Social Selling: The Ultimate Kick Start Guide To Launching A Social Selling Program www.tribalimpact.com @tribalimpact SOCIAL SELLING: THE ULTIMATE KICK START GUIDE TO LAUNCHING A SOCIAL SELLING PROGRAM

Social Selling is for WHAT IS SOCIAL the digital age. Except it’s SELLING? got far less to do with Social Selling is all about building selling and much more relationships and interacting to do with social. Social with prospects by answering media enables us to reach questions and providing useful content until the prospect is our audience in so many ready to buy. different ways throughout Taking a Social Selling approach different stages of the means your sales team will: buying journey. • Stay front-of-mind with prospects even when they’re not physically sat in from of them; • Become helpful and informative rather than interruptive and disruptive; • Support the buyers journey with content that adds value to their experience; • Become trusted experts with their network – a source of relevant content that increases their credibility with their buyer

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WHY SOCIAL SELLING? It’s no surprise to learn, therefore, that sales people who The buyer journey has changed use social networks outperform beyond all recognition since the their peers with a 66% greater onset of the digital age and social quota attainment than those media. Buyers use their social using traditional prospecting networks to research and techniques. [Source: SBI] compare products, with a report by Social Buying Study stating 75% of B2B buyers that 75% of B2B buyers use to support purchase now use social decisions. [Source: Linkedin] media to be more People are self-educating themselves through the buying informed on vendors cycle. They’re searching, reading and asking peers for recommendations. If your sales team aren’t engaging early on in this process, they will find themselves engaging further down the funnel where the conversation is focused on price and not value.

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In addition, the B2B buyers most actively using social media to 65% support their buying process of buyers feel a vendor’s content were more senior, had 84% has an impact on their final bigger budgets, made 61% purchase decision [Source: more purchase decisions and Demand Gen Report] had influence over a greater span of purchase decisions than those buyers who did not use social 82% media. [Source: Social Nearly 82% of buyers viewed Buying Study] between five and eight pieces of In fact IDC found that 84% of C content from a winning vendor 78% of social sellers Level/VP Executives used social [Source: Demand Gen Report] media to support their purchase outsell peers who decisions. Social Selling is a way don’t use social 90% your sales teams can enter the buying cycle early, influence the media. of B2B buyers are more likely to decision making process, limit engage with sales professionals competitive involvement, reduce who are viewed as thought deal closure times and even leaders in their industry increase the deal size. [Source: LinkedIn]

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WHAT IS THE 1. Establish your Social Selling Index –Today SSI SCORE? professional Your Social Selling Index (SSI) measures how effective you are Complete your profile with your at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, customer in mind. Become a engaging with insights, and building relationships. It is updated daily. Wherever you hear about Social thought-leader by publishing Selling, you’ll hear about the SSI meaningful posts. – or Social Selling Index – score. This score is all about how well 2. Find the right people your sales teams use LinkedIn Identify better prospects in less today. It’s split into four time using efficient search and key areas. research tools. 3. Engage with insights Discover and share conversation- worthy updates to create and grow relationships. 4. Build relationships Strengthen your network by connecting and establishing trust Establish your professional brand 22.83 with decision makers. Find the right people 21 So, why should you care about your score? LinkedIn reports that SSI leaders (an SSI of 70 and Engage with insights 21.77 above) generate 45% more opportunities per quarter and are 51% more likely to exceed Build relationships 25 their quota. [Source: Linkedin]

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THE POWER OF Thought leadership SOCIAL SELLING and influence: Buyers choose sales reps that add value and insight to the All the statistics point to the buying process. fact that Social Selling gets better results. So what are Expert Brand: the key outcomes of taking Build it over time so you become this approach? a trusted expert and are knowledgeable in certain topics. Competitive Differentiation: Insights help differentiate you from your competitors. Relationships, not sales pitches: Buyers are increasingly searching for answers rather than sales pitches.

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SOCIAL SELLING TOOLS A word of warning: Sales Navigator is a big investment There are a number of tools and you need to be sure it will be to support Social Selling. utilised properly. Consider how you will train and embed the methodologies to change LinkedIn Sales Navigator behaviour. Plan how you will LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the work together with on most obvious one in the world content creation and the use of of B2B sales. It’s great for your InMail quotas. researching prospects and accounts and targeting the time PointDrive you spend engaging audiences PointDrive is a Sales Navigator that you are interested in. It feature which helps users provide includes unlimited searches, a more personalised follow up the ability to see who’s been experience for their prospects. checking your profile over the Users can quickly and clearly past 90 days, a monthly InMail share content – whether quota and TeamLink, which PowerPoint, PDFs, maps, video allows you to see who you or URLs – and then track the could be referred by within viewer’s activity to find out what your own company. they accessed and for how long. This provides excellent intelligence into how warm a prospect is.

