KNEWSTART E-BOOK

7 Smart Social Selling Tips for 2015

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7 Smart Social Selling Tips for 2015

The world is getting bigger and busier. Opportunities abound. Technology is in momentum and it’s

changing everything including the way we work. True performance based businesses embrace this.

They always operate in a state of readiness. They see opportunities when others don’t. They take

measured risks, act fast and want what’s current. They put better above cheaper, and revenues

ahead of costs. And they are leading the way with social.

In 2015 smart, savvy business owners are following suit. They’re revaluating and modernizing their

sales approach. They’re going social, inspiring their teams and incorporating it into the business.

They know that they’ve got their work cut out. Change isn’t always welcomed especially when hard

graft and mindset shifts are involved.

To be successful they’re now going to have to wear many hats. For example, they’ll need to know

how to sell their services, plus how to brand, market and mine data. However, when they get this

right they’ll increase their opportunities by 45% and reduce their prospecting time by 75%. This

obviously enables more revenue, faster, and with less cost. And, a happy sales force ensues.

So here are seven top tips that you and your sales team can implement right away in order to

achieve these results.

#1 Tip - Work with a social media policy

As a business owner who’s interested in adopting a social selling approach one of the first things

you need to do is define your social media policy and prepare a written agreement. This needs to

detail who owns what i.e. the profiles, logins/access, content, followers and how it can be used.

Both the brand and the employees need to make sure that the terms are clearly defined before any

work on social media begins.

It’s crucial you seek specialist advice for this. The law is extremely complex and social media is still

very new. As a guide, you may want to think about the following headings:

• Policy statement

• Who is covered by the policy

• The scope of the policy

• Responsibility for implementation of the policy

• Using social media sites in the brand’s name

• FSA requirements

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• Using work-related social media

• Personal use of social media sites

• Rules for use of social media

• Monitoring of social media

• Monitoring and reviewing of the social media policy

#2 Tip - Prepare a steady flow of content and sales collateral from marketing

If you’re going to succeed with social selling, your sales team must have content that they can use

to attract their buyers with and add value. This is their “bait” so I encourage you to do several

things.

The first is to get marketing to create your buyer profiles. It’s likely there’ll be a few. Secondly,

make sure everyone involved knows what they look like and is emulating your buyer. Read what he

or she reads. Know what they like to consume.

Armed with this information you can then get marketing to list each type of content you produce i.e.,

blogs, whitepapers, articles, guides, check sheets, press releases, videos, newsletters etc. Once

you’ve done this, they can map your content against your prospects’ buying cycle.

Here they’ll need to identify all the areas in the buying cycle where you’re lacking content. This

enables them to plan the content marketing schedule, develop a content repository and allocate the

right resource internally for content creation.

With a content marketing schedule and repository in place they can now make this available for the

teams who’ll be using it. They need to know what they can share, when they can share it, whether

it’s time sensitive and whom it’s applicable for.

Furthermore, they need to know how to craft their messages. For example, the first 75% of the

buying cycle should provide commercially neutral solutions to your prospects’ problems, whereas

the last 25% should be self-promotional, as they’ve established themselves as a trusted source.

Always encourage them to review the quality of their content and make sure it’s well written,

informative and interesting.

The easier you make this for them, the more they’ll use it. And, that’s why sometimes I suggest that

marketing writes the tweets, hashtags, commentaries and posts, and uses an employee advocacy

platform. This way they can be sure that they’re protecting the brand and only “approved”

messages go out.

A word of warning though if you implement this approach. As with any technology initiative, success

depends not so much on the capabilities of the technology, but on the way in which it’s used.

Simply expecting your teams to broadcast content, parrot-fashion is setting yourself up for failure.

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#3 Tip - Educate your sales team and get their buy in

Jill Rowley, is a well known social selling expert and she says: “The modern consumer is digitally

driven, socially connected, and mobile empowered. Sales reps need to adapt or be replaced." This

statement is relevant. Here’s why.

These days if you’re going to perform in B2B sales or manage a performing team, you need a

strategic approach. Success now depends on responding earlier in the buying cycle. It means

reaching out to buyers at the right times, while knowing more about them and their needs than they

know about you and your product/service. It requires you to be savvy, astute and forward thinking.

