In just over a week, Dan will be giving a workshop on How to integrate, deploy, and maintain a best-in-class social selling program at B2B Marketing's IGNITE event in London on July 3rd (register here).
For those who can't attend the event, we thought we'd give you five ways NOT to integrate, deploy, and maintain a social selling program if you want it to succeed:
- Leave training in the hands of folks without domain experience. No offense to Marketing or Sales Enablement, but salespeople would rather hear from people who've been in their shoes before. When you're under pressure, there's nothing worse than being pulled out of the field and told what to do by someone with no domain experience. (We with love.)
- Roll out a program without C-level buy-in. There will be naturally curious people who are open to learning new things, but for the most part, people take cues from their superiors. If the boss doesn't give two figs about the new program, there's little reason for anyone else to.
- Ideate and launch the program in a silo. We've seen this car crash from a few different angles. From sales leadership not telling the CMO about a new training program until the kickoff meeting to Marketing signing on without the green light from Sales, you cannot transform a siloed decision into a cross-functionally aligned program.
- Expect the program to thrive without close cooperation with frontline sales managers. These folks have a team of people to coax into hitting their number on top of having their own quota to deal with. Help your frontline managers look like all-stars by ensuring they understand what their people are being trained on and can continue the training in their 1:1's with reps. But leave them to fend for themselves? See #2 above.
- Forget to bring Sales Ops into the program. An effective social selling program needs everyone in the revenue engine, but especially SOps, who are the key to measuring the initiative's success.
The good news? It's not too late in the year to set up a social selling program and start yielding results. If you need help, you know a guy.
For more information on what an effective social selling program looks like and why it has to be delivered with a programmatic approach, check out our article in the Forbes Business Council.
ChatGPT likes to generate copy that starts with cringy high school essay openers like "In the realm of XYZ...." It's totally cool to use AI to write messages, but rewriting unnatural phrases like this is an easy way to add a human touch back to the robot's responses. "In the fast-paced world of Buyer Experience" (there's another crappy example), a short personalization exercise can go a long way.
