sales 2.0

9 Social Selling Strategies for Sales Leaders

At the Social Sales Strategies Forum last week, one of the speakers referenced a writer who didn’t seem to think much of this whole social selling thing. Although I cannot remember the exact quote shared with us, it was along the lines of…

“Social Selling is hogwash. Nothing is a substitute for human interaction.”

Comments like that frustrate me a little bit. I’m just wondering who ever said that human interaction was kicked to the curb using a social selling approach? Nothing could be farther from the truth. Contrary to what some may believe though, you can “interact” with other human beings online in a meaningful way. Does that mean that I would only converse with someone over LinkedIn email to discuss, negotiate and close a deal? Of course not! That next step in the sales cycle after initial engagement is talking to your prospect real-time.

The real hogwash here is the misinformation being spewed about. Let’s talk about what social selling really means.

My definition is this…

Social Selling is an evolved sales process that is focused on what buyers want and leverages technology to put a sales rep in front of the right prospect – with the right message – more quickly.

At the end of the day, a Social Selling approach helps sales leaders to address their 3 burning priorities:

Get more leads in the pipeline
Improve win rates
Shrink the sales cycle

To turn your sales organization into a Social Selling machine, you need to do these 9 things:

Accept that buyer behavior has changed. It is indeed vastly different than it was 10+ years ago. Your salespeople must change their sales approach and you must help them learn how to do it.
Create a social selling plan. Engage marketing as part of your process but marketing doesn’t own it for sales. Be careful not to default to LinkedIn training without having thought through the bigger picture.
Establish usage guidelines. People must know what is expected. And don’t assume that they know. You need to make sure that you help your salespeople understand what’s appropriate to say on behalf of your company when they are using social networks as part of their daily work.
Choose the right tools. We encourage most B2B sales reps to start with LinkedIn and InsideView (or whatever data intelligence tool that your company may use). Twitter also plays a role in terms of the research and competitive data you can gather and use, but start small before moving on.
Invest in training. Sales behaviors have to change and salespeople need to understand the technology in the right way. If you use the platforms to do nothing more than spam, you have not only defeated the entire purpose of a social selling approach, but you just put your brand at serious risk.
Participate consistently, often and remember that first impressions matter. Today’s buyer surfs for information before reaching out to have a discussion with sales, so your salespeople need to be visible and easily found. Their online presence needs to rock and say…look no further…you definitely want to have a conversation with me about your business needs.
Focus on the right ROI. No, your LinkedIn profile sitting there all by its lonely self will not bring the deals to your doorstep. I find it surprising that sales managers are not asking about the ROI of the time wasted at unproductive networking events. Or, what about the damage being done to the bottom line when salespeople are being allowed to send out some of the most poorly written sales propaganda I have ever seen to prospects? As a sales leader, are you policing the email communication your people are sending out? You should be!
Eliminate outdated sales approaches – cold calls and cold e-mail. Yes, you need to get on the phone with people but you should do that once you spend even 5 minutes doing a little homework before you do. If you want to speed up deals in the pipeline, learning how to engage a prospect properly the first time will take you a long way.
Be realistic in your expectations. No canned sales tricks will get you there. A little sweat equity needs to go into putting these changes into action. If I meet someone offline at a conference event, it is highly unlikely that we close a deal as a result of just that first meeting. OK then, the same goes for using social media and social networking. You still have to court the process along, but the great news is that you can also move more quickly when you combine offline and online networking to get to your end goals.

Social Selling is about selling more, more often using a new approach and new tools to get you there.

You want to sell more, right?

OK then…time for you and your team to do things differently!

Note: image credit to www.kokasexton.com

Is Attracting Prospects Online a Myth?

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Kent came across this blog post whose author suggests that finding and engaging with prospects online doesn’t work. As you might imagine, that got my back up a little, so I decided to look deeper. The blog post referenced a Gallop poll of 17,000 people. With a few clicks (gotta love the Internet), I found the original post from Gallup about social media and the 3 big myths they say that they uncovered.

Here is what needs to be clarified straight out of the gate.

The Gallup poll is consumer oriented and focused on the impact of social media “marketing” in driving the acquisition of new customers and the retention of their current ones.

