Many sales teams are struggling to make their quotas. Reaching potential buyers has become increasingly tough, and it seems that, when you do get ahold of your buyers, your competitors already have their ear.

Sound familiar? Let’s take a look at a couple ways that you can use social selling to solve the challenges that you and your team face.

Problem 1: Who Should Generate the Leads?

By now, you’re familiar with the blame game. The sales team says to the marketing team, “You’re not giving me enough leads!” The marketing team retorts, “You’re not following up on the leads I’m giving you!”

So, let’s settle this argument once and for all – with some cold, hard facts. In a study by CustomerThink, they found that marketing teams typically produce between 15% and 30% of a company’s new leads. In fact, according to CustomerThink, “a world-class marketing team will trend toward 30%.”

Talk about putting pressure on your sales representatives. At best, they can expect to generate 70% of their own leads, but some sales teams have to generate upwards of 85% of their own leads.

Problem 2: Cold Calls Are Ineffective.

To add insult to injury, not only do sales teams need to generate their own leads, but old sales techniques no longer work.

In a not-so-distant past, it was much harder for prospects to obtain information about a company. Potential buyers had to use the phone book, request brochures, and speak with sales representatives.

But with search engines and social media at their fingertips, prospects can do their own research before making a purchase. As a result, 57% of every buying decision is already made before a sales representative becomes involved (CEB).

Plus, prospective buyers no longer feel the need to answer the phone to speak with sales representatives. Cold calls are ineffective 97% of the time (IBM’s preference study).

So, what are sales representatives supposed to do? They face quite the dilemma:

• Their potential buyers are more informed.
• Cold calling is effective only 3% of the time.
• But they still need to generate between 70% and 85% of their own leads.

The Solution: Social Selling

What is social selling? It’s the use of social media to build relationships so that you can increase your company’s top line.

Don’t think of social selling as a replacement for traditional techniques. You will still exchange e-mails and phone calls, and you will still have face-to-face meetings. Instead, think of social selling as a way to remove the ineffective parts of the sales process.

Social selling works because you are engaging with prospects where they are. Did you know that…

• Americans spend more time on social media than any other Internet activity, including e-mail (Business Insider)?
• 100% of B2B decision-makers use social media for work purposes (Forrester)?
• The majority (57%) of B2B IT buyers use social networks as part of their purchase process (IDG Connect)?

As a sales representative, you want to be wherever your buyers are, and if they are on social media, you want to be on social media, too.

Engaging with prospects on social media is not merely a fad. It actually works! Sales teams that use social selling tend to come closer to attaining their sales goals than sales teams that do not use social selling.

• 64% of sales teams that use social selling attain their sales quota (Aberdeen Group).
• 73% of salespeople who used social selling techniques meet or exceed quota (Aberdeen Group).
• 54% of salespeople close business as a direct result of social media (McKinsey & Company).

Sound good?

If you want to learn more about social selling, check out these resources:

When sales leaders discuss social selling, they tend to associate it with prospecting and acquiring new customers. But social selling doesn’t stop with the sale.

Think of social selling as another touch point as your sales reps manage their accounts. When an opportunity is closed and won, the lines of communication are anything but closed, and for account executives, networks like Twitter and LinkedIn are fantastic ways to keep customers interested and grow the lifetime value of their accounts.

Let’s take a look at a couple of customer nurturing campaigns that can be enhanced by social.

Sample Customer Campaign #1: Onboarding Customers

Onboarding is a crucial step in a customer’s journey. Those initial interactions set the tone for the rest of your engagements with an account. You can help guarantee success by educating your customers early on after their first purchase.

Granted, each company has a different onboarding process, so we can’t tell you exactly how to work social into your onboarding process. Use the following example for a CRM sales rep as inspiration for your own sales team.

Touch 1: Sales rep connects with key stakeholders on the account on LinkedIn. Sales rep also follows key stakeholders on Twitter. A rep should try to connect with several people at the company, especially if they’re working with an enterprise account.

Ongoing Basis:Sales rep shares company-created content, industry news, and thought leadership posts so that the rep continues to provide value, albeit more passively, to the customer.

Touch 2: Sales rep sends tweet that includes tips for someone’s first 90 days using CRM. Tag one of the key stakeholders in the tweet.

Touch 3: Sales rep sends email that invites the stakeholders to join your customer community.

Touch 4: Customer service check-in call.

Touch 5: Soon after the check-in call, sales rep comments on relevant Twitter and LinkedIn posts of customers. This further establishes the rep’s knowledge about the space, and it gives the rep the opportunity to reassure any stakeholders who might be experiencing buyer’s remorse.

