Social networks are full of opportunities for sales professionals. LinkedIn and Twitter enable you to build trust and rapport with prospects. They enable you to engage current customers. They enable you to find buyers and be found by them. And they enable you to research buyers.

In this post, we’ll look at how you can use LinkedIn to research your buyers. Specifically, we’ll discuss how to mine someone’s “recent activity” for information and for opportunities to spark engagement.

Introducing LinkedIn’s Recent Activity

Before interacting with someone on social media, you should observe the person’s digital body language. On LinkedIn, there are various ways to glean information. You can look at people’s LinkedIn summaries to see how they describe themselves. You can look at people’s skills and endorsements to see how other people perceive them.

Additionally, you can look at someone’s “Recent Activity.” Haven’t heard of it? Don’t worry. It’s one of LinkedIn’s best kept secrets.

To see someone’s recent activity while using a desktop computer, navigate to the person’s profile. Then, move your cursor to the down arrow in the top part of their profile. Finally, click on “View recent activity.”

Note: If you cannot see someone’s recent activity, that person may have hidden his or her recent activity. Alternatively, the person may not have posted anything recently.

Observe Buyers in Their Social Habitat

You might be asking, “Why should I care about someone’s recent activity?” Well, there are two reasons. First, the recent activity section allows you to become acquainted with your buyer even more. Second, it presents an opportunity for you to engage with your buyer. First up: Getting to know your buyer.

Before you interact with a customer on LinkedIn, it’s important to observe the customer’s digital body language. When you’re looking at someone’s recent activity on LinkedIn (or recent tweets on Twitter, for that matter), you can ask the following questions:

• Is this person active on LinkedIn?
• How often does this person use LinkedIn?
• What tone does the person use when posting to LinkedIn?
• Which topics interest this person?
• Which types of content (e.g. images, industry news, how-to articles) interest this person?
• How does this person interact with other people – comments, likes, tagging people in posts?

By asking these questions, you can anticipate how your interactions will unfold. For example, let’s say that your prospect doesn’t have much recent activity. This indicates that your buyer may not be overly active on LinkedIn, and you shouldn’t grow frustrated if your buyer takes time to respond to you.

Let’s think of another example. Imagine a customer whose activity consists of giving “thumbs up” to long-form articles about marketing profession. If you want to attract this person’s attention, perhaps you should share more long-form articles instead of internet memes.

Choose How to Engage

As you peruse someone’s recent activity on LinkedIn, not only do you form a more complete image of your buyer; you have the opportunity to interact with your buyer and the content that your buyer has shared. Here are the three ways that you can engage:

Read content and save for later

This option works well if you’re about to jump on a sales call with someone.

Let’s say that your prospect shared an article about artificial intelligence in sales software. After you read the article, you can mention it during your sales call.

Warning: Don’t force connections. If your product or solution has nothing to do with artificial intelligence or sales software, don’t feel as if you need to reference that article on your sales call.

Like it

This option is good for lighter touches. Users of social networks enjoy when you like or favorite things on social media. By giving a “thumbs up” to the post, you signal to the prospect that you’re paying attention.

But be careful: If the person has several connections on LinkedIn, your “like” could get lost in a sea of “likes.” As a result, your prospect or customer may miss your interaction.

Beyond that, “likes” don’t require much thought on your part. Anyone can like something. To build rapport and establish yourself as a credible source of information, you’ll need to do more than just like a piece of content.

Comment

When you want to stand out, a comment is your best option. People tend to receive fewer comments than they do “likes.” As a result, people are more likely to notice a comment as opposed to a like.

More importantly, commenting allows you to enter into a conversation and add value. If you’re going to shape someone’s journey on social media, you need to provide helpful insights.

Give It a Try!

It’s your turn. Go to LinkedIn. Locate 5 prospects. Look at their “recent activity,” and analyze.

What patterns do you notice? And how can you engage with what the person has already shared?

Good luck!

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For companies to start generating leads and driving revenue through social selling, a fundamental shift must take place. The organization’s culture and mindset must change. For enterprises (and any organization), this can be a challenging prospect for enterprises, given that tradition can trump innovation.

But it can be done! IBM, for instance, has famously made this transition. Below, you’ll find four key insights and recommendations for promoting social sales and changing your company culture.

