something. The Social Business Agenda has been used in over 64 countries for business success!
  3. The story is told with over 70 case studies from companies in B2B, B2C, small, medium, and large, and every industry and country.
  4. It is about real ROI.    Did you know that on average adding Social into your sales process increases your sales by 15% according to a McKinsey Study?
  5. It recognizes that transformation takes more than luck, technology or prayer.  It takes a culture.  Afterall, Culture eats strategy for Lunch!

Adding social to your sales process makes you more competitive.

As an example of what you will learn in the book, read this real case study!

In IBM, our ibm.com team must attract a high volume of leads from a new set of customers.  Since Social has become a tool for getting information on products and services, we wanted to explore how to leverage word of mouth.   For instance, after a Twitter search or deeper conversation in a LinkedIn group or forum, potential buyers might ask companies for more information, but they also often turn to their peers, other clients and trusted advisors.

So our ibm.com team decided to go social.  Our inside sellers drove prospects to their Rep Pages –- personalized ibm.com pages that play a “virtual business card” role for inside sellers. These pages have relevant information to clients, enhance the relationship, and give clients one-click access to interact with their reps.

After training on how to engage and nurture potential clients, the ibm.com team built Twitter profiles to establish a presence in the social networking world. The ultimate objective of this pilot was for sellers to use social media to add value to conversations and build a pipeline of leads.

We (IBM) also worked with an outside firm to identify the most prominent influencers in the our space, so sellers could then follow them and comment on or retweet their posts and learn and connect.  We developed a unique engagement strategy for each influencer, based on their activity and what they were saying.

To make it easy to maintain their Twitter presence, sellers also have a social message calendar, accessible via the feed reader function within Lotus Notes. The calendar features time-sensitive messages reps can tweet, with enough content for three tweets a day.

Over a 7 month period, these ibm.com teammates increased their Twitter followers by 5X

In the first two weeks of this effort, sellers’ Rep Page visits rose by 106 percent –thanks to a systematic pattern of Twitter mentions. The sellers reached 1.9 million contacts.

As we move ahead, social selling success will be reflected by the rep’s Klout score,  which gauges influence in the social world, an increase in the number of direct Twitter followers, and relationships developed with key influencers.

I’d love your comments and feedback on  “Draw Up Your AGENDA,” provides a showcase of complete Social Business AGENDA case studies with a summary on each workstream your company will need to complete.   See a sneak peek of the 10 top lessons of using Social Media to your advantage!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EneTBPnwtKI]

Many thanks to Jeff Gitomer for his mentorship on writing this book!! He is SUPER!

by sandraanncarter

Levels of Maturity for Communities

Communities are essential for Social Businesses. All communities go through a community maturity model.

1.  Potential:  Planning phase of maturity.  It typically involves setting up the community elements required for long term success such as roles and responsibilities, strategy, mission, membership planning and activities.

community maturity model

2.  Formation of the community.  Having a great community manager is a key factor of success.   During the formation, the initial members and influencers

3.  Building and Evolving.   The community builds and evolves as it forms.   The best communities stick to their goals but evolve in the way they reach them.    Typically building and evolving involves driving traffic to community and increasing member participation.   The topic of content curation is also one that grows and questions of contribution of content and consumption is reviewed.   The community may review how to improve quality of content and how to train the leaders.

4.  Operationalization.  A community that has made it to this stage, has begun to do analysis adn use the insight to drive to its strategic objectives.   Typically, the metrics are around Collaboration, Consumption, and Contribution. Opportunities, Risks and learning are then applied.  This is the time to develop detailed action plan to achieve goals, maintain and monitor activity plan and content strategy, identify potential content gaps to feed to harvesting plans

and to train community members on social.

5.  Adaptive.   This final phase is where the community now takes on the personality of the members. It enables the community manager to drive the goals to the next level.

At IBM, we do Health Checks for our communities.  

These health checks do the following:
  • Ensure the communities have the design for success
    • Clearly defined strategy and active plans
  • Produce Healthy communities
–High volume of collaboration, contribution and consumption
–Connecting people to experts and people to quality strategy content
–Ensure Community roles and responsibilities are clearly defined
–Facilitate business benefits that lead to important organizational value
  • Utilize the Brokerage Service to ensure long term vitality and maturity of the community
–Consistently high participation, collaboration and contribution and consumption from the community members

by sandraanncarter