And that’s where social selling comes in and educating your teams on it.

Organisations that train their sales teams to use social selling as a layer in the sales process see

them hitting their targets (quotas), achieving shorter sales cycles, having more renewals and

retaining more customers. In fact, according to a LinkedIn study of sales reps in 2013, 45% saw

more opportunities and 51% were more likely to hit quota. And in November 2014, Jamie Shanks

from Sales for Life reported that after working with 45,000 sales reps in over 200 companies the

ROI they’ve seen amounts to this:

• On average – for every $1 a company puts into a sales rep for social selling training, that

sales rep will make the company $5 within 180 days.

Clearly these stats indicate that when sales teams are better informed and more engaged with their

buyers at the critical moments of the decision-making process, or at the ZMOT (zero moment of

truth) as Google calls it, they perform to higher levels.

However, to do this they have to take a holistic approach and they need training.

It’s not enough for sales professionals to set up profiles on LinkedIn. Effective social selling

professionals monitor and participate on multiple social networks. They take advantage of the

unique strengths of each platform and they communicate in the language each one demands. They

socially surround their connections (analysts, thought leaders, experts, peers, and colleagues). And

once they’ve made solid connections with one person on multiple social networks, they continue the

process by taking a look through the prospect's followers. This enables them to see whom else they

can connect with.

Whenever I’m explaining this to my students or clients I often use the analogy of a puppeteer. Just

as a puppeteer would pull the strings of the puppet to make it come to life, so does the skilled social

selling professional with their social media platforms. They work each one with skill and they make

it look easy too. Yet, all they’re really doing is just following a process.

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The process has been taught and it’s being managed. Success comes when social selling is

integrated into the workflow and that means changing “old school” sales habits, such as cold calling

and email blasting.

So let me clarify exactly what I mean here.

Social media has not replaced phones or email. Sales teams who use social selling are actively

using both and are actually far more productive using these tools when they start to use social

media platforms to monitor their prospects and gain warm introductions.

However, social media platforms open a secret door that puts a sales professional right in front of

decision makers. The secret door is much more effective than the front door, i.e. the phone. So if a

sales professional is trying to contact a C-level prospect through the front door, they’re not going to

get in for they'll encounter the gatekeeper who’ll keep them out. However, if they go in through the

secret door, there’s a 98% possibility that these C-levels are paying attention to what’s being said

on social media platforms and that they’ll engage with them there.

To illustrate the point that I’m making I’m going to use Jessica from ACME Corporation. She’s tired

of getting cold calls from sales people trying to sell to her. It interrupts her workflow and is irritating.

She’s busy and most of the time she’s running between meetings, implementing the actions from

them and dealing with volume email. As a result she has her phone on voice message permanently.

She uses her mobile (cell) phone for business and only gives her number out to those people she

wants to hear from. She’s proud of her mantra:

“If you want to reach me then you better get introduced by someone I know or share something

interesting that catches my eye.”

Choosing not to answer cold calls, whenever she has a buying need her approach is typical.

When she’s looking for a supplier she doesn’t do a Google search and then call to make her inquiry.

Instead, she searches Google, reviews the supplier’s website, considers their services, checks their

reviews and reaches out to her connections for verification or recommendations. If she thinks

they’re OK, after having done all that and having compared them to other suppliers, she then

makes contact via email or the phone.

Most buyers are like Jessica. They’re completing 50-70% of the buying process before engaging

with a sales person. So imagine what would happen if you could get your sales teams into the

buying cycle earlier and influence Jessica’s decision on which supplier to pick? And, all they had to

do was to help her.

It sounds good doesn’t it? Ok, so let’s replay this scenario but with you adopting a social selling

approach.

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From the start you’re now going to do some research on ACME Corporation. You’ve found out that

Jessica is a potential buyer of your services and through a bit more data mining that she’s on two

social media platforms - LinkedIn and Twitter. By going to LinkedIn, you can see that you have

mutual connections in common and that she’s connected to several other contacts from ACME

Corporation that could also be useful.

You don’t do anything with this knowledge right now. You just store it for future use. You can see

what she’s interested in and the groups she’s connected to. Hopping over to Twitter, now you can

gain more intelligence and through more data mining build a clearer profile on Jessica.

