Successful Social Selling: What I learned at LinkedIn Sales Connect 2015

Those of you who know me know I’m an Engineer, with a capital "E". When I go to conferences I go to conferences with booths that contain large computers, 3D Printers, and cool machines.  This was my first conference that had a DJ, live music, and an actual dinner where the majority of the people stayed and talked to people they had never met before. Did I mention it was in Las Vegas and not Ontario as well?  A major change, this SalesConnect event that LinkedIn put on.

Even though it was out of my comfort zone (some famous basketball player spoke...) I learned some things about this new thing called Social Selling that I thought I would share.  But before the sharing starts, a little background is in order.

PADT has been active with marketing through social media since before they called it social media. Forums, newsletters, and email lists have been a big part of how PADT reaches our audience for over 20 years. As those methods have been replaced by blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, we have had to shift our approach. Even with all this change, from a marketing perspective things have gone well.  What is new for us is Social Selling, defined as: “Social selling is the process of developing relationships as part of the sales process. Today this often takes place via social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, but can take place either online or offline.” Our ANSYS software sales team has made significant progress using LinkedIn and the LinkedIn SalesNavigator  and has seen some success in this area. Other areas of the company are not fully leveraging it. So under the pretext of visiting customers in Nevada and a desire to learn more, I attended this event.

Connect + Inspire + Transform

This was the theme for the event. Many attendees are new to SalesNavigator and using LinkedIn to help sell.  So the idea was to connect with each another, figure out what was working, and transform our sales process to take advantage of the networks we have through LinkedIn.  This did work. I met a lot of smart people who are, just like PADT, figuring this stuff out as they go along.  A copy of common themes bubbled up as we connected and tried to inspire one-another

1. This is still new. Not a lot of people are using their social network to help them provide better services and products to existing and potential customers. Those that adopt this now will have a couple of years to take advantage of it before it becomes common place.
2. Social Selling is not a replacement for creating relationships and delivering value to your customers. It is just a better and more efficient way to do it.  It does not make you into an industry expert, but if you are one, you can reach more people.
3. The use of social networks and the connections they create allows you to be more personal and less automated. It creates and grows relationships that need to be two-way to be successful.  It is the opposite of bulk email and cold calling because it allows you to build a relationship.

Shaquille O'neal did a nice Q&A session... again, not normal for an event I attend. I think he played Basketball...

Implementation

A common desire in the attendees was to learn more on how to successfully implement Social Selling in your organization. Many of the talks were given not by LinkedIn, but by users of LinkedIn tools, and they were useful.  In the end, the lessons learned on implementation were the same for any significant business project:  Get management behind the effort, develop and follow a plan, educate the users, measure what you can, and hold people accountable. No big surprises or secret weapons here, unfortunately. We all want that magic bullet.

One observation was repeated over and over again, and is worth mentioning. Your sales and management team should spend some time on their LinkedIn profile. Have an engaging picture that truthfully represents them and have text that tells potential business partners what you actually do and what you are good at.  Many people set their profile up to attract job offers, and that is fine if you are looking. But if not, gear it towards telling people things you would want to know if you wanted to do business with you. (I just updated mine.)

Sandy Adam and Ubaldo Rodriguez from ANSYS, Inc. gave one of the better talks... but I'm biased. 

Measuring Social Selling: SSI

Anyone who has tried to measure sales and marketing projects knows that it is hard, regardless of what the salespeople selling you marketing automation tools tell you. There are few tangible inputs, and it is hard to draw conclusions from the outputs.  The nice thing about LinkedIn is that they have tons of data on what their users are doing.  So they have found a measurement that they feel is a good indicator of how well you can use your social network on LinkedIn to be better at sales: The Social Selling Index, or SSI.  Everyone can see their SSI here.  As of today mine is 75.  Anything above 70 is considered very good (I only point this out because I am over 70). They measure a lot of things to come up with this number behind the scenes, but what you see is a score in four areas, each worth 25 points:

• Establish your professional brand
• Find the right people
• Engage with insights
• Build Relationships

If you are a good skeptic, you will ask “so what?” Being a card carrying skeptic, that is what I asked. And it was answered.  Companies that keep track of the use of SocialSelling have shown increased number of meetings with prospects, more deals in their pipeline, and larger average deal sizes.  Microsoft’s sales team has done the most rigorous tracking and they saw 38% more engagements from salespeople with high SSI scores. There was other data, and I'm not sure what was confidential and what was not, but if you contact your LinkedIn rep I'm sure they will share what they can with you.

The bottom line is that this SSI score is proving to be a true Key Performance Indicator.

My SSI as of this Afternoon... maybe this article will get me to 76?

B2B Sales has Changed

Several different speakers hit on this theme. The internet and internet search have drastically changed the way businesses buy products. A common statistic that is sited all the time is that when a customer engages a sales team, the vast majority of the time the customer has already made a decision on what they want to buy.  Customers are educating themselves so the role of a sales team as educator is much diminished. That role has shifted to making sure the customer is getting the right solution, and helping them to acquire and implement that solution.

The acquire part has also changed. When we started selling ANSYS 18 or so years ago we generally sold to an engineer. The were empowered to figure out what their company needed and buy it. Now almost every purchase is done by consensus. Teams that involve engineers, IT, management, purchasing, and finance are making the buying decision.  So much more complicated and a lot more work.  And as we have all learned from being on both sides of the table, the number of factors being considered in the buy decision has gone way up.

Social networks help a sales professional educate those users long before they engage with you, and the networks also help you understand and work with the committees that are now involved in purchasing.

Doing Social Selling

After sitting in on several talks and keynotes, I found that there were a couple of key steps that are working for those who are successful with social selling.

1. Use your contacts and information in LinkedIn to find people who might find your products useful - network
2. Use that same information to get to know your prospects, turning a cold call in to a warm call. Both you and the prospect benefit from that - research
3. Reach through the noise out there and become an industry expert, providing useful information to your network - publish
4. Stay in touch and use the tools to know when changes happen to people in your network - connect

If you are an implementer or sales manager, train your team to do these four things, then follow up with them and make sure they are using them.  Several people pointed out the value of face-to-face time with salespeople to see how they are using LinkedIn and SalesNavigator and making small improvements. 

Overall Thoughts

My first observation was that a conference full of salespeople and marketers is a very friendly place, in comparison to a technical conference.  Meeting new people and striking up conversations was never easier.  This resulted in not enough people in the technical space being there and the engineering focus group at lunch was half of one table. Very sad.  That being said, it was great to get out and interact with people from other industries and other parts of the country. 

My second observation was that PADT is lucky. We sell two product lines, ANSYS Simulation Software and Stratasys Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing) machines.  Both of these are the clear industry leaders in their space because they provide a product that works and that people want.  We don’t have to “sell” our customers anything, we just need to find the right solution for their needs.  We just need to find the people that can benefit from our products, and Social Selling helps us do that.

Lastly, I learned that technology is no replacement for integrity.  Yes LinkedIn give me access to hundreds of prospective customers. But if I use it to spam them or harass them, I will be no more successful then if I’m waiting in their lobby to ambush them as they go to lunch.  If I really have a product that can make them more successful, and I respect their time and needs, then a network like the one I have in LinkedIn can help me find people and interact with them in an efficient way.

Good stuff.

Share your thoughts and comments and we can keep this conversation going.  If you would like to learn more about PADT, what we do, and how we do it, visit us at www.padtinc.com or contact me... I'm on LinkedIn.