More and more sales organizations see social networks as a crucial way to engage their customers. As a result, social selling has experienced tremendous growth in recent years.

Unfortunately, many sales teams are doing social selling wrong. They’re using LinkedIn and Twitter in ways that damage relationships with buyers. That’s why it’s important to set ground rules with your sales team.

Here are the four ground rules of social selling – taken from our Definitive Cheat Sheet for Social Sellers.

Rule 1: Nix Hard Pitches

Pitches turn off people on social media. If you solely talk about your product or services, LinkedIn and Twitter will not work for you. Focus, instead, on adding value. 74% of buyers choose the sales rep who first adds value during the buying process.

Rule 2: Focus on Building Relationships

Social is a two-way street. No one likes being talked at. Yes, make sure that people hear your message, but remember to show others that you are listening to them, too.

Rule 3: Relax and Be Yourself

Social selling is about, well… being social. Of course, you need to be professional. But don’t forget to show people that you have a personality. After all, people buy from people they like and trust.

Rule 4: Content Is Your Friend

Without engaging content, your social selling efforts will most likely fail. Select content that shares unique points of view and will challenge your buyer’s status quo. To do that, you’ll need access to blog posts, infographics, research reports, industry news, and more. Product one-pagers won’t cut it.

A Quick Word about Content

Social selling experts recommend that 80% of the content pushed by sales reps comes from third-party sources (i.e. other people’s blogs, news, interesting articles, research reports, etc.). The other 20% should come from the rep’s company.

Why’s that? If you share only your company’s content, you lose credibility with your buyers. You come across as biased. By sharing other people’s content, you project expertise, not just blind loyalty to your company.

Introducing the Definitive Cheat Sheet for Social Sellers

With those ground rules in place, your sales team will begin to attract buyers – rather than scare them away. But those four rules are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s still much more to learn – like, how do you set up your profile? How do you find buyers online?

To be successful, sometimes you need to be pointed in the right direction. That’s where our cheat sheet comes in.

It’s always said that content is king, and when it comes to the ways we share, process and incorporate information, that’s certainly true. But there’s much more to the story than simply having content to dole out. In a world where new content is continuously being created in droves, the quality of your curated content is of paramount importance. But just what is it that separates a mediocre piece of content from one whose quality is spectacular?

Here are four characteristics that separate the wheat from the chaff:

1. Relevancy. Whether a topic is timely — following an event, news story or current development — or timeless — where the story will be just as fresh months or years from now as it is today — it absolutely must address an issue that’s of paramount importance to your audience. We might be drawn in or distracted by pictures of kittens riding tortoises, but as far as addressing your audience’s needs, that type of content won’t get you anywhere. Quality content needs to speak directly to a pain point, information gap or opportunity available to the demographic you’re targeting. When you can find content that fills that role, then, you’ve found relevant content.
2. Originality. So why should they care about this particular take? Why is this story the one I should read, particularly if I’ve already looked at a story on this topic before? Because there’s a perspective or a set of points in here that isn’t present elsewhere. This story has a unique value for the very reason that it’s doing something that the other stories on this subject aren’t doing: it’s telling you something no one else is.
3. Informative. This is where you — with your unique expertise — really get to shine. With thousands of voices clamoring for attention out there saying hundreds of original things, which one should people be paying attention to? Not the one with the highest searchrank, clout or prestige, but the ones with the most valuable information in them. Before you share a piece of content, you need to ask yourself, What will they have gained from reading it? Can you identify important pieces of information packed into that piece that are worth having? That are worth sharing with your target audience? That help demonstrate that you understand what’s vital in your industry? That’s what you should be asking yourself.
4. Compelling. You’ve no doubt heard the saying, “Sell the sizzle, not the steak,” and every piece of content should not only be like a great steak — delicious and satisfying as you devour it — but tantalizing from the moment you’re first exposed to it. Everyone reading it should feel hooked, and should feel like they’re missing out if they don’t click on this article and read it end-to-end. Does this article do that? Is it as memorable at the end as it is alluring at the beginning? That’s the kind of quality you need.

