Social selling: Using social media to drive sales Perspectives from senior sales and social selling professionals
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Introduction Author and marketing expert Jay Baer summed up the trap many salespeople fall into with social media when he said, “activate your fans, don’t just collect them like baseball cards.” But the question many salespeople are currently asking is what that process of activation actually is. With the modern consumer facing such a “wall of noise” whenever they log into social networks, the common practice for most salespeople is to simply turn the volume up in an attempt to shout louder than the competition. Yet true social selling isn’t about this, and rarely does this work. In fact, many believe true social selling doesn’t involve selling at all, but rather a process of listening, empathising and helping potential customers by positioning yourself as an expert who can solve a problem. And to do this takes time and an understanding of what social networks are best suited to selling in your markets, and where your customers reside and are most likely to engage. Whilst this sounds like a time-consuming challenge that can be negated by simply picking up a telephone and cold calling a prospect, the reality is the tried-andtested models of selling are no longer appropriate for the modern-day consumer’s buying process. Research from Sales for Life states that 57% of a consumer’s buying decision is completed before they are “willing” to talk to a sales rep. With 72% of consumers using social media to research a company or product before making a purchase, it stands to reason that salespeople need to be more engaged with customers earlier in the cycle, via the channels of choice. With so much to consider, we’ve pulled together this report taking on board the views of a select group of experts and practitioners to determine the pros, cons and requirements for implementing a social selling strategy into your organisation. The following articles will help pinpoint areas of success, while highlighting trends in how social selling is evolving and tips to ensure you go along the right path to benefit the organisation and the sales teams your social selling strategy is designed to empower.
Neil Davey, Editor, MyCustomer.com
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Why is social media becoming a go-to channel for selling?
Featuring Theo Priestley, technology consultant and strategist, Redux
Why is social media becoming a go-to channel for selling? Theo Priestley, technology consultant and strategist, Redux Theo Priestley is a technology strategist, advising vendors and end-clients on how technology and digital trends will disrupt their business models and customers. Theo gives keynotes and conference talks worldwide on tech trends, writes for Forbes, and mentors early to mid-stage enterprise software start-ups on go-tomarket, product and marketing strategies.
Let’s get a myth out of the way first: social selling isn’t new. Or to put it simply, selling has always been social. The act of selling has always required a personal touch, the building of meaningful relationships, and more importantly, relevance to the buyer. You wouldn’t buy from a salesperson if the product or service didn’t contain any relevance for you at that time, or if there was no intention of developing a relationship. What the advent of social media and social networks have brought to selling, and ultimately the entire buying process, is that the methods of contact have increased, the information available to create greater relevance have become more transparent, and as a consequence building a meaningful relationship has become easier. You may have already heard the phrase “cold calling is dead” , and to a great extent this is now true. Once upon a time, a salesperson would call or email speculatively to see whether there is an opportunity to sell.
Now, salespeople can research a myriad of sources and social networks to build a picture of the picture.
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Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Wordpress, YouTube, Flickr, Medium, they are all channels which a prospect may be using to interact professionally and personally, each containing vital profile-based information which can give essential clues. From these a salesperson can build a profile of the prospect and therefore tailor their sales technique and pitch to be more relevant to that person, with information such as:
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Who the key individuals are within the organisation that are connected to the prospect.
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Who the salesperson knows personally and who they’re connected with.
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What’s happening in the company the prospect is a part of.
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What the prospect likes and dislikes in their personal lives.
LinkedIn is perhaps the most well-known tool for developing a deeper relationship with a prospect in this regard, offering a number of opportunities:
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Your first level contacts open up a route to a wide range of second and third level connections.
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You can discover a better way to map your prospects - you’d be surprised how much people put in their profiles, i.e. which team they’re in, which office they work out of, what projects they’re focusing on.
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You can get past the gatekeeper with InMail - InMail is LinkedIn’s internal email system and allows you to send an email to any LinkedIn user without requiring an introduction.
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You can learn what’s happening in your prospect companies and follow any company that has a LinkedIn page. That way you’ll see anything that changes directly in your updates.
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Use groups for more than simply keeping up to date - Member questions are great for telling you about frustrations and unmet needs. They can also give you the perfect reason for making contact with a prospect.
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It works, too. Microsoft is a great example, as they recently did an extensive ROI analysis of their social selling programme and found that engaged social sellers were far more productive, generating 38% more new opportunities than the traditional sellers. The programme quickly grew from an initial pilot of 15 salespeople to over 3,000+, due to the demonstrated success.