1. Worry First about Your Organization’s Mindset

To transform your sales team, you need a new mindset, a new skill set, and a new tool set. And the transformation process needs to happen in that order.

Too often, companies try things in reverse. They buy social selling software. Then, they expect their employees to use it. That’s a problem. While a good social selling tool can promote adoption, it’s not a silver bullet.

So, if adoption is lagging at your company and results are inadequate, don’t immediately blame the software. First, ask yourself whether you have changed your team’s mindset.

2. Executives Need to Lead the Charge

McKinsey & Company studied organizations that are embracing digital change, and they concluded that executive buy-in is key. Social and digital change must come from the top. They write:

Indeed, digital and social transformation can’t happen on the margins. It takes deep commitment – from multiple departments.

For social selling to happen, sales, marketing, and sales enablement leaders need to be aligned. Sales leaders need to lead by example. Marketing leaders must support the sales team’s content needs. And sales enablement teams must offer consistent, ongoing training.

If you’re trying to get executive buy-in, here are some resources that can help:

3. Once Your Executive Team Is on Board, It’s Time to Work with Your Sales Team

Once you have your executive team on board, then, you can start transforming your sales team. First, your sales reps need to stop thinking, “I must pitch my product to buyers as quickly as possible.” Instead, sales reps must say, “I must spark relevant sales conversations by providing insights.”

Quick Tip: At this stage, it helps if sellers learn the value of content – both created by the company and created by others. Marketing and sales enablement teams should teach sales reps to use content to start conversations and challenge the status quo.

Second, sales reps needs to stop thinking, “I need to cold call as many people as possible.” Instead, they must think, “I need to become more digitally and socially savvy – like my buyers.”

Quick Tip: As companies support skills transformation, continuous education and training must be available to sellers. Furthermore, success stories need to be widely shared. Skeptical salespeople need to hear that social selling actually works.

Finally, sales reps need to stop thinking, “Can’t we automate this?” Instead, they must think, “Social selling works because of the human-to-human interaction. Software is a trampoline – not a crutch.”

4. Start Small and Create Mini Success Teams

When you’re trying to expand social selling in your organization, you can find success by creating social selling “pockets.” These pockets are small groups of sales reps who have embraced the social selling mindset and skill set.

By starting with a small, dedicated group, you can experiment with social selling, demonstrate success to the skeptics within the organization, and learn early lessons as you prepare to ramp up your social sales efforts.

It’s Time to Change

Before you can start an enterprise-wide social sales program, your company’s mindset must change. As McKinsey & Company’s research has shown, the change must start with your executives. The leadership’s attitude, in turn, will shape the sales team’s attitude.

Of course, changing a company’s mindset does not happen overnight. But don’t delay the change. The sooner you start, the sooner you can use social networks to shape your buyer’s mindset, beat your competitors, and drive more revenue.

Learn More about Changing Your Company

Flip through the ebook that we created with Sales for Life, and learn how to change your executive team’s mindset.

The B2B sales game is changing at breakneck speed. Gone are the days of interruptive selling tactics like cold calls. Today’s inside sales teams are focused on meeting customers where they live – online – and they’re finding success with this transition.

But how? What are they doing to be so successful? Here’s a list of strategies and tactics that B2B companies of all sizes are using to increase the productivity of their inside sales teams.

1. They’re focused on the customer – not the product

In traditional sales, reps are trained on the product. They can spew a litany of product features and benefits. But, often times, they don’t understand their customers, and as Forrester has noted, potential customers have noticed.

For digital sales transformation to take place, reps have to change their focus. They must replace phrases like “My company” and “Our product” with the magical word “You” – “Your company” and “Your industry” and “Your customers.”

2. They’re ceasing to spend money on tactics that don’t work

It takes 6,264 cold calls to make 4 sales. So, why are firms continuing to spend money on legacy tactics that are ineffective? Why are sales teams worried about auto-dialers and call centers and cold calling scripts?

“It’s what we have always done” is not a good excuse.

If you’re guilty of this kind of sales spend, consider doing some spring cleaning. Free up some budget for sales investments that are more effective.

3. They’re striving to engage potential customers earlier in the buying cycle

When sales reps wait to engage buyers, they have fewer chances to shape potential customers’ evaluation criteria. As a result, they’re more likely to miss quota.