With this information at your fingertips, all you have to do is start to build a relationship with her on

these social media platforms, gain her trust and add value in order to have an increased likelihood

of influencing her buying decision. And as easy as it might seem here, it requires training.

#4 Tip: Amplify your brand to increase brand advocates

So you’ve educated your sales team on social selling, which is fantastic. The next thing you need to

do is to leverage this even more. The way to do this is by involving more of your company.

With training everyone can participate.

If we revisit Jessica and her attitude of “share something that catches my eye” this is all about

sharing content i.e. blogs, white papers, articles, reports, interviews etc. In the pre social world this

was a job for the person (or team) in marketing. Through various campaigns they’d create all sorts

of marketing content and messages, which they’d then distribute to their market.

Today, however, everyone in your company can participate, as they’re all potential publishers and

brand ambassadors. As Kurt Shaver, social selling expert says, “They can take the same content

that marketing produces and pump it out to their own network across their own social media

platforms. In essence they’re micro marketers who deliver select pieces of your brand’s content to

audiences that already trust them. And by adopting both approaches the company gets to amplify

their message and reach more trusted buyers.”

Just Imagine if you have a sales force of 10, a marketing department of 1 and they’re all using

these social approaches in order to increase brand awareness and develop leads. When you add in

65 of your consultants you’ve now got 76 employees (brand ambassadors) sharing your brand’s

content - worldwide. And this is exciting as we’re much more connected than ever before.

According to research the average social media user uses two social media platforms. And, in 2011

the Pew Research reported that the average person (in America) had 634 ties in their overall

network, and that technology users had bigger networks. Now that was four years ago, and

everyone knows how social media has grown since then.

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Let’s look at IBM for they have a great success story and have used this approach successfully.

In 2014, they invited 200 employees to participate in a social media initiative and it drove more than

half-a-million clicks through to calls-to-action. That equated to a substantial return on their

investment with cost savings on media spend of between $300,000 and $1.2 million.

#5 Tip – Improve communication, get the teams working together

Whenever I walk into a company, it’s the same story. The sales team believes that marketing aren’t

providing enough high-quality leads. The marketing team believes the sales teams aren’t converting

enough of the leads they do provide. And then there are the technical teams who don’t want to get

involved.

Anyway, working like this isn’t profitable for the business and it must stop. The best businesses

know this and that’s why they encourage good internal communication and a team culture. They

understand why it’s better for everyone to work well together. And, they let their employees know

that if they do this they’ll be more secure in their jobs, less pressurized, achieve more job

satisfaction, obtain better bonuses and commissions as a result.

Here's why.

Typically, when revenues are down, business owners and senior managers look at the activities

that have gone on within the sales and marketing teams. Many jump to the conclusion that hiring

more salespeople will solve the problem. Others cut marketing budgets or make redundancies

within the technical teams. Some do all three. Regrettably, they all result in a quick fix and don’t

solve the main underlying problem for a long-term solution.

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Only by getting the teams to work together and focus their attention firmly on the prospect, will a

business increase its leads, sales and revenue. As a business owner it’s important that you and

your senior managers realize that this relationship is a vital component of your business success

and go about reinforcing the alliance.

Before instructing your teams to target your prospects with marketing material to generate leads,

make sure you have an agreement and definition as to what constitutes a qualified lead i.e., when a

suspect becomes a prospect and the process for handing over the lead. By doing this, everyone is

clear on when it should be passed to the sales team, and this affords sales with the highest quality

selling opportunity.

As the lead generation process continues, sales should constantly review their criteria for a

qualified lead and feedback to the marketing and technical teams if changes occur. Further to this,

sales should also inform them when the lead converts to a win or loss. Sharing victories leads to a

united and empowered team. Furthermore, it’s PR and reminds the team that the new social selling

approach is working.

#6 - Managing your social selling approach and work to shift mindsets

Some businesses understand that they need to modernize their sales approach so they invest in

training. However, many don’t see a return on their investment. Sadly, that’s because delivering

training and workshops are not going to increase performance and impact the bottom line on their

own. The only way that you’re going to reap the rewards of your teams’ new learning is by changing

their behaviour and this requires ongoing management and support.