These four points:

• whether the piece of content you’ve found is relevant to the needs of your target audience,
• whether it displays originality in the perspective it opens up to your readers,
• just how informative it is to the people you’re trying to reach
• and the extent to which it communicates its points in a compelling fashion

are the biggest factors to consider when evaluating something for quality. If the content’s not relevant, original, informative and compelling — and it has to be all of them — why would anyone be interested in reading it? With so much original content out there, readers can afford to be choosy with what they dive into, and they remember not only the gems (and the rhinestones) that they find, but also who brought them there.

Trust flows naturally from integrity and competence, and there’s no faster way to establish trust than by demonstrating how well you understand the nuances of the issues vital to your field, and by sharing what everyone needs to know with the world. By being selective about what you share — and by identifying and demanding the highest quality content — you set yourself up as a voice worth listening to. Make sure you know how to do it, because if you don’t, someone else will!

-Ethan

Related Links:

Image credit: © bcm public relations Ltd 2013.

Social selling is at the core of the modern sales movement, as more and more sales teams move away from traditional sales tactics like list buys and cold calling.

Far too often, the shift from traditional sales to digital sales is done without a clear direction. As a result, performance fails to live up to sales leaders’ expectations.

In order for any sales team to fully take advantage of social selling, you must first understand your organization in terms of social selling maturity. So, let’s take a closer look at the three key stages: emerging, experienced, and optimized social selling.

Stage #1: Emerging Social Selling

All social selling programs have to start somewhere, right? When you’re in this stage, you recognize the value of social selling. You know that your sales team needs to rely on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to engage buyers earlier and drive revenue. But you don’t know where to begin. Or maybe you’ve noticed that your sales reps are committing random acts of social. They’re engaging with prospects on social, but your sales and sales enablement leadership are not providing much guidance.

Many times, emerging social sales programs lack the support needed to launch a full-fledged social selling program. Perhaps the sales team does not have full buy-in from company leadership or has not documented a social selling strategy or has not invested in the technology required to build a repeatable social selling process.

Next Steps

There’s only one way to go from here – up! If you are looking to grow as a sales organization, you might want to consider these questions:

• Who is using social media on your team? And what are the best practices that they are following?
• What kind of training is required for your team to develop the right skill set?
• What are your technology needs? Do you have tools that will help you create a repeatable social selling process?
• Do you have a documented social selling strategy?
• What can you do to gain support from the key sales and marketing leaders at your company?

Stage #2: Experienced Social Selling

Think that you fall in the experienced category? Here’s what you need to know. Experienced social selling programs have said goodbye to random acts of social. They have a formal group of social sellers, which the sales organization wants to expand.

Best practices have surfaced, and sales reps actively follow them. For example, sales reps have abandoned “pitch-slapping.” Instead of shoving their products and features in buyers’ faces, sales reps look to add value to their customer’s journey. They try to position themselves as consultants. And they recognize that sharing content is one of the best ways to do that.

Experienced social selling programs have a documented strategy – often verbal, but sometimes written. They have garnered the support of their executive team, and as a result, they have leaders in place who are driving the direction of the program.

One last thing: These programs have secured budget and resources, which means they have been able to invest in social selling technology. At this stage, they are often learning how to fully leverage their social selling platform and integrate it into their selling practices. Often times, they have some level of analytics in place, but have not fully developed their analytics capabilities.

Next Steps

Experienced social selling organizations have found success with small groups of social sellers, but they need to make changes to their program if they are going to scale it. To build toward greater success, these organizations need a tighter focus, a more mature process, and an investment in the right technology.

Here are some questions that you should ask yourself:

• How is your marketing and sales alignment? Is your marketing team curating the right content for your sales team?
• Is your social selling strategy documented so that your entire sales team can reference it?
• Have you invested in the right technology? Can you create a repeatable, measurable sales process with your current tool? Do content and messaging flow easily from marketing to sales? Does artificial intelligence help surface the right content?
• Are you measuring the right leading indicators (e.g. engagement on social media)? Are you already thinking about the right lagging indicators (e.g. sales opportunities and revenue)?
• Are your tactics working? And will they scale across the entire sales organization?

