Social Selling’s Impact on Sales and Marketing

In our last blog post, we talked about how the Enterprise Social Graph enables Social Selling.  At Reachable, we think of Social Selling as the ability for sales people to not only leverage their personal contacts, but also the contacts of others, such as fellow employees, customers, and partners, during a sales process.  Uncovering a connection within a target account can turn a cold lead into a warm introduction, which could make the difference between a win and a loss.  The ability for organizations to leverage the personal connections within their business is having an impact on how sales and marketing professionals are doing their jobs.  Here are some examples…

• Lead Scoring – Lead scoring has evolved over the years and has become more sophisticated.  Historically, it just involved assigning a score based on the responses to sales qualifying questions.  Recently, it has incorporated the behavior of visitors on a company’s website.  Social Selling takes lead scoring to another level by taking into account the personal connections an organization has to a particular lead.  The better connections to a lead, the higher the score.

• Lead Distribution – Leads are typically distributed geographically, or sometimes based on vertical segments.  Social Selling introduces the notion of distributing leads based on the personal connections sales individuals have to a lead.  The person with the better connections to a lead gets it assigned to them.  This is one of the “5 Key Sales and Marketing Trends” in 2012 according to Caitlin Roberson in a guest blog post she did for SellingPower Blog…

Geographic territories will become extinct.  If your Chicago-based sales rep has a closer social connection to your San Diego-based prospect, it doesn’t make sense to assign that lead to your San Diego-based sales rep. Social proximity beats geographic proximity, hands down.

• Target Account Management – Social Selling changes the way target accounts can be managed.  Target accounts can be assigned based on which sales person has the best personal connections to a particular account, and they can use their connections to penetrate the account more effectively than a sales person who doesn’t know anybody within the organization.

These are just some examples of how Social Selling is impacting sales and marketing.  If your organization is using Social Selling in other ways, please let us know by adding a comment below.

- Perry Mizota, a marketing guy at Reachable

Leveraging the Enterprise Social Graph to Enable Social Selling

In our introductory blog post, Reachable’s CEO, Al Campa, talked about the emergence of the Enterprise Social Graph.  He defined it as an uber social graph that connects various elements within a business – employees, customers, prospects, recruits, etc.  Al also touched on a number of different use cases within a business that could benefit from an Enterprise Social Graph…

Effectively utilizing a larger network can greatly speed many aspects of business.  No longer do sales reps need to make cold calls.  Now they can scan through their prospects and see where they have strong connections that they can leverage to open doors.  Account managers can better leverage their existing account contacts into new contacts and expand account penetration.  Recruiters can more clearly find critical talent and how to get introduced to them.  Executives can better leverage their contacts for developing new partnerships.

In this post, I am going to focus on one of those use cases – eliminating the need for sales reps to make cold calls.  In his Mashable article, “8 Ways Digital Will Improve B2B Sales in 2012”, Totango CEO, Guy Nirpaz, predicts that “Social Selling Will Go Mainstream”…

Ninety-two percent of prospects almost never book a meeting from a cold call or email, according to a study by UNC’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business. In 2012, rather than make cold calls, sales executives will first seek connections through social media networks, and then increase response rates with warm introductions.

Aside from personal networks, sales managers will also find ways to leverage the networks of colleagues, partners, customers, executives and former employees during the sales process.

We think this prediction is going to be spot on as we already see many of our customers using Reachable for Social Selling.  As Nirpaz points out, the key success factor is for an individual sales person to leverage more than their own personal network; it is also important to for them to take advantage of a broader network – fellow employees, customers, etc. – in order to turn cold calls into warm introductions and increase the probability of success.

In a future post, we will expand on how the Reachable solution supports Social Selling but in the meantime, we would like to hear how you have used Social Selling to be more effective.  Let us know by leaving a comment below.

- Perry Mizota, a marketing guy at Reachable