Sales Benchmark Index’s research shows that sales teams that focus on the first part of the journey (i.e. the “Discover” and “Learn” stages) rarely compete on price and often win deals with zero competition because “they got in early” and were able to influence the buyer’s purchasing criteria. In fact, proactive teams are 56% more likely to hit their numbers.

How do inside sales teams engage buyers earlier? By meeting potential customers where they are – online.

4. They’re committed to using content

In the digital space, earning someone’s trust and interest is all about content. This does not mean that sales reps are writing their own blog posts and ebooks. Rather, reps are learning how to use the content and messaging that marketing has supplied for them.

Content positions sales reps as go-to resources for information. Through content, sales reps are able to tell prospects something that they didn’t already know. As a result, customers feel less like they are being closed and more like they are being helped.

5. They’re getting social, and they’re budgeting resources accordingly

We’re seeing more and more companies incorporate social selling into their budgets. This shift is happening because buyers are using social to learn about potential vendors. 84% of C-level/vice president executives use social media to support purchase decisions (IDC).

As a result of this shift to social, sales teams are thriving. Top social sellers have 45% more opportunities per quarter than social selling laggards (LinkedIn). Social sellers realize 66% greater quota attainment than those using traditional selling techniques (Sales Benchmark Index).

So, what are you waiting for?

6. They’re relying on new technologies to support contextual engagement

In the past, sales reps relied on one-size-fits-all messaging. Sure, there were some signs of personalization (e.g. changing the prospect’s name in an email). But generally speaking, sales reps didn’t tailor their messaging to fit the customer’s situation.

Now, through technologies like CRM and marketing automation, sales reps have more information about their customers. They know what content their buyers have read. They know how their buyers found their website. They know whether a buyer thought about signing up for a demo, but didn’t fill out the form.

Good sales leaders are teaching reps how to interpret a buyer’s digital footprint and turn that knowledge into meaningful interactions.

7. They’ve updated their key metrics

Inside sales metrics have revolved around the phone call for decades. How many calls did a sales rep make? How many of those calls became an opportunity? How many calls became a deal?

As the effectiveness of cold calling wanes, inside sales leaders must update their metrics. Instead of focusing on call volume, sales leaders need to concentrate on engagement metrics. They need to ask themselves how they can measure salespeople’s multi-channel interactions with buyers. Each channel (email, phone, and social) must have its own set of metrics.

8. They have the support from other departments, especially marketing and sales enablement

Most marketing departments have already experienced the digital revolution. They understand how to adapt to the modern buyer, and their tribal knowledge is an excellent resource for sales teams. As Peter O’Neill of Forrester writes:

Making the Change

Making a change in your sales program can be tricky because it requires aligning budgets, departments, and employee mindset. But prospects are changing how they look for solutions to their problems, and as long as buyers are evolving, sales organizations need to evolve with them.

The first step in this change is moving from a traditional inside sales strategy to a digital sales strategy. Good luck!

Want to Start Planning Your Digital Transformation?

Fill out this workbook, and learn how to plan your social selling program.

By now, you’ve recognized the problems with your current social media strategy, and you understand how employee advocacy can help you fix them. But how do you get started?

For many marketers, salespeople, and HR professionals, launching an employee advocacy program is completely foreign. Here are six things every organization should consider before starting your program.

Your Goals and Objectives

Before you can launch your employee advocacy program, you need to understand your objectives. You have to assess where where you want to go and how quickly you want to get there.

Some key questions to ask yourself are:

• Why are you implementing an employee advocacy program?
• What are your goals for your employee advocacy program?
• What’s your timeline?

Once you’ve implemented your employee advocacy program, you’ll measure the success of your program against your goals.

Your Employees’ Goals and Objectives

Few employees will know what employee advocacy is – let alone care about how employee advocacy benefits your company. They will, however, care about what’s in it for them.

The question you should ask yourself is this: Why would your employees want to use social media for professional reasons? The answer to that question will vary from department to department and from employee to employee.

Here are a few possibilities:

• Build your personal brand
• Attain your sales quota
• Position yourself as a thought leader
• Attract more top-notch talent to your company
• Feel in touch with the company’s strategy

Your Organizational Readiness

Okay, you understand why your company wants to run this program and why your employees want to participate. You have a vision for the future. To get there, you need to understand where you are right now.