Stage #3: Optimized Social Selling

Optimized social selling organizations are the ones that survived their growing pains. They have successfully scaled social sales across the entire sales organization – partly because they have chosen the right social selling platform and partly because they have changed their mindset and skillset. They see social selling as a revenue generator and an essential tool in their sales tool kit. And they have taught their sales reps how to leverage networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter throughout the entire buyer’s journey – from initial engagement through customer retention.

The most successful sales teams have a documented social strategy, a clear vision for success, and a way to measure it. They have begun to look beyond engagement metrics and look at revenue metrics like pipeline generation and revenue growth.

Optimized programs continually look for opportunities to improve. For instance, they know what content works, where it works, and when it works. Using their social selling platform, they have created a data-content feedback loop. Their metrics inform their sales outreach and content strategy.

Next Steps

Few organizations can say that they have an optimized social selling program. And even those that do need to continually look for opportunities to better their programs. That way, they do not begin to lose ground to their competition. To stay on top of your game, here a few questions to consider:

• When’s the last time you updated your strategy? Is your strategy still relevant?
• How effective is your social selling platform?
• How well is your content strategy for social selling working?
• How is your data management? Is your team effectively tracking activities in your CRM?
• Do you have the right talent in place? Are your sales reps and sales management good fits for the digital and social age?

Where Are You?

Is your company just getting started, or is your social selling program a well-oiled machine?

Assessing your maturity is critical. After all, the first step to change is acknowledging where your company is and where you want to go. Only then can you make the right decisions to implement the change your organization needs to be successful.

Over the last decade Big Fuel has helped brands create some incredibly compelling content. But we also believe that content “creation” is just 1 of the 3 key elements of any successful content strategy. You don’t necessarily need all three — there is no “winning formula” as it ultimately depends on your audience, your goals and your commitment to content — but each element needs to be considered in order to develop a winning formula… and all three happen to start with the letter C.

1) Creation

What kind of content are you going to make? Where will that content live? Who is the audience? What kind of tone/voice?

There are dozens of key considerations that help define what content a brand should invest in creating. Beauty brands skew heavily in this area as the demand for “how-to” content provides a tremendous opportunity to connect with consumers. Red Bull is probably the most prolific brand today. Their content extends so far beyond the beverage category that they are now partly considered a media company.

2) Co-Creation

What opportunities do you have to co-create content? Are there key-influencers you can collaborate with? How can your own audience get involved?

Co-creation of content is incredibly important as it often comes with built-in “earned” distribution. Collaborating with the right influencers brings an instant audience while allowing brands to borrow credibility. Which is why those same beauty brands are partnering with folks like Michele Phan and other YouTube stars to create content with them. GoPro leverages the power of co-created content better than anyone. The entire brand was practically built by leveraging content made by their customers.

3) Curation

What content do you care about? What content resonates with you… and your audience? What topics are you credible in?

Content curation is foundational to any content strategy. There is no shortage of content today. Between emails, social networks, texting, surfing, chatting, blogging, vlogging, micro-blogging and a dozen other things — we’re surrounded by so much noise that it’s often hard to find peace. This creates a tremendous opportunity for brands. Rather than adding to the noise, brands can surface the best of what their audiences need and want. In fact, being “a trusted resource” has connected mass audiences to the likes of Home Depot, Kraft and many others. Home Depot has curated some of the best “do-it-yourself” content out there while Kraft has curated a huge library of recipes that moms love.

As an agency executive, in many ways my job is to help brands stand out or get noticed — and it feels like my job has gotten harder over the years. 10 years ago we we didn’t have much quality digital content. Today we are drowning in it and bombarded by messaging wherever we turn.

It’s critical for any marketer to be strategic about what content they create, who they partner with and how to leverage and curate existing content in order to drive their business goals. By thinking about content across these 3 buckets we can begin to formulate the right strategy and get one step closer to our consumer.