Touch 6: Rep sends a private LinkedIn message or email to the customer, inviting them to a local event that your company is hosting.

Sample Customer Campaign Example #2: Cross-Sell

Cross-selling can be help establish long-lasting relationships with customers. In the commercial Financial Services industry, for example, there’s a strong correlation between customer satisfaction and the number of products a customer uses.

As a result, many commercial banks are trying to master the art of the cross-sell, and you guessed it: Social selling can help with that.

Let’s say that you’re trying to sell investment advisory services to existing customers, but you’re not exactly sure who would be a good candidate. Here are two ways that you can identify potential cross-sell opportunities.

Option 1: Social Listening

On an ongoing basis, sales reps should monitor their customers’ social activity on Twitter and LinkedIn. Some people use social media as a way to crowd-source knowledge about products and services. If reps notice that a customer is actively tweeting about investment advisory services, they’ve found an easy way to open a discussion.

Option 2: Send out Feelers

As sales reps know, opportunities don’t always fall into their laps. Reps might need more proactive approaches. Here’s an idea that you can try:

Touch 1: On Twitter and LinkedIn, a rep shares a piece of industry news about investment advisory services. The rep takes note of which customers like, favorite, or comment on the piece of content. (Reps should be connected with your customers!) Then, the rep follows up with those customers who engaged with the post. They’ve given the rep the opportunity to strike up a conversation.

Touch 2: A few days later, the rep shares a customer success story related to the company’s investment advisory services. Once again, the rep takes note of which customers like, favorite, or comment on the piece of content. Then, the rep follows up with those customers. By posting on a different day, the rep may attract the attention of customers who didn’t see the first post.

Keep in Mind: This tactic will only work if the rep has taken the time to build a strong social media presence and has cultivated relationships with current customers via social.

Ready to Start?

Customer nurturing is an area that is often overlooked in social selling. However, it is a fantastic touch point as you onboard new customers, educate them, and extend their lifetime value. Email and phone aren’t the only ways for sales reps to interact with their current customers.

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Mobile users are snackers when it comes to content: looking for headlines to skim through, articles to quickly scan and then pass over, and maybe a comic or image to linger on for a brief moment. At least, that’s the conventional wisdom, and the mobile strategy that most companies are banking on.

Except what if it’s not true? What if more than 80% of mobile users would watch long-form TV shows or movies on their phone if available? What if a majority of mobile users actually preferred long-form content to clips or snippets? And what if long-form content titan Buzzfeed was not only getting 50% of its traffic from mobile, but that phone users were spending twice as long reading articles than those on tablets?

As Buzzfeed’s CEO, Jonah Peretti says,

Reaching a large audience with mobile by streamlining your site is no doubt still important, but streamlining your content is no longer an option. The so-called second screen is becoming the primary screen for a large number of people, and this is true for both video and text-based content.

It seems counterintuitive, that people would choose to spend their time watching a movie designed for a theatrical experience on a 4-inch screen, or read a 6,000 word article on a device that’s an eighth the size of a single page. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. As smartphones continue to penetrate the market, and a number of users switch to mobile devices as their primary computing devices, reaching a mobile audience with full-length articles, stories and videos is more important than ever.

In 2010, the average American adult spent just 24 minutes on their mobile devices a day, yet as of a few months ago, that figure had surged to 2 hours and 21 minutes a day. That increase hasn’t been because they’re spending more time skimming; they’re spending that time reading magazine-style articles or watching full-length videos. And if you’re not providing them with the same high-quality content on their mobile devices that they can get elsewhere, someone else will. You can cut down on any number of things for an improved mobile experience, but if you don’t want to disappoint your audience, don’t cut the content.

– Ethan

We all have a strong set of core values; we wouldn’t have come as far as we have if that weren’t the case. We do our best to sleuth out the most important facts and figures, and we craft for ourselves a narrative of the truth that aligns not only with what we value, but with what we hope others will value in themselves.

This helps explain why we’re all so good at attracting like-minded individuals to ourselves and our causes – when you’re passionate about something, it shines through, luring others with the same passion to the same luminous sources. And yet, this also poses an incredible problem for all of us. In the immortal words of Frank Zappa, “One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.”

He’s right, of course. You cannot change someone’s mind who vehemently disagrees with you. But what you can strive to do is to go all the way back to the beginning of the process and remember how they arrived at their position in the first place: based on their values and the information that they deemed was important and reliable. The people with core values that oppose our own are not the people whose hearts and minds we even want to win over, but what about the people with similar values who just chose to emphasize a different selection of facts as their starting point?