I don’t disagree with the conclusions of the study, but the blanket statement by Charles Blakeman in his blog post that you can’t engage prospects online is very misleading. Marketers may be faced with a difficult challenge when it comes to trying to engage customers in ways that lead to the conclusion of a sale, but their research doesn’t apply to B2B or how social media fits and benefits the sales process.

Using social media in the selling process is NOT the same as social media “marketing”. You can read an earlier post that I wrote on this topic. Marketing and Sales need to work in tandem and they will both leverage social media in different ways. The distinction is an important one!

How Social Media Fits Your Sales Process

Networking – are you calling three people every day in your network in order to stay connected? Do this daily and make sure that the purpose of your call isn’t to sell something. It is a chance for you to learn more about them so that you can offer to be a resource for them.
Referral Building – are you spending the time needed to cultivate a referral network? You should. Referrals from an outside, credible source secures that meeting 44% of the time. Have someone (credible and trusted) inside your target company sponsor you andexpect to secure that meeting 84% of the time. Think of three people each day who can help you and you them.
Prospecting – using techniques like creating a saved lead list in LinkedIn, you find your targeted buyer quickly, so that you can then plan your engagement strategy and approach.
Lead qualification – when receiving those inbound leads, you can use social media to learn more about the company and individual before having that first phone call. Information that you’ve gathered will aid in your qualification process.
Pre-sales call research – because so many salespeople fail to do this work, they come off sounding amateurish. Questions like what keeps you up at night or what are your top initiatives in 2012 just have no value and only waste time. With tools like InsideView, you can gather public information about companies and their leaders, as well as be able to leverage the real-time buzz and conversation via social media.

By now, most people conceptually understand that the power of sales meets social media happens in these five areas on the front end of the sales cycle. It is in the HOW to do these things well, which is followed by then doing them consistently is where things start to break down.

We have seen so many great examples of how our clients are using social media to build pipeline and revenue. It does work. But if you or your salespeople are not seeing great results, we’d love to talk to you. We are launching a new social sales coaching program September 14 that will help you do these things and more. Training people on WHAT to do and HOW to do it is the fastest way to start seeing sales results.

Success stories from our customers who know that social selling works!

Prospect – “After a meeting with the prospect, we learned their parent company had an initiative to consolidate all their wireless lines (thousands). I was given the title of the person making the decision but that was it. I then found a C-Level contact at the parent company on LinkedIn who was connected to him. I was one degree separated from her and we shared three similar connections. I reached out to a common connection of ours to make a referral and then asked her who was responsible for the wireless consolidation task. I had a meeting with him one day later.”

Prospect – “A cold call to the President/IT director resulted in the prospect telling us to call back in a year. One of my reps went on LinkedIn and found a Director of Safety. We called her with a fleet tracking safety solution and secured a meeting. Now we are working on a solution for 50-75 devices.”

Former Customer – “Ported out over 10 lines five years ago. They would not take our call for years on several win-back attempts. By using InMail on LinkedIn, we got a response and a meeting with the owner. We now have three opportunities in the funnel and have already had follow up meetings.”

This is HOW its done folks! This particular client’s salespeople were seeing results in just a few days or so. By leveraging the information and changing their engagement approach, you can see from their comments that the results speak for themselves!

Check out our Sales Meets Social Media Program

Selling is Social in a 2.0 World

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Recently, I attended the Sales 2.0 conference. As a first-timer at the conference, I wasn’t completely sure what to expect, but I have to say that it was one of the best run, most informative conferences that I’ve attended in some time.

The overall theme of the conference was sales and marketing alignment, in addition to social selling. What I find curious is all the time spent talking about the need for sales and marketing alignment (it has been a topic of conversation for years), but somehow the problem has yet to be resolved in most organizations. Now that social media has entered the scene, I believe that alignment between these two departments is even more critical.

