Transforming revenues through Data-Driven Social Selling

The classic sales and marketing funnels has been evolved as customer life cycle — discover, explore, buy, and engage — which put the customer at the center of your sales and marketing strategies and efforts. There is a need of sales & marketing to work together to identify the sales signals, engage with potential buyers with contextual insights and build credible relationships with buyers. 

As much of the customer buying behavior continues to move digital, digital (social) media have become fundamental to the success of sales & marketing organizations. Whatever product & services you’re offering to the market, potential customers are everywhere – but as modern technology has changed the way we engage with customers and information, both sales and marketing need to adjust their efforts and redesign consumer journey and experience accordingly.

Sales organizations must join marketing organizations and take a customer-centric approach to how they engage with both customers and prospects. Digital (Social) Selling can help organization better understand what content sales team is sharing with clients and prospects online and via social media. As marketing learns more and more about what content sales is using successfully, they can create better and more targeted content.

Whether you’re selling to individuals or businesses, the buying process has changed for your customers. Customers are more tech savvy, well informed and well connected than they’ve ever been before. They aren’t easily swayed by a cold call and a sales pitch as they prefer to do their own due diligence. With so much information at their fingertips, customers are engaging with the seller or provider far later in the purchase process, only to discuss the last few details before making a decision. In order to stay relevant in this rapidly changing environment, the smartest sales representatives are getting social. It’s more important than ever to reach buyers early to engage prospects in the right way, with the right content, at the right time. Salespeople must think more like marketers. They need to approach selling from a buyer’s perspective. This means understanding and aligning your sales strategy to the issues, questions and processes buyers have when making a decision. 

Figure 1: Data intelligence is changing the way we make sales as it enables new digital sales models and opportunities like social media engagement.

And this is where social selling comes to the rescue. At NTT DATA Digital Business Services, we offer social selling solutions that utilize the latest digital technologies and methods to conduct core activities sales professionals have always performed: research, networking, prospecting and building relationships with customers.

Priorities and challenges for sales and marketing organizations due to changes in customer buying behavior:

Strategic priorities ? Sales productivity ? Customer acquisition ? Customer retention

 Challenges ? Increased complexity ? More knowledgeable customers ? Intense competition ? Reduce costs, especially travel

As the digital space and customer expectations continue to evolve, the most obvious change to the customer buying process is the ever-growing dependence on researching, exploring, learning, buying and providing feedback of products online. This means social selling is now more relevant than ever. At Digital Business Services, we believe that social selling is an uprising for sales. Gone is the traditional sales model based on cold calls, qualifying leads and demos. The new sales model is all about taking a business-first approach. By educating prospects and connecting with them through social media, sales reps yield a more successful, contextual engagement with buyers. To do this, they need content to build credibility, provide innovative insights and capture buyers’ attention and interest. Sales should partner with marketing during the transition from traditional to the next-generation social selling model as marketers should be able to provide more insight into what works and what doesn’t. They should work together to create value for and build credible relationship with buyers, which will help them grow revenue in the long term.

 Approach to social selling

Customers have become digitally empowered, extremely informed decision makers. Digital channels help them discover deals, explore products and services, and share feedback — giving customers significant market-making power. Social selling can optimize revenue, return and results of the sales process by utilizing social media for listening, engagement and collaboration. The next generation of marketing is all about one-to-one or personalized marketing and social selling, through a data-driven social selling experience. This enables sales and marketing teams to engage one on one with prospects. It’s an evolved form of content marketing.

The pillars of social selling at Digital Business Services:

Discover and relate Sales and marketing organizations discover potential leads by listening to and monitoring digital channels and social networks. Using our social media command center, we map out relationships within prospective companies to determine who the decision makers are, what they are looking for, where they are spending time and common topics of interest. Like consumers, today’s businesses openly express their objectives and needs through digital and social media. This allows us to discover shared interests or relationships that can turn cold calls into warm introductions. By discovering more about a prospect and learning how to relate those discoveries on a one-to-one basis, we can help sellers build a strong relationship with prospective companies through contextual interactions.

Engage and influence Digital is a comprehensive process, so we recommend a business-first approach to engage with and influence potential customers. Social media allows sales representatives to connect and contextually engage with influencers, potential buyers and decision makers. They can keep tabs on customers’ social profiles and get informed of trigger events without bothering them with follow-up calls that add little value to either side. When an opportunity for engagement arises, the seller can reach out to the customer through social media or another digital channel. Sales representatives can engage with potential buyers at every stage of the customer lifecycle, help them make informed decision and influence them with contextual information or offerings.

Collaborate and transact Digital and social platforms strengthen the entire network of relationships involved in sales and marketing, making the selling process as collaborative as the modern buying process. Sales representatives can collaborate to discover prospects, build referrals and identify cross-selling opportunities. By providing value in relationships, we establish a connection, create trust and foster loyalty. Sales reps can be a credible source of information for buyers in their buying process. 

A peek inside our social selling process

I strongly believe that social selling starts with social data. Through our robust 5-R Methodology, we help companies understand customers, gather insights by analyzing empirical data, and define an engagement plan with buyers on social channels. Using automated data consolidation, a 360-degree view of customers, and engagement and marketing strategies, we extend social selling solutions into a cross-channel marketing powerhouse.

Data-driven social selling has also transformed sales and marketing outcomes. Through social selling, sales and marketing representatives can:

? Expand sales and marketing efforts across customer touch points

? Enable personalized marketing

? Influence relationships at scale

? Automate outbound sales programs

Social selling maturity model The benefits of social selling are significant. As our social selling maturity model shows in Figure 3, selling teams who fully embrace, integrate and optimize their social selling activity can expect to see top-line improvement of 15–20%.

Business and sales leaders should approach social selling as an organizational journey. It is larger than any one tool, project or initiative. But social selling also requires sales professionals to change their behavior, which may be a challenge.

Measuring success

Social selling is not hard to measure. Based on sales and marketing objectives, organizations can build their own measurements framework. Breaking down sales and marketing signals into their logical areas makes sense — organizations can then measure engagements and effectively determine impact on the overall sales pipeline (marketing- and sales-qualified leads) and revenue. According to LinkedIn, businesses with successful social selling strategies: 

? Have 45% more sales opportunities

? Are 51% more likely to hit sales quotas

? Outsell 78% of peers who don’t use social media 

We’ve found that businesses can see up to a two- to threetime increase in marketing and sales qualified leads and up to a three- to fourtime increase in outbound yield over cold calling with social selling techniques.

Conclusion

This shift in buying behavior is driven by anywhere, anytime access to resources and online stores in the new digital era. Organizations need to adapt and use social selling to help buyers make informed decisions — or risk losing their sale completely.

To tap into the changing buyer reality, sales and marketing teams should utilize social data insights to support customers throughout the entire buying lifecycle. Marketers also need to understand what pieces of content are working best in which situations and with what segment of buyers. This will improve a buyer’s journey by giving them the timely content, increase the number of sales- and marketing-qualified leads, and effectively bridge the gap between digital buyers and sales representatives using data insights. With a data-driven social selling strategy aligned to the customer buying cycle, organizations will see noticeable brand and sales pipeline impact.

Stop struggling with revenue figures and sales performance today and learn how to transform the selling and buying process with social selling solutions.

Read my whitepaper on www.nttdata.com

Connect @AskMukesh