Research by the University of British Columbia showed that common ground between a buyer and seller is enough to establish a personal connection and increase the likelihood of a sale. These personal commonalities can include something as simple as a shared first name, birthday or birthplace, as well as professional similarities. These can actually shape the situation in terms of a prospect’s desire to buy and associate with the product, solution or company, and can also translate as deep as their attitude toward the overall buying cycle itself. Today, almost all (over 90%) of buying executives never respond to or buy from cold calls or unsolicited emails, of which they receive some 200 a day, so getting the attention of a decision-maker has become almost impossible using old sales techniques. Furthermore, 91% of B2B buyers are now involved in social media in one way or another. Over 50% of them are seeking information about products and services on social sites. 75% claimed research via social media would likely influence a future purchase and over 80% of executives will engage when referred by a connection via a social network.
Social media has had a significant and disruptive impact on the entire buying and selling lifecycle. It’s no longer a one-way process. Using social media and social networks as a means of researching the prospect is just a small piece of the puzzle. Social media also offers a means to establish a salesperson as an authority on a subject matter and develop their own personality by creating
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meaningful content, content which may ultimately inform a prospect and lead to them initiating first contact. How can a salesperson achieve this? It can be as simple as writing for the company blog, commenting on popular online industry articles, or creating presentations and uploading to Slideshare. And why would they do this?
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Helpful content can anticipate and answer a prospect’s questions.
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Useful content is findable and relevant and acts as your own 24/7 salesperson.
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Reliable content builds customer assurance, because you are establishing your expertise.
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Valuable content adds value to the buying process, since your buyer is searching first and calling second.
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Relevant content helps to solve a customer’s problem and increases your reputation.
Selling has always been social, it’s just now buyers have become more informed, and can control and influence more of the lifecycle than ever before. And as a consequence salespeople have had to evolve and adapt.
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The benefits and pitfalls of becoming a social seller
Featuring David Tovey, founding director, The Sterling Growth Hub
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The benefits and pitfalls of becoming a social seller David Tovey, founding director, The Sterling Growth Hub David Tovey is a published author and an inspirational speaker on social selling, customer experience and leadership. His book ‘Principled Selling’ published by Kogan Page joins up social media, content marketing, selling, customer experience and leadership.
Probably the biggest single barrier to the adoption of social selling by salespeople and their managers is that it’s called ‘social selling’. It’s a title that can conjure up thoughts of doing business with a glass of wine in one hand and a business proposal in the other, or sharing Instagram pictures of what you had for breakfast with serious prospects. It would be much better to think of this new approach to winning business as ‘selling in the digital age’ , but that’s a bit unwieldy. The reality is that sellers and buyers alike live in a rapidly developing digital age over which they have no control, and having a strategy for the digital era has become an essential part of driving sales growth. Technology is changing how customers buy and inevitably that means how we sell needs to adapt to the new business landscape. I describe social selling to my clients and audiences as using social media to connect and engage with customers, building and maintaining trusted relationships before trying to ‘sell’. I deliberately put ‘sell’ in inverted commas because selling has changed significantly in recent years. In the past, salespeople often depended on marketing to provide leads. Any salesperson will be familiar with the “Why doesn’t the marketing department send us decent leads” and the marketing departments response “Why can’t you sell to these great leads we give you” - an argument that pervaded my corporate life as both a sales director and later as a marketing director.
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In my experience, the situation has always been that sales people have needed to generate their own leads if they were to have any hope of meeting or exceeding quota. The traditional route employed to generate leads started with cold calling. In my early days of being a quota-bearing salesman that usually meant working through the Yellow Pages. Later in my career, CRM systems were introduced – but early iterations weren’t much more than a computerised Yellow Pages. Whilst there are a few who will still insist that cold calling works, all the evidence is that the approach produces diminishing returns with every passing year. I am not suggesting that calling (using the
As Trish Bertuzzi, The Bridge Group, says: “It’s the ‘cold’ that is dead, not the calling”
telephone) isn’t relevant any more, it most definitely is, it’s just that the ‘cold’ bit isn’t effective.
Benefits of social selling Buyers are better informed and savvier than ever. Social selling allows anyone, who is charged with winning business, to adapt their approach to selling in a way that is more in tune with how customers buy. A significant part of my role as a salesperson in the past was to educate prospects about products and services, now buyers educate themselves on line. Buyers research product information, compare prices, find out about our organisation’s reputation and even make judgements about us personally by checking out our online presence. However unfair it might seem, having no social media presence can be as damaging to your reputation as having a negative online review. The new role for salespeople is more about demonstrating business prowess than selling skills, more about being commercially minded than sales-minded, more about being a business consultant than a persuader. This means developing a deep understanding of the customer’s world, allowing sales people to give context to how their products and services
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help prospects to achieve their goals and objectives. The great news is that there is plenty of information available online about our customer’s world.
