A short guide to creating a social selling culture

How to use social selling to bridge the sales and marketing gap and enhance your demand generation

themarketingpractice.com

Social selling for Inside Sales

Social selling techniques are now as common a part of the sales arsenal as a CRM system or a packet of Pro Plus.The value of using social media to build one-to-one relationships is broadly accepted. But many B2B organisations aren’t investing sufficiently in the right tools and processes to support their sales teams in doing this.

This paper shows how The Marketing Practice has been supporting its Inside Sales team with social selling. And how it’s become an accepted, valuable part of the demand generation process.

Why it works

Whether you’re supporting sales, Inside Sales or any other function managing and building customer relationships, familiarity with the business case for social selling will help you drive the right enablement strategy:

• Social selling promotes the personal brand. There are studies aplenty that show the importance of human-to-human engagement. Social selling allows you to put a face to a brand, and leverage the personal brand of salesperson – their charisma, expertise and experience.

• Early sales engagement. Despite Forrester’s proclamation that the ‘death of the salesperson’ is imminent, the involvement of (inside) sales throughout the whole process is critical. It’s just changing. Social selling deformalises the sales engagement process by providing a constant presence from the start of the relationship (one or two years out from any potential opportunity) through to the ongoing customer interaction.

96% of sales professionals use LinkedIn every week

At TMP, we’ve seen +20% leads and 1.5x better MQL-to-SQL conversion rates by integrating early stage digital techniques with traditional lead nurturing

Whether you’re just setting up a team capable of social selling, or they’ve been doing it for some time, there’s a host of support you can provide at various stages of the process. This is how we support our Inside Sales team as part of the demand generation process.

Profile development

This is where the quick wins happen. The salesperson’s LinkedIn and Twitter profiles are their brand homepage. Customers and prospects who visit them need to see opinion and passion that either matches or challenges their own. Not a list of sales successes and awards. A small amount of investment in helping them write their profiles and overhaul some of the aesthetics (profile picture, layout and banner image) can go a long way to making them appear a good person to connect with.

Network creation

Make things easy for them at the start by finding the profiles of the first 50 people they need to try and connect with, as well as a list of internal connections to give them a boost. After that, they’ll have grown their network sufficiently for it to become organic.

Communications

At the start of every campaign, we create InMail templates that can be used by our Inside Sales team as an alternative to email. They can be personalised to the contact or organisation, and adapted into connection requests. But it’s also important to be responsive – we monitor the reporting weekly to see what new templates might be needed, or whether there are certain prospects that need a bit of extra care and attention.

How it works

Average email response rate – 2–5%; average LinkedIn InMail response rate – 20–30%

2–5%

20–30%

When Oracle Eloqua implemented Sales Navigator, salespeople saw a 30% increase in engagement with prospects

LinkedIn and Sales Navigator

There are a host of paid-for and free support apps for LinkedIn – from getting them to download the standard app so they can interact with contacts on the go, through to shelling out for Sales Navigator. Most of our Inside Sales team have Sales Navigator – a tool created by LinkedIn to enhance the salesperson’s ability to find, connect with and understand the networks of prospects.

Social listening and insight

This is where Twitter comes into its own. Tools like Brandwatch are a great way to monitor what the market (and our target audience) are saying, and how. Feeding this insight into the sales team helps them shape the content they’re sharing, and connect with influencers that will give their profile a boost.

Content aggregation

A more advanced social selling team can be given a huge boost by using a tool like Dynamic Insights. All of your content can be aggregated into a single, searchable platform from which the team can share directly to any social platform. Making it easy for them to regularly post the brand’s content, and for you to measure the engagement they get from it. You can even incentivise their engagement by giving them points for every share.

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Showing the value

The core metric for your social selling programme needs to be opportunities, and how that is quantified into pipeline.Many marketers and publications make the mistake of comparing social selling or social media results to those of traditional demand generation techniques. In truth, sometimes they will be stronger, sometimes weaker. But social selling is now another part of the demand generation capability; it doesn’t have to justify its existence any more than Inside Sales or any other channel does.

The targets you set for social selling should thus be the same as demand generation as a whole. For example:

• % of the pipeline target, tied through to a number of opportunities or meetings

• Average size and quality of opportunity

• Insight gathered: mapping of organisational structures, new contacts and opportunities or tenders

A significant focus should be given not just on the volume of opportunity, but the quality too.

Interactions through social, because they don’t have the same sales stigma as the phone call, often take place earlier in the buying cycle. Many of the conversations our Inside Sales team begin through LinkedIn, for example, are concurrent with the prospect just beginning to shape their requirements. As any salesperson will tell you, that kind of opportunity is invaluable compared with the standard BANT qualification.

In our first four social selling-enhanced campaigns, we generated 13 additional leads through LinkedIn, and saw greater response rates from InMails than eDMs

If you’d like to find out more about how TMP has shaped its social selling programme, or about our experience implementing similar programmes with clients, get in touch with our Social Media Manager Monika: Twitter: @M_Lazarowicz Email: mlazarowicz@themarketingpractice.com Phone: 01235 433 401

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