Social Selling is the Big Bet for 2015!
New tools and skills for sellers
So, if you’re not already considering social selling within your organisation for 2015, then here’s some reasons why you need to start looking at social media for selling. Gone are the days of cold calling, cold lists, random marketing mail outs, these techniques as prospecting are fatigued with over usage. Today we see smart organisations utilising the social channels to gain customer insights, competitor insights, employee engagement, brand advocacy and even open up new revenue streams. Social media for B2B organisations is not just about having a social presence, opening up a Twitter, LinkedIn and or Facebook account, but is more about bringing together sales and marketing as a combined unit and creating a social selling environment for the organisation to exist in.
How do you go about creating a social selling programme for your organisation?
We all know the marketing 4Ps (product, place, price and promotion), well there is the 4Ps of social selling that has been widely discussed in many blogs and articles that are scattered across the web, these areas should be addressed in your social selling programme:
The Four Ps of Social Selling
People buy from people, so what better way than to upskill your sales team with social media and social selling skill training. Note that people will take up social selling at different rates, so it is important that you have an ongoing social media training programme to support novices and experts. Publish best practices and highlight achievements to encourage participation.
Document a simple social media policy linking to your orgasnisations’ code of conduct and brand values. Your employees are ultimately your brand ambassadors and the first point of contact before engaging. So it is imperative people are aware of the policy, as this is your code of conduct when it comes to representing your organisation online. I would suggest developing a small internal communications campaign including linking to your published social media policy, a short educational video and internal communication notices. We all help educate and support your social selling team.
Social selling is about people, but in order to aid or facilitate the programme you will need to look at the different social media tools that enable you to aggregate the varies social networks into one tool. You can use the tools to automatically post to your teams’ accounts or allow your team to decide what content they wish to share in their social networks. Ideally the sales team would choose the most relevant pieces content and add personal touches and opinions to the content, this will enrich and adding value to their networks and build their individual “trusted advisor” status.
For social selling to be effective and measured you need to connect sales and marketing with your CRM system, this could be as simple as adding a social selling field to your database to issuing social selling campaign tracking codes. What you decide on will depend on what systems you have in place within your organisation.
You should also agree daily tasks and content that should be shared regularly by the sales teams’ social networks. A weekly social media calendar helps stimulate regular social media usage, but you also need to think about other standard tasks you would like your team to do regularly, for example, connecting with customers and prospects.
Bring social selling to life and add that competitive edge by adding gamification to your programme. This can be simple as awarding someone social seller of the quarter with a trophy and certificate to awarding a prize to the first deal secured that quarter through social selling. Adding incentives with aid to the success of your programme.
So developing a social selling programme for your organisation doesn’t need huge development funds. I would suggest piloting social selling within your organisation with a small team of sales people and conduct this over a period of 3 to 6 months depending on your sales cycle. You will need to invest in training, write a social media policy, create social media content for the sales team, buy a few LinkedIn sales navigator licences, trial a social media aggregation tools (Social on Demand, Hootsuite, Social Chorus, Sprout Social or Buddy Media to name a few social content distribution tools) and agree a process and measurement. Simple!
Good luck with your social selling programme in 2015 and if you’ve had any successes with your programme, then please leave me a comment below, as I would love to hear from you and share your learnings.
