Top 3 Factoids for Social Selling
1. Leads developed through employee social marketing convert 7x more frequently than other leads (Source: IBM)
Wow! Employees are becoming the new sellers!
2. Sales reps using social media as part of their sales techniques outsell 78% of their peers (Source: Forbes)
Developing a relationship online makes a big difference!
3. 77% of buyers are more likely to buy from a company whose CEO uses social media (Source: MSLGroup)
It starts Top Down!
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:
- It shares advice from a business leader who has leveraged Social Media to drive ROI in her businesses.
- 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!
- The story is told with over 70 case studies from companies in B2B, B2C, small, medium, and large, and every industry and country.
- 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?
- 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!
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Many thanks to Jeff Gitomer for his mentorship on writing this book!! He is SUPER!
Social Selling Tip: Celebrate your clients
This video blog is the last in the series of our Social Selling series.
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Happy Halloween! Social Business is creating a Scary number of new jobs
Happy Halloween! Since we had Hurricane Sandy last year, and snow the year before, this will be our first true trick or trick in a while! Be safe!
I was just in a panel with Target Marketing and after the panel got a lot of questions around what are the new job types I should be looking at due to social media dominence.
Don't be scared! There are a few. Your fear can rest if you start looking at the new frontier today!
What are some of the new job types that the Social Era is producing?
- Community manager - A person responsible for building, maintaining, and activating members in an online location around certain topics. Key skills required: Ability to be transparent, drive sharing among members, and listening and shaping conversations. This role has become so popular that a day honoring its professional was created!
- Social Business Risk Manager – A person who is focused on managing the risk associated with clients controlling brand online. The role entails building a risk management plan, selecting a listening tool for ensuring risk is assessed, and ensuring groups of people can rally around a recovery. Key skills required include: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, public relations, and grace under fire of a crisis.
- Reputation manager – a person responsible for building, maintaining and protecting a company’s reputation. Reputation is what clients and potential clients believe to be true about your company. Key skills required: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, marketing, and the ability to position a brand, company or product in a positive light. This role has now outpaced the Risk Manager role, showing that the industry has moved to being much more proactive.
- Social Analytics manager – a person who monitors, listens and analyzes the sentiment (or feelings of people online), and turns the massive amounts of data into insight. This role will become increasingly important as more automated tools are coming into the market. Key skills required: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, business intelligence, and ability to make recommendations on incomplete data.
- Social customer support manager – a person responsible for scouring the blogsphere for customer concerns, insights, and statements. This person’s role will have to extend through multi channels of input – including social tools like Twitter, Facebook, as well as traditional channels of phone which has now become one of many places where listening and turning data into insight will occur. Key skills for this role include: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, customer service, and CRM.
- Social Product Innovation manager – a person who can generate ideas, refine ideas, and solicit valid “votes” on the best ideas that customers will actually buy. With the increase in crowdsourcing or the ability of using crowds in the blogsphere to create and vote on new product concepts, this person becomes crucial to your company’s innovation engine. Key skills for this role include: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, product management, and product development.
Social Selling! Best Practice of Engagement!
Have a great cup of coffee and enjoy this week's Social Business Coffee Break!
Today we are continuing our series on Social Selling. Thank you so much for the great response to date!
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The Social Sales Team - Knowledge accidents and all!
The Social Sales Team
A good sales team should rarely meet each other. It should, instead, be out meeting customers. It should be working out what your customers want and be maximizing the return for your organization. The problem comes because sales teams have voracious appetites for ideas, comments, case studies, pricing, presentation, market intelligence and so forth. They are generally very poor at following a process and providing forms to fill out and records to keep gets in the way of the sales process. In addition to this, much of what a sales team relies on is experience amongst the members of the team.
The knowledge accidents that occur when they bump into each other in the corridor or at lunch are extremely valuable and efficient to exchange information and catch important snippets. So how do you keep their appetites satisfied, but maximize their time in front of customers?
Make them Mobile
Give them the technology they need to keep in touch easily with the places they need to go to help them in their job. This might be an iPad with a 3G card, or a Mi-Fi device or similar which lets them connect to the office and access your systems.
Collaboration Hubs for Clients
In your social intranet, create communities focused on each of your major customers. Use Wikis, Forums, Activities, Ideation Blogs and all the other tools you need to share everything you have about that customer which would help your sellers. Consider organizing the material around opportunities (perhaps pulled from your CRM system) using tags. That way you can easily find everything about a particular opportunity whilst keeping the structure fluid so that it’s easy to re-use information. For more information on this, please see
Give them some Power Tools
Provide them a social network to interface with other sellers. Teach them how to use the outside social tools . Did you know the most productive sellers in IBM leverage social in their sales process?
One of the best techniques the Sales Team can deploy is to use an informal blog. This lets them express their thoughts, experiences and opinions about the work they’re doing with the customer account without the need for the structure of more formal meeting minutes. It’s in the blog that the seeds of the knowledge accident tree are sown. It’s where short narratives about what’s going on can be captured and stored for the benefit of the rest of the team.
Remember that by putting mobile technology, which is connected to your system in the hands of your sellers, they will be more inclined to participate. If it’s made easy, and they are rewarded for doing so, they will do it.
Social Selling Video Blog! Know the influencers!
Welcome to our Social Business Coffee Break!
We are in the middle of a Social Selling series. Today we will focus on leveraging influencers to help you reach that white space client and to retain client loyalty!
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Social Selling! Tip #4 "Learning" Your Clients Through Social Networks
Happy Monday!
We are continuing our Monday series on Social Selling -- today focused on our Tip #4! I am to start the discussion on how you know your prospects and clients.
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