Use social media to listen to what is going on in your target prospects’ lives and they will tell you about their business challenges, they will inform you about their industry and they will even give you tips on how best to sell to them. It’s about trust The Edelman Barometer of Trust, an annual global survey into who consumers trust most, revealed in its 2015 survey that buyers trust information that comes from employees of an organisations more than they trust what the CEO or advertising says. The survey also shows that consumers trust people in their social networks more that they trust what organisations say through their traditional marketing channels. This is more great news for salespeople. It means that what salespeople share through social media platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) is more likely to be trusted than anything that their organisation generates through traditional channels. All salespeople have to do is ensure they are connected to the right audience, share valuable content and adopt a consultative approach to winning more business. The fact is that no one wants to be ‘sold’ to anymore. Successful social sellers are becoming adept at building a buyers motivation to buy; where the energy to buy comes from the customer not the seller. Get social selling right and more of your dream customers will be beating a path to your door.
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Salespeople still need to be great face to face communicators and to be enthusiastic about their products or services. When salespeople use social media to build trust before trying to win business, they earn the right to tell their story and are more likely to be listened to. Keeping in touch with customers throughout the buying cycle, building and maintaining trust before and after a sale has never been easier – I just wish social media had been around 20 years ago!
Avoiding the pitfalls The case for social selling is overwhelming – but it can be easy to succumb to some of the pitfalls.
“Technology connects us, people build relationships” The first pitfall is thinking that social selling is about technology, it’s not – it’s about relationship-building and communication. If you can use a smartphone you can use social media - anyone can be up and running in ten minutes and realising the benefits of social selling within a few hours. It’s also not about age. I have clients aged 25 who understand the business use of social media and I have clients who are 65 who are complete converts to social selling. Many marketing departments were early adopters of social media but some don’t see the world as salespeople do. Marketers sometimes think it’s about getting any content out there and continue to pitch marketing propaganda, effectively using social media as another way to cold call. They bombard prospects and customers with content - but most of it is being ignored. The only content to share via social media platforms is valuable content. Information that educates and informs; information that customers really appreciate because it is useful, timely and even sometimes entertaining. Salespeople are usually much closer to customers and instinctively know what type of content will appeal to their target audience.
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The issue for some salespeople is that they aren’t used to crafting articles, writing blogs, thought leadership pieces or producing videos. All types of content that can be easily shared using social media. The answer is for marketing teams and sales teams to work closely together so that developing valuable content becomes a joint responsibility – using the skills of everyone to generate quality leads, maintain customers enthusiasm throughout the buying cycle and building long-term loyalty after the first sale. Every article, every Tweet need to be crafted, every piece of content shared from third party sources has to pass the ‘valuable content’ test. As this 21st century approach to selling continues to gain traction there will be casualties. Organisations and salespeople who decide to stick with more traditional methods of winning business will find that they lose out to the competitors who harness the power of this new digital age. Adapting to social selling does take time and effort, but have no doubt that the results will be more sales, more revenue and more profit.
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What makes me a social seller?
Featuring Marleen Reininger, account manager for health organisations and charities, Microsoft
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What makes me a social seller? Marleen Reininger, account manager for health organisations and charities, Microsoft Marleen is account manager for health organisations and charities at Microsoft, having previously worked within Microsoft’s Advertising and Online business as Solution Sales Specialist role for XBox, developing bespoke advertising solutions for key clients across multiple industries including entertainment, automotive, technology and FMCG.
I’m an account manager for a mix of 130 health and charity customers. Due to the number of organisations I need to manage and build relationships with, my role is internally focused, however I have a large team made up of regional business managers, technology specialists and partners that help me execute. Social media is crucial to success in my role. It is the first thing I check after starting up my laptop. Not only does it give me the opportunity to build a more personal relationship with my customers (which is not always easy to gather over the phone), but it also helps me get an understanding of what they look like and their background. In turn, they can get a feel for my role, who I am and how I can potentially help them, through my updates. The crucial first point of note here is that using social media is actively encouraged in my organisation. Parts of the business undoubtedly use social more than others depending on the number of customers they have to interact with, but with the increased importance on influencing other business development managers outside of the standard remit, social media will become more and more important for all sellers. As a result, we started off with using Social Selling Index (SSI) as an indicator for success, however now we are also tracking how active people are in sharing content and winners will be celebrated on Yammer on a weekly or monthly basis. It’s something being instilled in our working culture as well as our personal lives.