The biggest problem with information these days is not that there’s too much of it, but that we’re surrounding ourselves with people who are already beginning with the same predispositions that we are. If we’re all going to the same sources, if we’re all reading the same interpretations and presentations-of-facts, how are we ever going to grow? This problem — the echo chamber problem — is something we’re all unwittingly creating for ourselves. If we fall prey to it, we run the risk of shutting ourselves off from important information that might add nuance or value to how we construct our overall narrative.

And yet there’s one simple value we all share that makes us recognize the dangers of the echo chamber and the need to break out of it: the truth matters.

It’s sometimes a disconcerting process, especially when the new information challenges our preconceptions, but new discoveries are exactly what we need to break out of our comfort zone and reach our full potential. Because at the end of the day, we don’t just want a selection of available facts, we need the full suite of information that’s out there. We don’t just want interpretations from voices that already agree with us; we need a variety of views that emphasize different points, all of which may be important to us in varying degrees.

It’s a bold step to take. Sometimes it means acknowledging a positive advantage in one of our competitors, or admitting a fault or prior bad decision, or that there’s a difficult situation with no universal solution. But it also means that you’ll discover new things with the potential to delight and convert new eyes and ears to a way of thinking that might not have occurred to them before. And that’s how you grow in today’s world: not by staying within a safe social space, but by informing and inspiring your audience to take a step they never would have considered otherwise. So step out of your comfort zone and discover something new; you just might be surprised at who comes with you on the journey.

-Ethan

In 2010, the word “hashtag” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, and four years later, the Scrabble Dictionary followed suit, accepting the word as a valid combination of tiles. There’s no question that hashtags, once your phone’s pound sign, have become a prominent part of popular culture.

In our last post, we looked at how to find hashtags for social selling. Today, we’re going to ask whether we should even use hashtags. If so, when should we use them?

Let’s first take a look at the case for using them and go over a few best practices. Then, we’ll dive into the case against using them. Sound good?

Use Hashtags to Join Conversations

Think of a hashtag as a way of organizing conversations on social media. Every minute, Twitter users send nearly 350,000 tweets. By using a hashtag, you make it possible for other users to find your tweets, and you are inviting them to engage with the ideas in your tweets.

If you are just starting out with social selling, you most likely do not have a large Twitter following. By using hashtags and responding to tweets that use appropriate tags, you can attract followers, add value, and build relationships with potential customers.

Remember that the more specific you can get with a hashtag, the more targeted your conversation will be. #Business will be much broader (and noisier) than #Sales, which is much broader (and noisier) than #SocialSelling.

Not Every Tweet Needs a Hashtag

Hashtags make your tweets discoverable to a wide audience. The truth is, not everything you type deserves to be discovered. If your tweet, post or comment won’t add substance to the wider conversation, you should consider ditching the hashtag. For example, a Tweet that says, “I love #SocialSelling” isn’t adding a lot to the conversation about social selling. (Though, we at Trapit are happy you feel that way!)

During One-on-One Conversations, Drop the Hashtag

When you tweet using hashtags, other Twitter users will respond from time to time, and you’ll want to respond to them. As you engage in one-on-one conversations, don’t feel like you need to use the hashtag. Like we said above, hashtags are great for starting conversations. But when you’re already in a conversation, you don’t need to continue to use the hashtag.

In the example below, notice how Bill uses a hashtag for his tweet, but when Kim responds, she doesn’t use the hashtag:

Limit the Number of Hashtags

Maybe you’re used to Instagram, where users flood their posts with pound signs, so you feel the need to flood your tweets with hashtags. Or maybe you want to be as discoverable as possible, so you’re determined to use as many hashtags as possible.

Stop doing that.

There are a couple problems with your hashtag-happy strategy. First, using too many pound signs affects the readability of your post. We skim on social media, and it’s hard to parse hashtags when you’re skimming.

Second, if you have more hashtags than words, that’s a violation of the unwritten rules of Twitter etiquette. Why? The point of using a hashtag is to add substance to a conversation. If you have more hashtags than words, chances are that you’re not adding anything of value.

In fact, research shows that you shouldn’t go overboard with hashtags. Check out the research from TrackMaven, which found that tweets with one hashtag generated the most engagement:

In other words, keep it simple.

The Argument for Authenticity

Above, we looked at the case for using hashtags and some best practices surrounding the octothorpe. However, some social media experts are against the use of hashtags. To them, using hashtags seems contrived.