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

• How does your company use social media now?
• Which departments are going to participate in your social media program? How do they currently use social media?
• Which tactics are working in those individual departments?
• How much training will program participants need?
• How mature is your employee advocacy program?
• Do you have a social media policy in place?

Your Content Strategy

Your employees can’t post to social media if they don’t have content, so it is crucial that you have ample amounts of content for them.

Where are you going to get that content?

Don’t fret. You don’t need to hire another content creator to generate more content for your program. Sure, your employees will want to share company-related content from time to time. But most of them will want a variety of content types (e.g. blog posts, infographics, videos, etc.) from a variety of sources.

Learn about the 4-1-1 rule and how it can help your employees on social media.

The composition of your employee advocacy team is crucial. There are eight key roles that you have to fill. Before you launch your program and implement your solution, make sure you assign roles and understand who’s doing what to whom.

What can employee advocacy platforms do for you? Short answer: a lot. To drive adoption and results, you need to take your time and select the right employee advocacy platform.

There are a lot of considerations when it comes to starting an employee advocacy program. If you know your goals for the program, identify your employees’ goals, understand how your company currently uses social, are producing and discovering content to educate your audience, have assigned clear roles, and have identified your platform requirements, then you’re on the right track for successfully launching your employee advocacy program.

Social media is a critical channel for your marketing and sales efforts. It builds awareness, credibility, and trust with buyers. It fosters authentic engagement. And it drives sales.

Unfortunately, branded social media accounts are struggling to reach their audiences. They currently reach only 6% of their followers, and the majority of people do not trust their ads.

But you know who buyers do trust? The people they know. That’s why companies are turning to employee advocacy. Your passionate and dedicated employees can represent your company on social media, share your marketing and sales messages, and reach more buyers.

But how do you go about finding employee advocates in your company? Here are five steps that you can take to recruit your first group of employees for your pilot program.

Step 1: Pick a department (or two) for your pilot program

Each department in your company has different needs. What your IT department cares about may not be the same as what your marketing department cares about.

To ensure the success of your program, limit your pilot to a department or two. That way, your content and messaging will be extremely targeted to the needs of a specific group.

Typically, it is best to start with the departments that are accustomed to sharing your company’s messages. These might include:

• Marketing
• Public relations
• Sales
• Business development

Step 2: Identify the employees who are active on social media

Once you have honed in on a department, it is time to find a group of employees who already understand social media. Your social media superstars will be the ones who are eager to adopt the program and stick with it.

74% of all internet users have a social media account. So, it should not be difficult to find employees who understand social media. The trick is to find employees who understand how to use social media for professional purposes. Here are a few strategies that you can use.

Speak to the department heads – Typically, your department heads will know which team members are power users of social media.

These employees are the ones who talk about how many followers they have. They always bring up Twitter and LinkedIn in meetings. They want the company to be more active on social media. You know the type.

Search for employees on Twitter – Chances are that many of your employees are already using social media for work purposes. After all, 50% of employees post messages about their employers on social media.

So, conduct a search on Twitter by typing your company’s name into the search bar, and see who is already advocating for your company.

Step 3: Keep the pilot program small

It’s tempting to launch a large-scale advocacy program. The more people who amplify your messages, the more people you reach.

But your program will suffer if you try to roll out a new program to a large group of employees. Your enormous program will be hard to manage, and adoption will be slow.

So, start small. Create your best practices. Show some early results. Then, expand.

Granted, the term “small” will depend on your company size. Generally speaking, you will want to start with 15-50 employees. This is a reasonable number of people for you to manage.

Step 4: Determine your incentives

How will you reward your employees for participating? Sure, many of your rising social media rock stars will be eager to participate, but it is also nice to reward their efforts. Here are a few ideas that you can use:

An ongoing rewards program – For every quarter a person participates, she receives a reward. It could be a t-shirt, a gift card, the latest headphones, etc.

A monetary incentive – For some employees, money talks.

Make sure that you set up clear expectations. From the start, indicate what will be required to receive that monetary bonus.

