Don't Bother Me With Social Media Strategy--I Have to Sell Something

By Andrew Rudin, Outside Technologies, Inc.

It’s old-school thinking, but I hear it all the time:

“If we can just get our product in front of the right people, it sells itself.” Or “we just need to get our foot in the door!”

To carry out that mission, does the image of a money-motivated, aggressive salesperson jump into your mind? Maybe a salesperson who “has the right contacts?”—codespeak for someone with a shortcut to a decision maker, obviating the need to perform other sales and marketing fundamentals.

What fundamentals am I talking about? Knowing where your company’s voice must heard, and developing strategies to get in the conversations.

Until just a few years ago, we assumed conversations meant face-to-face communication. In a group setting, we needed a few drinks along with great icebreaker patter to help us get into a dialog.

We don't make those assumptions anymore. With Web 2.0, or Social Media, conversations aren’t just face-to-face. Technology plays a big role, and it means everything to salespeople who can’t afford to wait for an invitation to join in.

For salespeople, why has participation in Social Media conversations become so important? First, through online conversations, people discuss problems well in advance of the salesperson’s first call. In Social Media conversations, as with face-to-face conversations, questions are raised. Insight develops and becomes shared. Social connections are made inside and outside of organizational boundaries. Patterns of influence are established. Issues are aired and ideas are exchanged. What’s different from face-to-face conversations is that in many cases, the discourse is completely open and public! In a metaphorical sense, as a salesperson, at what point would you want to pop a breath mint and sidle up to enter the conversation? If you said “when I’m telemarketing from a prospect list,” you might want to examine how your strategy pits against your social-media savvy competitor, who has participated in the discussion since it was a wee, little thought.

Second, today’s social-media conversations are larger than we ever imagined—called a network effect, according to John Todor, an expert in using Social Media for business strategies. In one example he mentions, “over 50,000 people (sites) have RSS feeds to ezinearticles.com and many of these sites re-post content and are picked up by thousands of others through their RSS feeds.” You’d need to shake hands very fast to make that many contacts at your next business council meeting.

What does this mean? Three things. First, companies must re-think the boundaries of their sales process. Those that have defined the process as beginning before the salesperson’s first call have a healthy advantage over those stuck using the old-school paradigm in which selling begins with the first prospecting call. Second, salespeople—not just Marketing—must adopt technology tools that provide the Internet equivalent of joining a conversation. Reciprocally, Marketing must recognize that the “one-to-many” vs. “one-to-one” delineation of Marketing vs. Sales blurs with Social Media. It’s not heresy for salespeople to initiate and manage one-to-many conversations. Third, Social Media shifts control of conversations outside of selling organizations. Salespeople must learn how to manage when that control is relinquished. They must learn new ways to use Social Media conversations to gain insight and exposure. What change could be more profound for those of us who grew up selling when we owned the information and were constantly coached in better ways to direct discussions?

Building sales and marketing organizations ready for this challenge requires shifting energy away from leading discussions through features and benefits messages to ones in which meaningful questions are asked. Social Media’s power can be fully harnessed when organizations discover how to exploit signals from these conversations for new strategic or tactical directions.

When it comes competing more effectively on today’s sales gridiron, which emerging Social Media technology tools can salespeople take into their own hands and use? Stay tuned. That’s the subject of my next blog