Why’s that? Well, for starters, Twitter is supposed to be a place for authentic conversation. To that end, some users believe that Twitter conversations should imitate the way we speak in real life. That’s why the hashtag irks them so much. Few people say things like “hashtag B2B” in real life. So, why would you clog up your tweets with a bunch of pound signs?

Other social media experts are concerned about readability. As we said above, we skim on social media, and when you’re faced with a series of hashtags, it’s much harder to read your tweets.

Finally, there are the cynics. They question the motives of those who use hashtags. They don’t believe that hashtag users are trying to start conversations. Instead, the cynics believe that pound signs are being used to broadcast messages to as many people as possible and gain as many followers as possible. Social media is not supposed to be self-serving, they argue. It’s about engaging in conversations and adding value to those conversations. So, to a cynic’s mind, using a hashtag is a clear violation of the unwritten rules of Twitter etiquette.

Hmm… The detractors raise valid concerns, don’t they? So, what’s a social seller supposed to do?

Perhaps your best bet is to take a pragmatic approach. If you’re new to Twitter, you probably have a handful of followers, and you’re looking to build a community. Unless you use hashtags, people won’t find you and engage with you. In other words, you need hashtags – from time to time.

Strive for balance. Aim to send a mixture of hashtagged and non-hashtagged tweets, reserving your octothorpes for when you want to add value to a subject that Twitter is discussing.

Good luck tweeting!

Want more social selling tips? Check out our cheat sheet for social sellers.

Posted byMark Bajus

In the wake of last week’s presidential elections, many social media experts were left with questions. Should our employee advocates, executives, and social sellers tweet about the election? If they do, how will those social posts affect our brand?

Trapit’s CEO, Henry Nothhaft, Jr., even conducted an informal Twitter poll on the subject:

To help companies navigate the thorny intersection of employee advocacy, social media, and divisive topics like politics, we put together a short FAQ. We hope that it helps!

Q: Should my employees post about controversial topics on social media?

When employees post their personal views alongside branded content, it creates an association in the minds of buyers and current customers. For some companies, that association can be a positive thing. For others, that association can be harmful. Your answer to this question is largely contingent on your company’s brand and culture.

If your company has embraced the election season, like JetBlue and Netflix did, it might be acceptable for employees to discuss politics on social. Or imagine that you’re in the renewable energy industry. It makes sense that your employees have points of view on renewable energy subsidies, as well as adjacent topics like climate change. Or let’s say that your company values open expression and free speech. Then, your employees might feel empowered to share their views.

No matter what you decide, it’s important to remind employees to be respectful when discussing controversial topics like politics. The rules of internet civility should not be discarded.

Q: How should I communicate the company’s expectations to employees?

Start with writing a social media policy for your company. By putting your approach to controversial issues like politics in writing, you can help protect your company’s reputation.

But remember that writing a social media policy is not enough. Many employees need the rules to be contextualized. That’s where social media training comes in. While many employees understand how to use social media in a personal setting, they need to understand social media in a professional context. And that doesn’t just include tips and tricks; that also includes education about professional netiquette. Give them examples of what they should do and what they shouldn’t do. Don’t leave them guessing.

Q: Should a company’s executives post about divisive issues?

Most companies are hierarchical, and the higher up the employee sits, the tighter the association between the employee’s words and the brand’s reputation. In other words, when a CEO tweets about divisive issues like elections and politics, his or her comments will be seen as a direct reflection of the brand, whether the CEO likes it or not.

That’s why it’s important to offer social media training tailored for executives. They need to understand how to be highly visible members of the company, and they need to understand the company’s “no fly zones” on social media (i.e. the topics that should be avoided).

Q: What about social sellers? Is it wise for sales reps to post about politics?

Again, the answer varies from company to company, but at Trapit, we believe that sales reps should avoid divisive topics.

Modern sales is about building relationships. Just as you can upset an aunt or uncle or friend by posting about controversial issues, sales reps can jeopardize existing customer relationships with a tweet or offend prospects with a LinkedIn comment, thus ending a relationship even before it begins.

To put it another way, the majority of customers want to avoid speaking with salespeople. By posting about controversial topics, you’re giving customers more reasons to ignore you and your sales team.

Q: But what about my employees’ First Amendment rights?

Unless you’re a government employee, the First Amendment does not protect your right to the freedom of speech. The First Amendment limits only the government’s ability to suppress speech. More specifically, it provides that “Con­gress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.”

Courts have extended this prohibition to all feder­al, state, and local government officials but have consistently emphasized that the First Amendment’s strictures do not apply to private-sector employers, meaning that private-sector employees can face repercussions for what they post on social media in the United States.