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I’ve developed a rhythm for connecting with all my customers and new contacts through social media. LinkedIn helps build better relationships and make new connections outside of your closest circles, and gives you the power to learn from industry leaders and see how they are connected. I’ve built my profile within the industry through making the right connections on LinkedIn and sharing updates relevant to my customers. Twitter is also an important tool as I’m able to stay on top of what is happening in the industry and discover what it is my customers care about. Spotting opportunities based on topics and articles my customers share is paramount to using Twitter effectively, and allows me to build a rapport with them when it comes to connecting via both Twitter and LinkedIn. In turn, I would add that industry blogs are included in the overall social selling piece, as they help me build up my subject knowledge, get to know the movers and shakers in my sector and, crucially, find and share content that’s respected and will hopefully help my customers build up their knowledge too.
Sales Navigator With LinkedIn playing such a crucial role in my day-to-day work, there’s no escaping the fact that sometimes the paid service it offers will give me more visibility. For people weighing up the pros and cons of paying for premium facilities, I highly recommend they consider just how important lead building is to their social selling. For instance, if I know what role I am looking for or what name I am looking for in an organisation I would use the Sales Navigator tool in Linkedin, as it allows you to have 3rd degree visibility: it unlocks the full profiles of 3rd-degree-and-up connections. Sales Navigator’s Lead Builder tool also enables you conduct warm outreach far more effectively, and build rapport and trust with prospects. This helps you create specific buyer profiles by job title, function, industry, location, to target potential decision-makers.
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InMail InMail is also a powerful tool the LinkedIn platform offers, and arguably justifies any of the premium subscriptions as a standalone feature. In the era of social selling, InMail helps creates more opportunities for me, as it is often a more cost-effective route to building contacts due to the payback service LinkedIn offers if an InMail doesn’t get read. To try and improve success rates, I would look for something that is relevant to the connection and mention it in my InMail; for example an NHS project in the area, related organisations I am also working with or contacts I might already know in the account and ask for an introductory call to learn more about their role and strategy. On the other hand, I would also recommend never standardising InMails as these inevitably sound like marketing scripts. Your customers undoubtedly receive a large number of this sort of communication.
Try to make it relevant and personal with the intention of genuinely wanting to get to know what they do and what matters to them. Just do it This isn’t a case of preaching an instruction manual for successful social selling. We all know how to use social media through our personal accounts, and it’s a case of taking a professional version of this to the work arena. Get out there and connect with your accounts. It doesn’t mean you need to email every single one of them, just see it as a way to build your credibility within the industry and as an opportunity to learn more about what your customers share, talk about and most importantly who they are talking to. If you see they’re talking to your nearest competitor on Twitter, for instance, isn’t that an opportunity to find out why?
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In my eyes, a social seller is someone that understands how to build relationships in new and innovative ways. Selling is not only the actual act of selling something anymore. It is about the effort you put into relationships and connections as well as the experiences you offer the customer along the way. Therefore, using social media to learn more about your customers, help them stay up-to-date with what is happening in your work and extend your network to other parts of the business, to me is what social selling really means. The actual sale will inevitably follow.
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The importance of creating your professional ‘brand’ on LinkedIn
Featuring Lewi Watkins, UK social selling manager, Microsoft
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The importance of creating your professional ‘brand’ on LinkedIn Lewi Watkins, UK social selling manager, Microsoft
Lewi leads social selling programmer in the UK, helping salespeople understand the true power of LinkedIn and Sales Navigator. He also educates on how to create a professional brand that encourages customers to connect and interact, ensuring salespeople are at the forefront of mind after a relationship is built an opportunity arises.
Social selling is a concept. It’s being able to act on this concept and create something physical from it that matters. The easiest way to do this is to create a professional brand, as social selling is more about selling yourself than the company. In this respect, LinkedIn is arguably the most effective tool for social selling; especially in B2B. A good point to reference is that the platform now has over 350 million registered members (and growing), which is a huge database to work from. With many CRM systems not able to change as customers change their roles, we find that our contact bases can become very outdated very quickly – at which point, LinkedIn can provide a great source for more up-to-date information. In this respect, LinkedIn is arguably the most effective tool for social selling; especially in B2B. A good point to reference is that the platform now has over 400 million registered members (and growing), which is a huge database to work from. Another great value-add of LinkedIn is its ability to integrate with Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM. Having an integration between the two platforms gives users a 360-degree view of their customers. This means a user’s time can be spent in one platform rather than changing back and forth between multiple platforms. Also – it’s such a simple platform to get started on.