–Avi Savar

Avi Savar is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of Big Fuel, a pure-play social media agency designed for the needs of large brands. He is the author of Content Commerce: Engaging Customers across Paid, Owned, and Earned Channels.

Want more great tips about social media, social selling, and content marketing?

Subscribe to the Trapit blog, and we will send them to your inbox!

Image via Flickr

How do you examine a trend?

One way is to pay close attention to Google’s trends page. The company’s charts allow you to see when a topic’s popularity peaks. In the case of employee advocacy, 2015 has been a good year (see above).

But Google’s data-centric approach to trending topics has its limits. The chart above provides little context. It asks no questions. For more context and deeper research, you have to turn to the analysts.

This year, two major reports on employee advocacy have been published. Not only do the reports give us a lay of the land. They give us excellent tips for building strategies on top of that land. Let’s take a look at what the industry analysts have to say.

The Altimeter Group

At the end of July, Altimeter published its research on the state of social business. In it, Ed Terpening and his colleagues discuss companies’ external social media strategies, and they note:

Key Takeaway: For Success, Invest in an Organizational Strategy

While there has been tremendous growth in company’s interest in employee advocacy, Altimeter is quick to point out that advocacy is still in its infancy. For there to be success, businesses need to take the time and create a strategy.

One of the biggest barriers for programs is a lack of governance:

The importance of strategy is a point that Altimeter reiterates:

Take the time to identify your key stakeholders, establish your objectives, and create an enterprise-wide strategy.

To read Altimeter’s entire research report, click here.

451 Research

Like the Altimeter Group, Matt Mullen of 451 Research has noticed a growth in employee advocacy. He writes about the “renaissance” of employee advocacy, which, in his view, has been mired by stringent corporate policies:

Key Takeaway: Give Your Employees Leeway to Be Themselves

To truly have an impact, Mullen encourages organizations to loosen their policies and to trust their employees to represent their companies:

In other words, a little authenticity can go a long way.

To read 451 Research’s full report, click here.

Are You Ready?

Employee advocacy as a company-wide strategy is still an early opportunity, but the space is starting to mature. Creating clear processes — identifying key stakeholders and creating systems that empower team members to express themselves on social media — will be central to your future strategy.

Want Help Launching Your Employee Advocacy Strategy?

Grab a copy of The Rise of the Employee Marketer, and learn how to set yourself up for success.

For the past 15 years, I’ve been leading sales teams for a number of companies. These range from scrappy startups to aggressive growth stage companies to major industry leaders. As many of my colleagues in similar positions can attest, much has changed in that time with how sales teams operate, the tools we have available, and even in how we engage leads. Still, the fundamentals for sales teams remain the same: sales is about building trust and relationships.

Perhaps the biggest change for sales over the past decade has been the rise of social. Up until now, the two “killer apps” for salespeople to engage have been the phone and email, but social has the potential to transform how we do our jobs. Social allows salespeople the opportunity to foster genuine relationships with leads earlier than ever before, have much broader reach – both in listening to potential customers and in engaging with conversations – and it breaks down the barriers of communication to entering those conversations.

Yet while social selling has been hyped as the latest, greatest development for lead gen, the truth is that for sales managers, it has really just exacerbated a lot of our fundamental challenges, and even created some entirely new ones. The potential of social selling is great and can be an invaluable asset to our sales teams, but as more companies are looking to ramp their social selling efforts this year, it’s important for them to understand the challenges.

1. Consistency across the sales team

In leading sales teams, one of your primary frustrations will always be achieving consistency from your A, B, and C performers. The way an A performer communicates on email, phone, and in-person is different than B performer. This is equally true on social. Consistency is the common denominator and without it, your team’s efficacy in Social becomes marginalized.

There is also a steep learning curve to doing social sales well. When I talk to sales leaders, I ask them how many people on their teams are comfortable in social. The response is usually about 20 percent are comfortable, and about 80 percent are not. The truth is that once we actually really dive into their processes, we find that it’s really only about 5 percent that truly get it and are really comfortable. Without proper training and the proper tools, it is hard to instill best practices across the sales organization.