When creating a social media policy, consult with your legal and HR departments. They will have a better understanding of what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

In addition to politics, we have the traditional taboo subjects: race, money, religion, and sex. While those topics are a good starting point, they aren’t the only subjects that could upset potential customers. Encourage your employees to be critical thinkers.

For example, sports can be a highly divisive issue. Let’s say that you were a Cleveland-based sales rep, and your territory included the state of Illinois. By posting on social media about Cleveland’s baseball team during the 2016 World Series, you might irk some of your buyers in Chicagoland. Sure, some prospects might say, “It’s just baseball. I’m not going to hold sports affiliations against this person.” But for others, baseball is no laughing matter, and your support of another team could be off-putting.

So, step into the shoes of your customers, and think about what might be a turn-off.

Much has been written about politics in the workplace. Here are two good starting points:

Bill Harris, VP of Sales at Trapit, shares his views on how B2B sales will evolve in 2017. In the upcoming days, we will continue to publish predictions about the future of B2B sales and social selling in 2017. Enjoy!

*****

I predict that, in 2017, sales leaders will play a more prominent role in shaping how Marketing supports Sales. Why? Buyers want one-to-one engagement, and sales can provide that at scale. That’s largely because of two critical developments:

• Sales and Marketing are working together on their account-based initiatives
• True engagement through social is now possible with the maturation of viable social engagement platforms

Sales and Marketing Alignment Around Accounts

Up until 2017, the perspectives of Marketing and Sales have been vastly different. Marketing has been focused on engaging as many people as possible, while Sales has focused on one-to-one interactions. Likewise, Marketing has focused on inbound conversion of leads, while Sales has focused on outbound conversion of deals.

The whole notion of Account-Based Everything tries to remedy this problem. Marketing and Sales work together on a targeted set of accounts, which are usually the largest and most lucrative. It’s a quality over quantity strategy.

For companies to pull off an account-based strategy, sales reps need to conduct deep research on their target accounts. One way to do that is through social listening. Hear what is important in the buyers mind, listen to what competitors are saying and not saying, and listen for opportunities to maintain that subject matter expertise or thought leadership.

After listening, sales teams need to be present in the conversation with buyers, and they need to be seen as a valuable resource as early as possible.According to Forrester, 74% of buyers choose the sales professional and company that gets in early while adding value and insight in the buying journey.

Social is a great venue to add value. According to IDC, 84% of C-level/VP executives use social media to make purchasing decisions. Unfortunately, so many salespeople and sales operations do social poorly. They simply cold pitch their product, and their buyers ignore them. To stand out, reps need to offer their buyers content that offers industry insights and helps customers think about their business problems in new ways.

And that’s where marketers step into the picture. The marketing organization can offer content and messaging to the sales team, and they can work with sales to create engagement strategies for their target accounts.

When you step back and think about it, the role of sales reps will change in an account-based world. Sales reps will no longer be closers at the bottom of the funnel. Rather, they will be involved throughout the customer lifecycle, and at crucial stages, they will serve as a linchpin between the customer and the marketing department.

Technology Built for Sales Reps

But there’s one big hurdle for sales reps in an account-based world: The Account-Based Everything technology soup:

This soup is a marketing technologist’s dream, and a sales leader’s nightmare. No sales team will patch together all of those tools and create a simple, intuitive sales process. That’s why Sales needs to take a leadership role in 2017 to cut through the noise and offer clarity about the sales organization’s needs in an account-based world.

The tools that work for marketing departments won’t work for sales departments. As Henry said in his prediction, sales teams need an approachable platform that enables and empowers sellers of all levels of digital competence to achieve best practices, provides marketing and sales leadership a set of tools to support and measure these efforts, and easily integrates with other systems of record within the sales and marketing technology stack, such as marketing automation and CRM.

If you’d like to learn about how our platform can help you engage your buyers and position your sales as trusted advisors, contact us. We’d love to talk.

Additional Resources:

Authenticity is critical for winning at social selling. Our customers have an instinctive feel for it. When we’re authentic, our buyers recognize it, and our authenticity grows our relationships. But when we serve up canned messages, our buyers notice our stiltedness. They feel annoyed and start to question their relationships: Do sales reps really care about buyers? If sales reps care about their buyers, why did the sales rep use a pre-written message instead of taking the time to write a meaningful response?

As more sales teams engage in social selling, canned social is on the rise, and we need to nip this problem in the bud. Here are five telltale signs that you’re serving up canned social that will erode trust with your buyers.