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It gives us a real-time view of a company’s contact base and allows us to strategically focus on those we believe can aid us the most with business opportunities. It also gives us access to potential contacts that we have never had access to before, and guides us when we haven’t filled in important information in our profile that might enhance our opportunities. Yes, there are areas that may not apply and if that is the case, simply push it to the back of the pile and focus on what counts.
What does count? As with any social network, in building your professional ‘brand’ it’s important to know what doesn’t work as much as it’s important to know what does. The obvious first point is to ensure you get your profile right. If you have a complete profile, but talk about how you constantly over-achieve and hit your quota, then a customer is not going to see any value from that. Turn that on its head, however, and talk about how you enable and educate customers through your product or service and why they need it in their business. You then become a trusted advisor, and therefore a social seller. It’s important to consider what you’re sharing, especially early on. Again, this may seem obvious, but always make sure the content you post is not in any way derogatory, racist, sexist or too politically motivated. It’s so easy to tarnish your reputation and brand, not to mention the business you work for, by sharing something that falls into one of the aforementioned subjects. Following on from that, there is commenting on posts and updates – some people purposely share provocative things aimed at trying to get an
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argument started, but if you see something that you don’t like, ignore it, dismiss it or report it. Always be the bigger person and do not get pulled in – it is a social media platform and not everyone is there to talk about business. Always think about who you’re adding and connecting with. If you do not know them, then don’t add or connect with them; the caveat being if it’s a potential client and you want to speak to them.
Social Selling Index Having worked with LinkedIn for some time now, I can say with some certainty that one of the platform’s biggest drawbacks was always that it was historically quite difficult to convey and see how connecting to the right people, engaging with insights, relationship building and having a complete and professional profile was having any sort of positive impact. However, the platform has introduced a new way of measuring success via its Social Selling Index (SSI), followed with an animated version that can be seen in real-time by simply going to a link. Suddenly, the concept of social selling on the platform had some element of measurement attached. I have also added a gamification element to the SSI that highlights and rewards the best performers, which I highly recommend as it makes people want to get involved with social selling. Improving your SSI is relatively easy – complete your profile and listen to what LinkedIn say when trying to help, share content and get involved with other people’s content.
The measurements may be devised by LinkedIn but the process of improvement is still extremely relevant to the process of improvement in traditional sales.
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Getting into the mindset of how social selling is measured can be one of the hardest things about the discipline, and so concepts such as SSI can help guide you through the process and add an important level of competition.
Social triggers Gerry Moran talks about the importance of LinkedIn ‘triggers’ and the actions people should take in response to these triggers, and I firmly agree with those being a critical part of being successful on the platform. However, while there are triggers that you should respond to (such as connection requests from potential targets), it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly which triggers work better than others as everyone is different. Some people will happily try and connect with someone if that person has looked at their profile, whereas some find it easier and more comfortable to start a conversation with a potential contact (off the back of a news article for example) before asking to connect with them. Being a social seller is a process that needs to work for the seller in question, as no one seller is the same. From a personal opinion, if someone looks at my profile and I think they could benefit from having me as a connection, or I could benefit from having them, then I will connect. I think the best action for anyone to improve their success is to test and find out what they are most comfortable with and focus on that method as well as trying others to expand and increase their success. Selling via LinkedIn isn’t something that happens overnight, and that is one thing I like to make clear. Ultimately, the more effort you put into it, the more you will get in return.
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Key takeaways
1. Social networks are your rolodex. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Wordpress, YouTube, Flikr, Medium; they are all channels which a prospect may be using to interact professionally and personally, each containing vital profile-based information which can give essential clues.
2. Having no social media presence can be as damaging to your reputation as having a negative online review. The new role for salespeople is more about demonstrating business prowess than selling skills; more about being commercially minded than sales minded; more about being a business consultant than a persuader.
3. You need to develop a ‘rhythm’ for connecting with customers and new contacts through social media. By making social media central to your daily processes you can build a more personal relationship with customers (which is not always easy to gather over the phone), and get an understanding of what they look like and their background.
4. Creating the right professional ‘brand’ is at the heart of social selling. Think about every detail in how you sell yourself rather than your company. Consider everything you post and every comment you make, and how it might be framed in the eyes of your current and potential customers.
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About Microsoft Microsoft Dynamics offers a full range of software focused on delivering business insights that matter to both you and your customers. It offers a suite of customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions that are easy to-use, tailored to your market and dedicated to growing your business through happy customers. Learn more here:
http://aka.ms/crm-social
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