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Flipboard / Google Alerts There are a range of Employee Flipboard and Google Alerts are Advocacy Tools which collate social listening tools that help pre-approved content in one you to find content which might location. The content can be be relevant for your audiences. categorised for simple and fast You can set up alerts which track searching. Content can be shared when people are mentioning directly from the platform, with you. You can also collate news mobile versions for sharing on and views on topics which the go. The impact of the content interest you, or which might be can be tracked to varying useful for your audience. This degrees, depending upon the means you can more effectively specific tool features, with a follow influencers with whom range of data and metrics you want to engage or even available. This allows the types learn from. of content driving engagement to be identified and provides evidence to support and refine Twitter is a great tool for ongoing content strategies. engaging with prospects and Scoring systems allow the use finding out about what they’re of the tool to be gamified for sharing and engaging with. It’s a additional competition, although great place to source content these features should be and you can create lists of your configured and used with care customers, prospects and to avoid inappropriate use. competitors to focus time and effort.

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TRAINING YOUR 3. eLearning: SALES TEAMS Target ongoing micro-learning modules to keep your team trying new things. Consider There are many different setting tasks to help them approaches to training. Here’s incorporate the new functionality a quick guide to the main types: into their daily routine. 1. Instructor-led: Get people together in a room, 4. Coaching: Buddy up people who are use the tools, demonstrate and new to Social Selling with let them try, with dedicated time your established champions. in which to learn. Someone who’s already been 2. Daily Routine: through the process can take the Give your team a 20-minute daily scary out of social. This approach pattern to follow (a bit like the encourages best practice sharing Tribal Impact Coffee Cup and you could create a monthly Routine). Let them build the Q&A to support it. habit without it being time consuming. Let them experience 5. Community Area: Do you use Yammer, SAP Jam or immediate results as this will Slack? Find a place where a sales help them adopt a long team are already collaborating term habit. where they can ask questions, seek advice and get answers.

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LAUNCH YOUR 1. Establish your PROGRAM goals and objectives Is your program about brand awareness, thought leadership, It’s important to differentiate more leads, more pipeline or between a tool and a program. shorter sales cycles? Do your A tool will help your sales team research to find out what the with digital selling. A program average SSI is across the team will embed the behaviour into and identify where to focus your your sales routine. efforts. Set a baseline of To quote; “Social selling is not benchmarks so the impact and just about helping your sales reps effort can be measured set up their social profiles…it against them. requires a comprehensive plan and deliberate strategies and 2. Be clear on ownership Decide who owns the program, tactics to deliver make sure they’re engaged and successful results.” then work out who else needs to Here’s the Tribal Impact be involved. It’s not just about approach to launching sales. You’ll need marketing for a successful Social content and social support, sales Selling programme: ops for measurement, L&D for scaling up the internal training, IT for systems integration and so on.

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3. Content, content, content 5. Set up policies and guidelines Decide your content strategy We’ve all seen those cringe because Social Selling doesn’t worthy moments when work without quality content. someone’s social media activity Staying front-of-mind is essential starts to go viral (for the wrong to building an expert profile reasons). Your team needs to be that’s credible and authentic. clear on what they can and can’t Start by researching what type say on social media. But, as well of content your customers as the rules, remember everyone engage with, what keywords is human and mistakes get made. they use and how they source Include risk mitigation and information. Embed your recovery processes in case of any findings into your content rogue moments. Keep all of this strategy to set up your brief and friendly so you don’t advocacy tool. scare the sales team off. 4. Start with a pilot This links closely to the second point: prove the business case to ensure sustained buy-in to the strategy from all parts of the business. A pilot also gives you the chance to revise things using genuine learning and get things set up perfectly before it all takes off in a big way.

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6. Educate the team 8. Embed Include training on how to build Create a communication plan an expert profile on LinkedIn whereby each month you which is optimised with highlight Social Selling success keywords and speaks to the stories, share best practices, customer. Provide practical provide top-up training and work training on Sales Navigator to embed the practice of Social including how to conduct Selling. searches, updates, posting, 9. Train the trainer InMails and networking. Nobody knows your business like Think about how to deliver – and you do so build a network of embed – the training. It’s key that trainers and mentors within the this stuff sticks. organisation that can share their 7. Measure experience with those that you Make sure you’ve set up onboard into the program. measurements and metrics, and that they’re easy to keep an eye on. If possible, link to the wider business objectives (more on this later).