1. You Like Everything That Your Buyer Posts

In an effort to save time, some sales teams have taken to automating their social interactions. They rely on workflows that tell them when to like a buyer’s post. Or worse, they rely on applications that automatically like posts on their behalf.

At first, such tactics might get a buyer’s attention. Who doesn’t like social engagement on their posts? But when this behavior continues, buyers see right through it, and your interactions quickly look overzealous, if not creepy.

So, don’t automate. Doing so might hurt your relationships by eroding trust.

2. You Use the Same Stock Comments Over and Over Again

Some sales reps aren’t judicious when responding to social posts. Instead, they want to be omnipresent, and when they try to comment on everything, they resort to copying and pasting stock phrases.

Sometimes, the stock phrases are along the lines of “Great post!” which doesn’t add much value. Other times, reps resort to trite sayings such as: “Our buyer has changed more in the last ten years than in the last 100 years.” The first time around, the phrase piques interest. But when you see it over and over in your LinkedIn or Twitter feed, the stock comment loses its punch.

A good response takes into consideration the content being shared, as well as the person sharing the content. Social media is not a place to dump fortune-cookie-like bits of wisdom.

3. You Share the Same Content That Everyone Else Has Shared

To build a relationship on social, a sales rep has to add value, and one of the best ways to add value on social is through content. However, you can’t help your buyers when you’re sharing content that they have seen in their social feeds several times. Your buyers will ignore those posts.

So, share content from a wide variety of sources – not just the usual suspects in the business world. Your marketing team and social selling platform should help you surface those diamonds in the rough.

4. Your Messages Are Rife with Copy and Paste Errors

I get it. Salespeople and marketers are busy. They want to minimize their effort, so they do a lot of copying and pasting.

However, when a buyer named “Bill” receives a message addressed to “Steve,” a red flag goes up. It indicates that the sender is sending out bulk messages and didn’t bother to tailor the message. Why would buyers want to do business with someone who can’t even get their names correct?

Take the time to not just personalize your messages (i.e. change the buyer’s name and company name), but rather, individualize them. Make your messages unique for each person.

5. Your Posts Have Zero Personality

Your marketing department likely supplies you with suggested copy for your social posts. But be careful; marketing speak can sound robotic.

For example, a marketer might write, “We’re happy to be a finalist for the ABC Awards.” A real person might write, “Woohoo! We’re finalists for the ABC Awards. So proud of my team.”

When you’re posting to social, add your own flair. Don’t sound as if you were writing a college paper. Instead, try to mimic how you speak. Contractions like “can’t” are okay. Even the occasional sentence fragment can help you sound less stilted.

Don’t Can Your Social

To be sure, some industries require a bit of canning. If you’re in regulated industries like finance or pharma, you might have pre-approved messages that you have to use. Otherwise, your company might get into legal trouble.

But compliance doesn’t excuse all the problems of canned social. Just because you’re in a regulated industry doesn’t mean your messages should not be individualized, nor does it mean you should limit your content sharing to, say, Mashable articles.

It’s scary that some sales leaders treat social as a dumping ground for canned marketing messages. With that attitude, sales teams will find themselves struggling to build relationships with buyers because their interactions lack authenticity and erode buyer’s trust.

For social selling to work, you have to do it the right way. And that requires sales reps to put time and effort into their interactions.

In the digital age, buyers are in charge. They’re always connected, and as a result, their process is anything but linear. Armed with mobile devices, search engines, and social media, customers do more and more research on their own. They look for solutions to their problems and product information anytime they have a spare moment.

If you’re trying to learn to adapt to the new reality of the digital era, it’s okay. You’re not alone. Many sales leaders are trying to answer questions about how they should approach their customers, what skills their team needs, and how they should partner with other departments, especially marketing.

To get you started, here are five things to think about as you recalibrate your sales organization for the future.

Create Flexible and Agile Sales Playbooks

In the past, sales playbooks could be extremely regimented because phone calls were the primary means of communicating with buyers. Sales reps were supposed to make X number of follow-up calls in X number of days to X number of prospects.

Now, all that has changed. Sure, sales reps still need to pick up the phone to close deals, but a phone call is not always the best way to contact a buyer.

Customers aren’t waiting in one channel for communications from a company. They’re moving across devices and channels. As a result, sales reps need to learn to engage customers wherever their customers are. That could be on the phone and email, but it could also be on Twitter, LinkedIn, text message, and a variety of other messaging apps.

To engage this digitally connected buyer, your sales playbook needs to champion flexibility and agility. It can’t toggle back and forth between email and phone.