This problem is compounded by the actual adoption of tools by sales teams. Some tools that are out there are really robust, fantastic tools, but for many salespeople, they are too robust and too complex. To learn them and put that in your muscle memory is difficult. The result is that you can only scale to a handful of people in your sales organization, and the consistency gap widens even more than before.

On the other end of the spectrum are point solutions that add value to one element of the social selling process – whether it’s CRM, sharing, content management, or analytics. These point solutions are ultimately just as expensive, and still create an adoption challenge.

You can’t achieve consistency unless everyone is using the same tools, with the same KPIs and metrics. The truth though is that companies aren’t really willing to invest their time in the small point solutions because the month-end revenue results come in and the knee-jerk reaction of senior leadership is to pick up the phone and make some phone calls. Every senior leader will say that they want to leverage salespeople to expand their reach and have passive listeners participate, and everyone understands how social selling works in theory, but then they struggle to truly commit to the behavior needed in social, largely because they have tools that frustrate consistent performance and results.

2. Selling is no longer just limited to the sales team

With social, your entire organization is representing the company, and in view of potential leads. There is now more overlap between marketing, employee advocates, customer service, and even the C-Suite with our sales teams than ever before. Everyone now can contribute to sales.

This represents a great opportunity for salespeople as it can be incredibly valuable.

By the time our customers now get to the point of decision, they have already performed a great deal of vetting and research, are likely much more knowledgeable of the options and other customers’ experiences, and are essentially entering the funnel at any number of various points rather than just the top. This creates a challenge for sales teams to understand exactly where leads are in their decision process.

It also comes back to consistency, but not just for the sales teams. Even if we’re able to achieve a common denominator among our salespeople, we have to take into consideration the messages coming from the rest of the organization. Sales is not necessarily the frontline of engagement anymore.

As a result, consistent messages need to be developed across the entire organization. Likewise, the company needs to be cognizant of social selling efforts, understand best practices, and know when to bring salespeople into the conversation. While other departments stepping into the line of fire of sales can be frustrating, we need to turn them into allies and assets. Sales and marketing working together can be a powerful asset on social, but it’s up to the sales team leaders and VPs to coordinate and ensure optimization at the top levels of the organization. That is no easy task.

3. Best practices change rapidly

Social is by nature always moving, so keeping up with the conversations, latest trends, and best practices requires even more of a systematic approach and process for sales teams than ever before. That is as true internally as it is externally.

Tribal knowledge and insights need to be communicated and shared more effectively across the team, especially as those insights rapidly evolve on social. What works well often suddenly changes, and new strategies are constantly developing. As sales managers, we need to make sure the entire team understands the best tactics and strategies as they emerge.

Our teams need to be able to adapt more quickly, while preserving consistency. Just as more departments are now overlapping with sales, so too does sales need to begin thinking about how to leverage the rest of the organization. For example, salespeople can learn best practices on social media from social media marketing teams, and they can learn how to leverage content by speaking with content marketing teams.

Although social creates many new challenges for sales teams — especially as companies begin to tie more concrete ROI to their social selling programs — the opportunities and potential are equally great. For socially progressive leaders, social is truly the next greenfield opportunity, but we need to understand the unique capabilities and best practices for social selling. And as sales managers, we need to recognize that we are no longer just leading sales teams, but also coordinating across the entire organization.

Want to Learn More about Social Selling?

Couple of weeks ago, Forbes tech reporter Eric Savitz interviewed Microsoft’s chief strategy and research office Craig Mundie. Mundie tells Savitz that, “Microsoft has had Siri for over a year.” And just in case the hole Mundie was digging for himself wasn’t deep enough, he goes on to try to explain that since the iPhone 4s basically sucks, Apple had no choice but to “market” Siri to make up for the phone’s deficiencies.

After the howls of laughter died down, what Mundie was trying to say was that the Windows 7 phone has had built in voice recognition technology for the past year. Which is 100% accurate, and 100% irrelevant. Microsoft claims Windows 7 can “Make a call, send a text, or find a pizza place using only your voice.” (To verify these claims, one must of course find a Windows 7 phone that, at least in Silicon Valley, is as easy as finding an AOL subscriber.)