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MISTAKES TO AVOID 3. Focusing on revenue and not relationships Many organisations have already Ironically Social Selling isn’t chosen to invest in Social Selling about selling. It’s a much longer- and have learned how to term approach about building optimise their programs by relationships by providing value; making mistakes. Learn from 4. Being creepy their mistakes and accelerate No-one wants to feel like they’re adoption within your team. being stalked so watch how you Here are the common mistakes target and follow people and to avoid. don’t pester; 1. Investing in a tool, 5. Spamming not a program Don’t turn your entire sales team Don’t forget the training and into a marketing megaphone. content elements of your Help them to add value to their Social Selling Strategy in buyers through relevant content addition to the tool; that will educate and inform. 2. Forcing your sales Let your team members find team to do Social Selling their expertise and value and Start by supporting those who help them to adapt the tool to are ready and keen to make the the role they have; transition. The rest will follow 6. One program fits all when they see the results; Account Managers will use Social Selling differently to your Inside Sales Rep team. You need to know the audience and tailor your training accordingly; www.tribalimpact.com @tribalimpact 13 SOCIAL SELLING: THE ULTIMATE KICK START GUIDE TO LAUNCHING A SOCIAL SELLING PROGRAM

7. Launch and leave 8. Siloed approach A successful Social Selling Social Selling can’t be done program will need to be without the wider business. Your embedded into the organisation. subject matter experts need to Help people to adopt this new create the content but the sales way of working by sharing guys need to put it into context in stories, using gamification (a terms of what topics they need to leader board?), tracking answer. Marketing will also need performance, coaching on a 1-2-1 to create content and can also basis, guiding the sales team on monitor and manage the overall how they can improve, using a content pool within your buddy system and generally employee advocacy tool. Don’t accepting this is a change that approach Social Selling without isn’t going to happen overnight; the wider context of being a Social Business.

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MEASURING Track the deal cycle time YOUR SUCCESS for social media generated opportunities versus marketing generated opportunities. There are a good number of ways Typically the former should in which to measure the impact close more quickly than the latter of Social Selling within because the prospect is warmer. your business. Finally, look at the size and You can track your social media- quality of the network. This generated pipeline within your relates back to the 2nd and 4th CRM system by manually tagging elements of the Social Selling opportunities that started Index: finding the right people out there. and then building quality Connect the dots between relationships with them. content shared by the sales team back to website traffic generated and ultimately conversion. Bring sales and marketing together and help them see this as one process, one cycle. Check out your team’s SSI scores and see what correlations exist between them and their quota attainments and pipeline coverage.

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SOCIAL SELLING FAQS What’s a good SSI score? LinkedIn states that an SSI over How do I get my sales team 70 is considered a professional to use their Sales Navigator social seller. However, don’t license more? forget the score is calculated on Do they understand the value? a daily basis and activity on the You need to ensure everyone platform may vary considerably sees the benefit of Social Selling day-to-day. The advice states and that it works for their own that a mere 10 minutes per day professional brand, not just the should be enough to maintain corporate brand. a decent score, provided that activity is spread across the Ask yourself whether they’ve had four pillars outlined by LinkedIn. the right training. They need to Scores can be seen on an overall have ‘used’ it in an environment basis and by individual category where they can try and test, to or ‘pillar’, so it’s worth focusing remove the fear of something on any areas that are lagging new. Also, simply training them behind in order to push up on the tool isn’t enough: they overall scores. need to embed the training into their daily routine. A good way of Also important is to look at embedding the use of LinkedIn ranking in your industry and Sales Navigator is to create a your network. Consider putting daily routine that incorporates together your own benchmarking it. By forming a habit, your data so you can track your main team will change their ways competitors over time. of working.

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Does Social Selling replace Have faith: it will happen selling as we know it today? over time, especially if you can No – but it will help your team identify one or two ‘champions’ be more efficient. Think of the who are early adopters of the time needed to run face-to-face concept. Use them to share best meetings: it would simply be practices and success stories. inefficient to spend the amount How do I know if Social Selling of time you can devote to online will work for my business? relationship building to actually Ask yourself how you’re getting physically visiting your network. your business today? Is it by Digital nurturing allows you to referral? If so, Social Selling be in front of your network when simply digitises the process so you’re not actually sitting in front there’s very little chance it won’t of them. work for your business. In fact, How do I get my entire sales if your customers are online, team Social Selling? chances are you will be able to You will need to accept it’s a engage with them successfully long-term transition if you want using the approaches described to bring your whole team across in this guide. to Social Selling. It needs to be a planned approach to give everyone time to understand and adopt to the new way of working.

www.tribalimpact.com @tribalimpact 17 Tribal Impact specialises in social media advocacy. We work with B2B organisations that are frustrated because they can no longer cut through the digital noise to reach their audience. We do this by helping them join the dots between Social Selling, Social Media Marketing and Employee Advocacy. Learn more at www.tribalimpact.com

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