Forge a Strong Connection with Marketing

Marketing and sales have much to learn from one another. While marketers can learn from the sales team’s deep knowledge of customer relationships, sales teams can learn from marketers who have experience delivering a consistent message across multiple channels and multiple devices. Whether your team realizes it or not, that consistency helps boost customer perceptions of your company, and ultimately, it drive sales.

How does marketing create those consistent experiences? One of the prominent ways is through content. Rather than pitch, pitch, pitch, marketers help, help, help. They share content that adds value to the buyer’s journey, and when they freely share your company’s knowledge and expertise, they build trust with buyers. And trust is ultimately your most valuable selling tool.

Many buyers are uneasy about sales reps. Forrester has found that the majority (59%) of buyers would prefer to avoid sales reps. That’s largely because many sales reps are quick to pitch their products, but they aren’t quick to understand their buyers’ problems and help their buyers solve their problems. This is where a marketer’s mindset could come in handy for sales reps.

Invest in Sales Enablement Technology

To create a consistent, unified customer experience, you need the right technology in place. Marketing needs to be able to supply content and messaging to sales, and sales needs to be able to share that content and messaging with the customers across a host of channels.

By connecting the dots between marketing, sales, and the customer, your entire enterprise will be moving together in unison, making it easier for your customers to interact with your company. What’s more, each department will gain a better understanding of your customers. In turn, this will lead to customer acquisition and profitable relationships.

Revamp Your Team’s Skill Set

In the digital age, sales organizations will need a new blend of talent. Sure, you’ll still need sales reps who can deliver engaging presentations and persuade buyers to purchase your solution. But your sales team has new arrows in its quiver, and reps need to learn how to hit the target with their digital arsenal.

For starters, sales reps need to learn how to leverage new communication channels like social networks and messaging applications. This does not mean that you need to hire an entirely new sales team of tech-savvy millennials. But it does mean that you need to invest in training your sales team on how to leverage these channels, and you may find yourself pleasantly surprised. Your veteran sales reps may become more adept at leveraging new technologies than younger generations.

As your sales team becomes acquainted with new communication channels, they must also learn what works on those channels. In today’s digital world, content is king. Sales reps must learn how to use content to attract buyers, nurture relationships, and build trust.

It sounds easy. You simply post content, right? Not quite. Content savviness is a skill that reps must develop. To effectively leverage content, sales reps must learn to act like consultants. They need to assess the buyer’s current state, envision where the buyer should end up, chart a path for them, and determine how they can leverage content and insights to guide buyers along their path.

Revamp Your Skill Set

There’s a difference between a strategic embrace of the new digital world and being a figurehead for digital change. Sure, you can tell your team to embrace the digital age. But if you don’t use social, mobile, and other digital channels to communicate with your customers and your team, your reps will never fall in line. They’ll believe that digital is optional.

So, while your sales team is learning a new skill set, use that opportunity to revamp your skill set, as well. Here are some additional resources that you might find useful:

Winning in the Digital Age

To win in the digital age, sales organizations need to evolve with their customer. This evolution requires careful planning, and it requires an investment in the right training and technology. Only with the right skill set and the right tool set in place can sales reps execute their playbooks and drive profitable relationships.

Embrace the new reality, and don’t fret. Not everything has changed. Sales reps are still responsible for building relationships and driving revenue. But how you approach those challenges has changed.

Posted byMark Bajus

The Biking Trap has been hanging out on the featured section of our homepage for a little while now, as a non-car-owning bike commuter it’s a personal favorite of mine.

Big news in the bike trap today is the fact that NYC is set to launch a public bike sharing program on the same scale as those that exist in Paris and London. This is good news for the Oregon economy as well, since Portland’s own Alta Bicycle Share has been selected to provide the system.

Also in The Biking Trap I discovered that the folks over at the blog Lovely Bicycle! are giving away a refurbished ladies touring cycle to the writer of a winning ride report. While the giveaway bike is a little too large for me I’ve decided to use their prompt as justification for hijacking the daily trap for my own ride report.

While blog readers may not have noticed my absence thanks to the beauty of autopost scheduling, I spent the past week biking from Portland to the redwoods of California along the Oregon Coast bike route (which was a highlight of this year’s popular Cycle Oregon ride). All told I clocked in a grand total of 399.6 miles in 7 days. The following is my report.

Day 1: (90.8 miles): My first day was my hottest and longest. I chose the route to the coast with least climbingbecause I wanted to get to the coast in just one day. While a fairly high traffic road, highway 18 has been recently redone with a large shoulder (6 feet in most places!) and is bound for Oregon state bike route designation.