But whether a Windows 7 phone can or can’t do these tasks simply doesn’t really matter. What Mundie apparently fails to grasp is that, yes, much of Siri’s success is marketing – but not the marketing that Mundie apparently despises. To the contrary, there may be no better example of Apple’s creativity and, more importantly, Apple’s understanding of their customers than demonstrated by Siri’s marketing. Apple had the marketing sense to create the perception of machine intelligence that far outstrips Siri’s actual technical capabilities.

It is evident that Apple, understanding their customer, anticipated the questions and commands that Siri would likely be asked, and hard-coded some answers into the software. From the sublime (“What is the meaning of life,” – “I can’t answer this now, but give me some time to write a very long play in which nothing happens.”) to the ridiculous (“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck…” – “Depends on whether you’re talking about European or African woodchucks”).

Apples engineers nailed it: they’ve created the illusion of technology being much “smarter” than it actually is, using keen insight and humor to surprise, delight, and entertain a whole new legion of Apple converts. One can only guess long hours and long Q&A flow charts on Apple white boards. They gave Siri a name, a personality, and that Apple brand magic.

Speech recognition technology has been around for a long time. The ability to run applications on mobile phones has been around for a long time. It took Steve Jobs’ genius to show the telecom carriers that people really did want – and would use – apps on phones. And it’s taken Steve Jobs foresight to make speech recognition – and the underlying AI – mainstream.

So if this is mere marketing, Craig, so be it. You’ve proven the old adage: “If Microsoft invented sushi, they’d probably have called it “cold dead fish.”

Gary Griffiths
Trapit CEO and Co-founder

Full Recipes:Potato Boat Dinner & Grilled Banana Boat Dessert
Discovered in: My “Camping Recipes” Trap
About the blog: The Stir’s “Yum!” blog was a great find, compiling posts from a multitude of female authors with unique tastes and writing styles. From grilling techniques, to refreshing cocktails, to an endless array of baked goods, Yum! is jam-packed with culinary inspiration for all skill levels.
Reason we picked it: We have finally reached this year’s camping season and I am sick and tired of the same old ho-hum routine, bringing along a package of bland hot dogs to be skewered and roasted over an open flame. I came across a blog post that provided 8 delicious (yet rather simple) camping recipes, two of which I intend on debuting when I escape off the grid next weekend. I loved how both “boat” style recipes encouraged creativity, insisting on stuffing in whatever ingredients necessary to suit the needs of your inspired taste buds. I found myself scanning every aisle in the grocery store in search of the perfect boat combination. Here is what I came up with:
What you’ll need:

The Potato Boat:

• large baked potatoes, with 5-6 even cut slits across top
• bacon
• spicy italian sausage
• green onions, diced
• sour cream
• cheddar cheese
• artichoke hearts
• sweet pickled red peppers

The Grilled Banana Boat

• bananas, peel on, sliced down the middle
• Snickers candy bar, chopped
• Reese’s peanut butter chips
• almond roca, smashed
• mini Marshmallows

For the dinner concept, I decided to remix the ingredients a little bit, sticking to the cheesy pork theme, yet rearranging the ham-bacon-cheese combination seen in the example recipe. Instead of ham, I implemented some skillet-cooked spicy italian sausage matched with some sweet, pickled red peppers, which turned out to be quite the flavorful duo. Adding in artichoke hearts felt like overkill during the process, but hey—if there is room for more stuffing, I say go for it!

When cooking the potatoes over a campfire, the key is patience. You’ll want to find a safe spot to place them with just the right amount heat, far enough away from any direct flame that will overly char the potato’s skin (the wait will be worth it!). Monitor the firmness, as you’ll need to make sure the potato’s interior won’t be too soft and mushy when it comes time to slice the slits to stuff ingredients inside. Anticipate roughly 20-30 extra minutes of continued cooking after completing the stuffing. When your boat is ready, garnish with green onions and drizzle on sour cream!