Social marketing campaigns must be tied to current sales processes and CRM systems but I don’t see that happening in most instances. Case in point. I met a Marketing Manager recently from a sizable organization who became defensive when I asked if her company had a social media strategy. “Yes, of course, she huffily replied. I handle all of that.” I said, “Cool. How are you tying your marketing campaigns and social lead generation activities to your sales teams CRM system and sales process?” She didn’t even know what a CRM system was much less understand how social sales leads should be tied it. Folks, social media marketing success is more than putting up a Facebook fan page and it certainly requires more than hiring the young 20 or 30-something who knows how to tweet, but I digress.

Personally, I don’t think the sales and marketing alignment problem is that tough to solve. Am I just naive? Why doesn’t the CEO put both sales and marketing on the same revenue goals and bonus them on the same objectives; i.e. hitting quota. Don’t bonus marketing on cheap leads, bonus them on the right leads! On the flip side, tie a piece of every reps sales commission to following up on the “right leads” provided by marketing. To be fair, we all know that salespeople often ignore the leads handed off to them by their marketing team and that’s generally because the leads are not adequately qualified. Salespeople want to talk to qualified, motivated buyers. Give them the right leads and they will follow up! By the way, signing up for a free whitepaper – often called “raising your hand” – doesn’t mean that the lead is qualified or that the potential buyer even cares about what you sell. Maybe they just thought that the whitepaper sounded interesting.

Here are a few of my other thoughts as a result of attending the conference:

The right conferences are still an incredible way to expand your network. Yes, I love the power of social media, but let’s face it, people do not buy from companies, people buy from people. I went to learn, speak, to meet people and to make connections, but I didn’t go to “sell”. Take note sales folks…the best sales come from the investment in building relationships that lead to opportunity over time.

Your online conversations can move offline. I had such fun meeting people like Joanne Black and Anneke Seley that I’ve been talking to or following online for quite some time. Joanne and I have connected again since the conference and have decided that we are twin sisters of different mothers. We both agree that there are lots of opportunities for us to support each other with referral business. And sometimes, you have to travel 2200 miles to meet a local colleague from your own community. That was the case with Judy Yi of Silverpop who works about 10 miles away from my office and wouldn’t you know…we are also members of the Atlanta Women in Social Facebook group. Small world! Online conversation is great, but taking it offline can be even better!

Don’t forget the social in social selling. There were a handful of conference vendors who just couldn’t resist tweets full of selling. The me, me, me got a bit old. If you’ve been sharing valuable information with conference attendees and then mix in a pitch here and there..ok, but tweets simply focused on you and what you sell are a big turn off.

Keep presentations focused on delivering value to your audience. This is a nice way of saying…don’t sell from the podium. One vendor in particular spent their entire presentation time selling, selling and more…well…selling. Not only nauseating, but they were the subject of numerous conversations throughout the conference and the comments were not positive. Honestly, is that really how you want your company to be remembered? Just sayin.

Bold moves sometimes backfire. During one of the presentations, I applauded the move to do a “live demo” of the sales approach being sold. At the same time, I felt like I was witnessing a car wreck in slow motion. The approach was slightly better than cold calling and the techniques used to get things like email nomenclature from the receptionist were a bit lame. Not to mention the rep went back to her several times asking the same questions she had just answered. Listening skills were lacking. As for the voicemail message being left for the targeted prospect…what a waste. It was focused only on what the vendor wanted – an appointment. Nothing in it for the exec at all! If I was the exec on the receiving end of that message I would have hit the delete button in 2 seconds flat. Lesson… do your homework before picking up the phone, so that when you need to leave your voicemail message, you’ll be able to leave one that is compelling enough for your prospect to want to call you back.

I’ll close by saying that aside from a few presentation missteps; I was inspired and energized by the sheer number of smart people with great ideas and approaches to their business. I engaged in many great conversations and appreciated the willingness of so many pros to share best practices. It can be easy to coast along comfortably in our day-to-day lives without remembering the importance of investing in our professional development. I say thank you to all the people that I talked with who so generously shared their perspectives.

Hats off to the entire Sales 2.0 conference team for creating and delivering a conference experience that raised the bar and puts other conference organizers on notice! Seriously, Selling Power, you rock!

p.s. I’m attending the Sales Strategies in a Social and Mobile World. Why don’t you join me for a meet-up?

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