About a 1/3 of the way into the day I learned via cellphone that my article on browsing was going to be featured in Mashable and I pulled into Devil’s Lake state park an hour or so before sunset and had a meal of crab flavored fish protein on rice crackers with a tallboy of Hamms (it’s funny the things you will impulse buy when *bonking and in a funky, small-town grocery store).

Day 2: (63.8 miles) Day two was planned on the fly to be a short day to Beachside State Park, a mere 44.8 miles away. But when I got to Newport the sight of an older solo touring gentleman turning around and climbing down from the highly trafficked Yaquina Bay Bridge coupled with a bike route sign leading under the bridge and towards the bay lead me on a 19 mile detour

Shamefully it was 9.5 miles before I realized that the back of the bay was not in sight and I was instead heading back towards the valley. The trek back to the bridge found me uttering explatives into a hot headwind.

The nice ranger who ushered me into the most private, ocean view having hiker biker site in Beachside cheered me up. As did a shower and meal of beans, zuchinni and quinoa.

Day 3: (76 miles) Day three’s early morning riding out of Yachats had me winding up cliffs on 101 with the iciest fog I’d ever met blowing up off the ocean. But as this narrow stretch would have been downright terrifying when traffic started to pick up, I made peace with the early morning weather.

I had a lunch of fried Oysters in Florence and this, the roaring sounds of ATVs all through the Oregon Dunes National Recreation area, and an amazing late in the day tailwind had me far (and unthinkingly) overshooting my most ambitious goals for the day.

I rode into North Bend as a thick cold fog was rolling in and the sun starting to set. A ways away from the next park, I ponied up for a room in a dingy hotel to a man who asked me to, “please save him some work and only use one of the beds in the room.”

I did as I was told and fell asleep listening to a man loudly proclaiming his belief in the lord in the motel parking lot.

Day 4: (39.7) I awoke to the same thick fog and a sore knee. I’ve had knee issues in the past, and this was my major trip concern. So I decided to make the day an easy one.

Sadly the world did not cooperate with me. The road between North Bend and Bandon is named 7 Devils and each of the Devils are, maybe you guessed it, the steepest freaking hills I’d hit so far making a modest day in mileage the most hellish I’d encountered.

I pulled into Bullards Beach State Park in the early afternoon feeling worse for the wear and tried to make up for it by treating myself to a Crab sandwich in the city of Bandon.

That night I met a party of mid 50s tourers from Seattle, donning an arsenal of heavy glass liquor bottles (carried over 7 devils in the trailer of a bike friday). They shared their fire with me and another girl from Bellingham who was biking to San Francisco then proceeded to keep me up well past when I retired to my tent.

Day 5: (58.5 miles) I woke up tired and knew that my knee was mad. After enthusiastic stretching and sheepish apologies from the Seattle party I took off on what I presumed would be a short day.

I made a bad decision of overshooting the gorgeous Humbug Mountain State park and by the time I rolled into Gold Beach I was riding pretty much one-legged.

Again 20+ miles from the next state park, I noticed a sign on a hotel that said “hiker/biker” rooms. I rolled up and rented a solid room with all the amenities for a mere $20 from Kurt, a hotelier for over 30 years. He proudly showed me the other hostel like rooms he’d created for larger parties (where he charged $10 per rider) and got me thinking about an article about bike touring economics I’d read before leaving.

Day 6: (27.2 miles) My knee killing me but I was unwilling to take a rest day if I wasn’t paying hiker/biker camping rates (and I really, really wanted to make it to CA).

This day was a sad, limping one and I was too focused on knee pain to really enjoy the scenery (which included Oregon’s highest bridge). I was close to giving up when I rolled into Harris Beach State Park when I realized I was only 7 miles from the California border.

Day 7: (43.7 miles). Psychologically prepared for pain, knowing my Dad was going to pick me up where ever I landed that day I figured I’d limp to California and if the mood struck me (and my knee help up) I’d try for the redwoods (my original goal). It was flat, nice riding and I hit California with a knee that seemed willing to work with me (or the painkillers I was feeding it).

I shot my dad a text that I’d meet him in Del Norte Coast Redwoods state park but when I got there it was closed (oh California budget woes). After hugging a redwood I noticed that my phone was nearly out of batteries and had no service so I headed back down the hill and met my dad on the side of 101 and headed for beer and some redwood camping.

Now I’m back in the office, dilegently reading the biking trap, letting my knee heal, and with fodder like this filling the Biking Trap, sure to be planning another trip soon.

-Laura