You need to show the teams that the new way works and work hard to shift traditional sales and

marketing mindsets. For example, in very traditional organizations sales teams often have an

attitude where it's not even good enough to win. Instead they've got to crush the competition while

winning. Likewise, marketing has operated profitably by pushing information out and broadcasting.

However, these types of mentalities don't work for the modern buyer. Modern buyers have unlimited

access to information and people. They want to engage with those who are knowledgeable about

their subject matter, and care about their welfare. They don’t want to be sold to and now they have

a choice.

Sales and marketing professionals have to remember to get into the heads of their buyers and think

what do they need to know, and what are the questions they have that are unanswered. They have

to be genuinely interested in forming integral relationships with their buyers and helping them get to

the point where they can purchase.

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Management too has to be onboard as they’re going to have to lead the change. They have to be

actively participating in social media and leading from the top. So, in addition to you that means

involving the:

• Sales Director

• Marketing Director

• Operations Director

• Technical Director

• Sales Manager

• Team Leaders

#7 – Review the teams effects

Once you’ve started converting leads into new business, it’s time to measure, assess and report

back on the whole campaign.

To begin, you must know that the old ways of measuring and reporting are out i.e., the number of

meetings, proposals and demos. Pipeline and revenues are still the metrics that matter but build

your pipeline by finding leads with true potential through commonalities.

This needs to be a team effort for sales and marketing, and technical if they’re also involved. By

reviewing the process, from start to finish you can make improvements and provide a more targeted

approach for future prospects.

Key measurements for review are:

Vanity Metrics: These are things like Klout scores or your Social Selling Index. They don't show

how much your efforts contributed to your targets or your company's bottom line, but they’re

indicators of social success.

Business Metrics: These are split between sales and marketing management, and the individuals

themselves. Between them they may track:

• Website traffic: visits to site. Track by URL or Campaign ID

• Number of clicks to shared content

• Number of active users (sales, marketing, technical) using the platform

• Network growth: new connections and followers

• Engagement: the number of prospects that engaged with your activity

• Lead generation: the number of prospects that converted to a lead (meeting, call, demo,

proposal)

• Renewal rates: the number of renewals you can directly attribute to social media efforts

• Pipeline: the number of leads that ended up on the forecast

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• Conversion: the number of leads that converted to a sale

• Revenue: the total revenue generated

• ROI: what was the return on investment for the lead generation activities

Conclusion

Whilst there are challenges to overcome when using social media, make no mistake; there are

more advantages available. And, whether you chose to get involved or not, one thing is certain –

your clients, prospects and competitors will be. You can treat it as an asset now; integrate it into

your company by training the teams and see the returns unfold, or get left behind. It really is that

simple.

I encourage you, as always to up your game and to seek out better ways to sell and market your

business. Thank you, as always for reading. If you found this useful, tell your “friends” and get them

to sign up to receive my information.

Finally, if you want to get in touch for a consultation please email hello@jane-frankland.com.

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About the Author

Jane Frankland is a successful technology entrepreneur,

business consultant and speaker. She has built and sold her own

seven-figure business and is frequently invited to speak about

entrepreneurship, women in business, cyber security and social

media at events around the world. She has over 18 years worth of

experience in business development and has held directorships

and senior executive positions within her own companies and at

several large PLCs. She built her last business in her mid

twenties, and through her latest consultancy, KnewStart, provides

strategic business development solutions to existing or aspiring

entrepreneurs.

Jane believes passionately in entrepreneurship, empowerment and freedom. Through her work she

wants to see more businesses survive and thrive. She is particularly interested in modern business

development methods and is currently writing a book, Who The Google Are You, on how to harness

the power of the Internet for accelerated business growth.

Jane has a BA (Hons) from Loughborough University in Design, is a Nominated Young British

Designer and a Fellow of the Institute of Sales & Marketing (ISMM). She’s also a mother to three

children, has a Weimaraner dog and a black and white moggy. The question you’ll hear her ask the

most in business is ‘what’s your objective?’ The reason why is obvious. Time is precious and unless

you know why you’re doing something why do it at all. However, at home it’s always, “Shall we go?”

Jane can be contacted on:

Email: hello@jane-frankland.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/JaneFrankland LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/JaneFrankland

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