After indulging, if your stomach still has a little room, move on to dessert for boat number two. I prefer this style of camping sweets over traditional S’mores, simple because of the frustration that comes after taking your first bite, as the hard graham cracker inevitably breaks into multiple pieces. The banana peel serves as a nice dish to avoid sticky-finger messiness, and provides enough room to stuff inside whatever your sweet tooth desires. Atop the warmed banana, the combination of melted Reese’s peanut butter chips, slightly-toasted mini marshmallows, crumbled snickers and almond roca dust was absolutely mouthwatering. The peel serves as a nice buffer to prevent the final product from the risk of burning. This basic recipe will blow minds at your next camping trip, that is a guarantee!

To check out the Yum! blog’s tasty boat recipes, as well as the other six camping recipe recommendations, click here! Also, I recommend creating a “camping recipes” Trap yourself—you really never know what you may discover inside!

Cheers!

-Geoff

Imagine having a quick and simple way to stay on top of the latest trends in B2B sales. You no longer need to shell out money to attend overhyped and underwhelming conferences. You no longer have to scavenge the internet for the latest tips and tricks.

Doesn’t that sound great?

We’ve found that sales and marketing leaders are grappling with the ever-changing buying journey. And a number of studies report the same thing:

As sales teams adjust to the modern, digitally driven buyer, there’s a lot to learn. Many sales teams need to reboot. That’s why we’ve whipped up a new, free resource for sales and marketing leaders.

Check out Sales Reboot Camp, a resource that offers authentic, practical guidance on building and growing sales programs for the digital age.

San Francisco, CA., Trapit, the leading platform for authentic social selling and employee advocacy, today announced the launch of SalesRebootCamp.com, a resource for sales and marketing leaders. Sales Reboot Camp offers insights and strategies that will help sales organizations adapt to the modern, digitally-driven buyer. Sales Reboot Camp will launch with a curated newsletter to help leaders and managers in sales organizations filter through all of information available on this topic and surface what is important.

Sales Reboot Camp launches at a time when the B2B buyer’s journey has changed dramatically. Buyers are engaging with social and digital at all layers of the journey and are more empowered than ever before. As a result, B2B organizations are revamping their sales programs to meet the needs of the new buyer in the “age of the customer.”

In order to support the shift, Sales Reboot Camp was designed to provide sales organizations with authentic, practical guidance – from building a business case for social and digital sales, to engaging executive teams, to developing an impactful content strategy, to training and driving employee adoption, to finding and implementing the right tools.

“Our industry has been cluttered by too much noise, vapid advice, and few true best practices. Sales Reboot Camp will break through that clutter to provide practical real-world advice for sales and marketing teams who are transforming their organizations in service of the modern buyer,” said Hank Nothhaft, Jr., CEO of Trapit. “We want to make sure sales organizations can stay ahead of the trends and realize the value of authentic content marketing, social selling and employee advocacy programs.”

Sales Reboot Camp will reach leading B2B sales executives, managers, and organizations. Topics for Sales Reboot Camp newsletter will include:

• Social Selling Program Development & Management
• Social Selling Training and Best Practices
• B2B Sales
• B2B Content Marketing
• Account-Based Sales and Marketing
• Employee Advocacy
• Social Selling Tools

Sales Reboot Camp is launching with a curated newsletter available for marketing and sales leaders today. To learn more about Sales Reboot Camp and sign up, please visit www.salesrebootcamp.com.

You can’t think about social selling in a vacuum. You need to think about how social selling fits into your overall sales strategy.

How can social sales complement your existing practices? In what ways will social selling help you deliver relevant customer experiences across all channels that buyers use?

Let’s take a look at some of the key items you need to consider as you work social selling into your sales playbook.

SDRs vs. Account Executives

To take a strategic approach to social selling, you need to think about the roles and responsibilities of your team. For the sake of illustration, let’s look at a common division on today’s sales teams – sales development reps vs. account executives.

When doing outbound social selling, who’s responsible for researching companies on social media – the account exec, the SDR, or both?

