Consulting

Buyers complete 80% of the buying cycle before interacting with sales. — HBR, Gartner

For sales organizations to succeed in today’s social business environment, they must first accept that buyer behavior has changed. Buyer 2.0 is web savvy, informed and probably knows more about you than you know about them. In this new world, sellers must shift from a transaction approach to the sales process to a solution oriented; value focused, and socially connected approach.

The Challenge

Sales organizations working through the complexities of the sales process have so much to think about and get right. Today, there are higher level executive relationships to establish, more information to absorb quickly and salespeople have to move faster than their competition. Social networks can either work for or against sales organizations. You know you and your sales team needs to leverage social networks to reach target buyers and shrink the sales cycle. The question you’re asking is how?

Solution

Using the power of social media, we will work with your sales team members to build on and leverage their existing relationship networks to identify the right influencers, create new lead opportunities, demonstrate value to prospective buyers, deepen account penetration in existing accounts and do the research that today’s buyer requires.

Seller 2.0 Characteristics

Today’s salespeople not only must follow a solid and repeatable sales process that generates consistent results, but they must be smart at leveraging social media to become what Hubspot terms “inbound marketers.

We know that buyer 2.0 starts the sales cycle without the involvement of sales, which mean that means B2B salespeople must leverage social business tools like LinkedIn to their competitive advantage. They must be visible, proactive, engaged in the conversation and sharing value that demonstrates trusted advisor capability and credibility. A social networking, referral building and relationship building strategy must become integrated into their daily sales process.

Why Social Attempts Often Fail

Companies and individuals who have failed with social media (or are experiencing lackluster results) did so because they jumped straight to tactics and onto the technology platform without determining their strategic purpose and approach for engaging with potential customers online. There is more to successfully leveraging LinkedIn™ for uncovering and pursuing sales opportunities than merely having a LinkedIn™ profile or occasionally inviting a few people to connect with you. In addition to a lack of strategy, the importance of training is ignored, nor is a repeatable process created that is followed on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Finally, without establishing measurable outcomes to monitor and track, it is impossible to the return on investment of their social media activities.

Our Approach

A successful social media project includes 5 core elements: Assessment, Strategy, Training, Implementation and Measurement. Many companies focus on one or two areas and never achieve the desired results. For example, training without a strategy is merely a tactical event unlikely to lead to much change in achieving revenue goals.

Assessment

The first step in a successful social media strategic engagement is assessing the cultural readiness of your sales organization to determine how best to approach the project. We ask questions that help you determine if your organization is ready to embark on a social media journey.

We assess:

• Senior Management Commitment
• Social Media Knowledge
• Current Customer Engagement Strategy
• Competitive Insight
• Staff & Resources
• Plan & Channel Selection
• Process Documentation
• Governance & Measurement

Strategy

A cohesive strategy that aligns with business objectives seems an obvious and essential step to succeeding with social media. Unfortunately, we know from experience that companies often overlook this critical step.

Working together, we will craft a strategic approach that incorporates the right tactics to achieve your objectives.

Elements typically included are:

• Aligning social media objectives with current sales and marketing goals.
• Analyze gaps in workflows and people skills.
• Evaluate existing content, identify new content needs, and define supportable workflows to create and manage all content.
• Review of social media applications and channels. Channels will include LinkedIn personal and company pages, Facebook Fan Page, YouTube, Twitter accounts or blogs, as well as any other potential tools to enable social interaction with your customers and prospects.
• Evaluate the current social media activities of the top 3-5 competitors.
• Creation and/or review of social media employee usage guidelines and policies.
• Social media success metrics that can be measured.

Training

Expecting your employees to “train themselves” to use tools like LinkedIn effectively will not only lead to wasted time, but there is a very high likelihood that they will never make the time to do it. An investment in training your salespeople to leverage social media in the right way is a must. It will require both an investment in time and budget, but the rewards are well worth it. Our seasoned team of facilitators has extensive sales experience and will help your salespeople learn how to best approach social networking approach to achieving sales results. We have expertise in LinkedIn, Twitter, Hootsuite, Facebook, Inside View, Focus, blogging approaches and much more.

Implementation

What’s the point of creating a strategy or providing your salespeople training if no one ever implements the suggestions? A strategic plan is no good if it is never implemented. During this phase of the project, we work with leadership and sales team members on a monthly basis to provide follow up accountability, training and guidance for putting the strategic recommendations into action. We will also help marketing and sales understand how to schedule and craft messages to support key initiatives, events, business announcements, etc. These follow up sessions are provided virtually via phone sessions and webinars.

Measurement

The final key is in creating a baseline of measurement criteria at the beginning of the project. It is important to remember that the success should be measured on more than just number of Likes on Facebook, number of Twitter followers or revenue.

Other factors that lead to the success of your social media strategies and campaigns are:

• Influence
• Fan engagement
• Increased referrals
• New deals in the pipeline
• Increase in number of new meetings secured
• Increased number of positive conversations happening about your company