Social Selling: What I’ve learned from my customers

In my role, I have the pleasure of working with some of LinkedIn’s largest global technology customers. In this Post I’m going to share what I’ve learned from them and the best practices that can be leveraged.

Before I do this I’m going to dispel two myths.

First of all, that small companies do not have the resources to become best-in-class at social selling. This is not true. The resources, in terms of both time and money, required are roughly proportional to the size of the organisation, the scale of the Sales Navigator deployment, and the level of ambition. The best practices that I will share can be scaled up or down as appropriate.

Secondly, that large enterprises are like oil tankers and to change direction, in this case their go-to-market sales strategy, takes a lot of time and a ‘softly softly’ approach.  The speed and agility at which the global companies who I work with have adopted, expanded and now lead market at social selling tells a very different story.

They are institutionalising Social Selling.

They build a Social Selling program. If I could offer you one tip for organisational success from Social Selling then building a program would be it. The program should have stakeholders including Executive Sponsors, Marketing, Sales Managers, Sales Operations, Sales effectiveness, and Program Managers with clearly defined roles for each of them. Below is an example framework.

They bake Social Selling in to their sales methodology.  Social Selling is not a sales process in its own right but rather an approach that supports the sales process, end-to-end.  The stages of a typical sales process are: Awareness, Lead Generation, Qualification, Opportunity, Upsell, and Referral. Social media – and in particular Sales Navigator – provides actionable intelligence at each of these stages.

They have a thirst for knowledge. Digital transformation of the sales profession is not a step but rather a continuous cycle of improvement. To stay at the forefront of Social Selling the Program Managers and Champions tend to attend Industry events (like Sales Connect), make full use of the online Sales Navigator training library, read and write LinkedIn Posts, are active in LinkedIn Groups and also make use of Social Selling training companies such as Scredible.  

They are strategic and they are tactical.

They plan. Social media is where Sales and Marketing converge and these departments should plan together on their objectives, goals, strategies and measurements. Coming down a level to sales teams and sales reps, Sales Navigator provides rich and deep insights and should be used in territory and account planning.

They enable. Enabling a sales organisation for Social Selling requires the right tools and the appropriate education. Deploying Sales Navigator is the first step. The second is customized training for each distinct user group to cover the why and how of Sales Navigator usage specific to their role, territory/ account base and challenges.  This education should then be reinforced with executive communications and gamification.

They measure. Inputs and outputs should be measured. Inputs measured should include quantity of usage (eg. searches performed, profiles viewed) and quality of usage (eg. accounts saved, leads saved). Outputs can be recorded in the CRM and/ or with ROI surveys and should include measurements such as decision makers identified and opportunities generated. Social Selling Index is a measurement of social selling behaviours (shown below). It should be the Holy Grail as it is a predictive measure of success and shows organisational, team and individual rep improvement over time.

They are playing to win.

They are scaling. The arms race is on. The consideration has moved from ‘how do we adopt Social Selling’ to ‘how to we scale Social Selling’ with Sales Navigator being deployed beyond sales teams to Executives, Marketing and other customer-facing roles.

They are giving themselves competitive advantages. Some of the not-quite-secret-sauces include: having social listening teams and social listening and sharing tools both on LinkedIn (Elevate) and other social platforms such as Twitter, building content libraries for distribution by their sales reps, and their Executives lead the way with pro-actively leveraging their networks to give warm introductions for their sales reps.

They are winning. Big time. Winning in terms of building more pipeline, having higher velocity pipeline, creating larger deal sizes and improving win rates. Accompanying this winning is a culture of celebrating Social Selling success with a focus on Social Selling Index and individual InMail and TeamLink stories.

I hope you found this Post interesting and useful. I will state again that best-in-class Social Selling is achievable by companies of all sizes.

I’m interested in any comments and questions that you have. For any private discussions you can reach me via InMail or at [email protected]