Who’s responsible for connecting with people at the target company on LinkedIn – the account exec, the SDR, or both? Should the SDR initiate the relationship and then introduce the account exec? Or should the account exec initiate the relationship because he or she will maintain the relationship over time?

There isn’t a right or wrong answer to those questions. But your answers do need to fit with your overall sales strategy. Taking the time to think through roles and responsibilities will save you confusion in the long-run.

Marketing vs. Sales Communications

Cadence

You need to coordinate your social selling strategy with your marketing strategy. How often your salespeople personally reach out to buyers needs to be reconciled with how often your marketing team reaches out to them en masse. Too many touches can annoy buyers. Too few touches can leave them asking, “Who are you again?”

Communication Style

Social sellers are tempted to copy the updates that social media marketers write for the company on social media. But there should be a difference between how marketers communicate and sellers communicate.

Marketers want to reach hundreds, if not thousands, of people at one time. Sellers, on the other hand, want to build one-on-one relationships on social media. Therefore, the task of a social seller is to make his or her social updates feel personal and intimate. This might mean tagging a person in a tweet or a LinkedIn update, like this one:

Personal, human-to-human communications is not something that your social media marketing can do at scale.

Timing of Social Interactions

Many sales teams have a prescriptive playbook in place. This playbook is dictates how often sales reps should reach out to buyers. and it is predicated on the length of your sales cycle.

Most sales playbooks focus solely on phone and email touches, but you should weave social touches into your playbooks, as well. In the following example, let’s assume that a prospect downloads a white paper from your web site. If your buying cycle is two months, your communication cadence might look something like this:

Day 1: As soon as the white paper is downloaded, marketing automation sends a personalized thank you note on behalf of the rep.

Day 2: Consult marketing automation platform to see the lead source – whether the lead found the site via social media. (This is indicative of whether the prospect uses social media.)

Sales rep researches the prospect and the prospect’s company on LinkedIn and Twitter. Research the prospect invisibly on LinkedIn. (To learn how to make yourself invisible on LinkedIn, check out tip number four in this blog post.)

Day 5: Sales rep follows up with a personal introductory e-mail and follows the prospect on Twitter.

Day 15: E-mail offering new content related to the first download, and sales rep looks at the prospect’s LinkedIn profile while “visible.”

To learn how to make yourself visible on LinkedIn, check out tip number five in this blog post.

Day 16: If the prospects responds to the e-mail or if the prospect looks at the rep’s LinkedIn profile, send a LinkedIn connection request.

Daily: Follow the 4-1-1 rule and post new content to LinkedIn and Twitter. That way, prospects who use social continue to be educated, and the seller stays top of mind.

Day 25: Share a piece of content on LinkedIn or Twitter and tag the prospect in the post. Make sure that the content is relevant to the person’s interests.

Day 45: Personal e-mail from the sales rep offering a product demo

Note: Be sure to test this and iterate this over time to determine the right number and types of touches.

Sales Calendar

You might be scratching your head, wondering what a sales calendar is. Regardless of the month, Monday is for closing; Tuesday is for closing; Wednesday is for closing; Thursday is for closing; and Friday is for closing. Right?

Well, there’s more to selling than closing. For example, let’s assume that several sales team members will travel to Boston for a conference in May. Leading up to the conference, your sales reps may want to let their social networks know that they will be at the conference. Who knows? Perhaps their followers will be at the conference.

Additionally, they may want to schedule face-to-face meetings with prospects who reside in the Boston area, but will not be at the conference. These prospects might come from their CRM, or they might be the result of outbound outreach.

(We’ve discussed how to use LinkedIn and Twitter to find prospects in a specific geographic area. You can read about it here.)

Final Remarks

When creating your social selling program, do not think about social sales in isolation. Think about how social selling fits into your larger sales communication strategy. Make sure that it jibes with your communications cadence, your team’s established roles, your calendar, and your company’s marketing efforts.

When you take a more holistic view of social selling, you’ll set your sales team up for success.

Launching Your Social Selling Program

Want more tips for launching your social selling program? Check out our social selling workbook.