Why Social Selling Works -- and Doesn't
At Altimeter, we've been conducting research and working with clients on "social selling", loosely defined as using social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube as part of the selling process. I thought I'd share some of the early findings that my colleagues Linda Saindon, Jon Cifuentes, and I have discovered -- and also ask for your feedback, best practices, and challenges in this space. This is part of our Open Research process, where we hope to engage people actively as part of the research process.
Why is social selling important? This stat is the one that we found cited over and over in our interviews:
79% of Salespeople who use social media as a selling tool outperform their peers who don’t
Source: Saleforce.com, The Smart Guide to Social Media Selling, Social Media and Sales Quota Survey
The impetus for this report comes directly our of our client engagement work, where in the process of creating social business strategies our clients wanted to leverage social to affect, influence and impact the sales cycle and ultimately, results. What started as efforts to train the sales teams to “be social” quickly escalated into questions around listening, content creation and marketing, and analytics.
We decided to research how companies are approaching social selling and found a wide variety of approaches to social selling – and not all of them were successful.
Here are some high level findings, with more on the way when we publish our report:
Social Media Training ≠ Social Selling
Access to Social Media Tools ≠ Social Selling
Social Selling ≠ Successful Selling
Too simple right? But we’re currently witnessing and hearing about a lot of activity that is very narrowly focused on training or tools and very light on strategy. Engagement and relationship-building are as important as how to send an informative tweet. Our report will address both best practices related to the art AND science of training as well as high-level mapping of the strategy, organization, tools and technology that support sales enablement. At the end of the day all the tools and technology are just a means to an end in terms of reaching and engaging with your customer.
So what DOES a team or an enterprise need to succeed in this new paradigm? The key is to strategically and precisely develop a new way for sales AND marketing to work together to develop and deepen relationships with customers.
Our draft framework for a social selling system has four components:
- Educate – Education must be tailored and targeted to multiple functions and stakeholders throughout the organization – executives, middle management, sales management, sales people and marketing.
- Activate – Activation includes the set up and optimization of social accounts and profiles, development of a personal branding strategy and engagement strategy, and baseline social listening to learn about customers and their needs.
- Cultivate – Cultivation as it relates to social selling means leveraging your strategy, tools and technology to prospect and discover leads, nurture customer relationships and engage more deeply across social platforms and networks.
- Iterate – Iterate in this case means starting to look at how this new approach to sales will affect enterprise business processes and transform them, including measurement, incentives, behaviors and activities, process, workflows and the integration and synergy that must occur within and between sales and marketing teams.
We would love to hear from you here in the comments and directly to Linda at: [email protected]. In particular, we are looking for social selling success stories, best practices you’ve developed, and especially your challenges and how you overcame them. We’ll be finishing our report soon and look forward to sharing it with you.
B2B Agency Leader | Marketing Strategist. Scaling and transforming marketing for innovative global businesses.
9 年One of the biggest challenges with social selling is defining and setting a consistent process that is repeatable. When training or imparting information to a sales team, there is an aspect of behavioural change that needs to happen. We all know it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, therefore having an ongoing accountability process, perhaps with a dash of gamification, can really make difference to the combined efforts of a sales team. Thanks for your initial thoughts - I look forward to seeing the full report. Is it available?
Sales and LinkedIn Coach for Consultants, Service Providers and Teams to Connect with High-Quality Leads That Become Their Best Clients | Executive Sales Coach | CONNECT | Social Selling Trainer | Speaker
10 年In my experience, there are 3 levels to social selling. The high level is understanding and accepting that the buyer process has changed in an online world, and as a result, sales people need to change accordingly to be successful. The low level is the technical training, eg. how to retweet or change your LinkedIn url. The mid level is the juicy part where we learn to engage thoughtfully and strategically. I have found social selling training is only successful when all three components are learned and implemented. And often, it's more than people realized they were going to have to take on, and that implementing all three takes time, persistence, patience and an open mind.
I get stuff done.
10 年Need to work the chain
Physical Identity based Single-sign-on for deskless workers @ OLOID | Leaders50 2024 | Previously co-founded Mindtickle
10 年Social selling and social brand building are really two sides of the same coin, and are both important. The 4 step process you mention, Educate, Activate, Cultivate & Iterate is how we undertake our programs at MindTickle. We Educate through informative blogs, Activate with deeper information like ebooks, Cultivate through newsletters and mails, and repeat to Iterate. We have a healthy social selling process through our website, and are now also building our social brand through social media. We use several tools to assist with this, like Hubspot to help build the four step workflow and track progress, Leadlander to identify visitors, and proactively hunt through Salesforce CRM. This all helps us identify problems we can blog about to help our potential customers. The crucial factor is being data driven, as this guides what needs people have and then in turn how we can help them.
Sr. Director, Enterprise Account Development | Client Success at Experian Consumer Services
10 年Good read. Social selling is nothing new really. It's a 1 to many referral conversation now rather than a 1 to 1 referral chat between 2 friends. From a B2B perspective using listening tools to stay ahead of buyers needs and finding connections using your network to break into an account when prospecting is the full extent of social selling I think. Most of my sales colleagues haven't experienced more from it than that. It's a very good thing but not a complicated thing at all. However, educating potential buyers in their research phase via Linked-in, Twitter, blogs, etc, isn't primarily done by sales reps. Market developers maybe, if they exist on a team, but not sales reps tied 100% to revenue. I'd call that social marketing not selling and it's mostly handled by a marketing team. I think we'd all agree no one wants to be sold during their research phase. Maybe a conversation on if and how a sales team should set quota expectations and be compensated in a way that requires sales folks to be social sales AND marketing folks is a good one as proressive companies seek to operate more cost efficiently.