Don't Bother Me With Social Media--I Have to Sell Something (Part II)

Can salespeople gain measurable business value from social media?

Reactions to Part I were mixed:

The skeptical:
“. . . we need real benefits, not hype,”
and
“We’re drowning in a Web2.0 sea of useless drivel.”

The visionary:
“Social media’s emergence today parallels the emergence of mass printing and mass literacy back in the early 1800’s . . .”

I wanted to find out which is correct. What I learned is that the jury is still out. In the meantime, it’s worth examining how companies have innovated using social media to solve some familiar, perennial sales problems.

1. Objection handling. In March, Mei Lin Fung wrote about how Dell used social media in You Can Learn From "Dell Hell." Dell Did when she examined why customer sentiment about Dell became negative. She writes, “What we arrived at was that what had changed was outside, not inside, the company.”

According to the article, “Dell’s approach paid off. Dell weathered the storm because Michael Dell has been personally involved in Dell's efforts to listen to its customers. One of those moves was to create a dedicated corporate blogger . . . (who) speaks to people ‘honestly and directly.’” She described how the blogger admitted the company's problems, and gave the company a “human voice.” The blogger “gave (the) customer respect and "got respect in return.”

2. Generating leads. Andy McCann of software company Radian6 shared a success story. When his client monitored online discussions about their company’s brand, they found 400 separate online conversations. But when they monitored their competitor’s brands, they found a huge opportunity: there were 4,100 conversations! Where do you think his client’s sales force went for new leads? Directly to the people that were talking about the competition! Not surprisingly, Andy uses online conversations for his own lead generation. As he tells it “I’ve never had to look up a lead at this company.”

3. Transferring knowledge. Salespeople crave proven techniques, but forums for sharing information can be prohibitively expensive for companies to build. Some salespeople use social media not only to share ideas, but to find out whether others have found those ideas effective. It’s similar for books, as Andy McCann shared. He searches online for subjects of interest and finds out who has written a book about the topic. Then through social networks, blogs, and reviews, he learns not only who has read the book, but who has found it influential, and why. Such precision has enabled him to glean valuable insight while investing little precious time.

4. Differentiating from the competition. Almost every company faces product commoditization as a strategic issue. Lee Erickson of Erickson Barnett described how her clients have blended social media and brand marketing to communicate a message to customers that very few companies have been successful duplicating: “We’re listening to you every day.” Blogs and other online resources enable her clients to do that. The assumption is that the trust created through listening is more correlated with customer loyalty than other attributes that often require much larger investments. So far, Erickson’s bets have paid off. Listening to customers through social media has spun off into other important differentiators, including reducing time to market for new products, and enabling the sales force to initiate discussions about the most relevant issues.

5. Monitoring the competition. In the past, many salespeople used readily-available competitor product specifications and compared “feeds and speeds.” But the value of that information was limited, at best. Spec sheets (as they were called) contain the manufacturer’s own data. And that information still didn’t uncover the answer to the far more valuable questions: How do customers like using [product X]? and What don’t they like about [product X]? That was then. This is now: Using Google Alerts and other tools, salespeople regularly mine blogs and product reviews to find out the answers to these questions. The result: salespeople have unprecedented power to position strengths against competitive weaknesses.

6. Finding the right people to call on. Developing a community of advocates and influential people within a client organization continues to challenge salespeople. But today, social networking tools such as LinkedIn have become so widely adopted among salespeople that many simply can’t perform their job without it. CRM software developers such as Salesforce.com and SalesCentric are keenly aware of this fact, and integrate to LinkedIn to tap the power of these already-built social networks.

Are these tools just more Management by Magazine flashes in the pan--or are the benefits significant and sustainable? How will managers know? Will traditional sales productivity measurements such as sales cycle time and conversion ratio be valuable for assessing the effectiveness of social media? Or do new selling models require redefining selling itself, and by extension, will they dictate new ways to measure productivity?

Those questions need to be considered as companies develop strategies and build sales models to achieve them.

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