It can be a team goal. “If 90% of the pilot team posts 3 times per week over the course of 10 weeks, each pilot participant will receive $100.” Or it can be individual. “If you post 4 times per week during a financial quarter, you will receive $100.”

Company-wide recognition – Sometimes, acknowledging excellent service is enough for your employees. You can give your advocates a special thanks in a company-wide meeting. If you want to throw in a twist, you can award them small trophies or plaques.

Step 5: Personally invite employees to participate

Your participants should have to opt into your advocacy program. It should be something they want to do.

The easiest way to invite advocates to your pilot is by sending them a personalized invitation. Here’s a sample template that you can use:

It’s tempting to write an extremely long e-mail that explains every detail of your program. But your employees are busy. They will not read your e-mail if it gets too long. Keep it short, and focus on what’s in it for your employees.

Go out and Recruit!

Now that you have a better idea of how to recruit advocates, it’s time to go out and do it! Remember that many of your employees are already advocating for your company. You simply have to find them.

Good luck!

-Mark

Looking for more great tips?

Download Employee Advocacy 101: The Rise of the Employee Advocate.

Additional Links:

At first, your executive team may not see the value of investing in social selling. Sometimes, you need to spell it out for them. To do so, you need to understand the executives’ priorities. Then, you can help them connect the dots and position social selling in a way that addresses their concerns.

Let’s get started with your company’s five main executives.

Head of Sales

Here’s what’s always on the mind of a sales leader:

• Hit or exceed quota
• Get an accurate sales forecast
• Make customers successful
• Create a repeatable sales process
• Beat competition

Here’s what a sales leader needs to know about social selling:

• Show how social selling is a way to beat your competition. By reaching out to buyers before they approach your company, your sales team can start shaping buyers’ attitudes early on, and in turn, your reps will win more deals.
• Remind sales leaders that buyers are deleting emails and ignoring phone calls. By using social networks, your sales teams will stand a fighting chance of engaging their buyers.
• Highlight the ways in which technology will help you standardize best practices across your sales team.
• Use the statistics and research reports available to you. Highlight the fact that buyers use social media when making purchasing decisions.
• Note that sales teams are more likely to attain their sales quota when they use social media.

Helpful resources:

CMO

Here’s what’s always on the mind of a CMO:

• Strengthen relationships with customers
• Build alignment with the sales department
• Measure and prove marketing ROI
• Protect brand equity

And here are a few tips for connecting the dots:

• Put social sales into context. Identify ways that the marketing team has evolved over years through marketing automation, content marketing, and other initiatives. Then, position social selling as a way of modernizing the sales organization.
• Discuss social selling as an opportunity to bring marketing and sales into better alignment. For example, the program will empower the salespeople to generate their own leads, reducing pressure on marketing.
• Assure the CMO that the company’s brand will be protected. Highlight your plans for social media training, and indicate that marketing can supply content and sample messages to the sales team. Sales reps won’t be on their own.
• Explain that social selling will not compete with marketing’s social media strategy. Social media marketing speaks to large segments of buyers, while social selling offers an opportunity for personalized 1:1 interactions.
• Emphasize the idea that social selling will amplify marketing’s efforts. Sales will rely on marketing’s content to build relationships and check in with customers. Without paying for advertising, more people will see your company’s marketing assets.

Helpful resources:

CEO

These are a few of a CEO’s many concerns:

• Grow revenue
• Attract and retain talent
• Innovate and out-execute the competition
• Enhance collaboration in the organization

How to position social selling:

• Contextualize social selling as the key to top line growth. Supply statistics about how social selling is connected to revenue, and position it as the future of the modern sales organization.
• Highlight how social selling will separate you from your competition. Show how your competitors are relying on the old sales playbook, and contrast your competitors’ efforts with your plan.
• Talk about the performance improvements that you’ll gain from knowing exactly which selling tactics are working and which content items are resonating with your buyers.

Helpful resources: The Connection between Social Selling and Revenue

CFO

Here are the chief concerns of a CFO:

• Manage expenses
• Contain risk
• Plan for the future

How to connect the dots for the CFO:

• Present your developed business case.
• Use benchmark statistics to project how social selling will affect revenue. Your CFO will understand if you have to use estimates. Simply note where you are using estimates.

Helpful resources: 5 Tips for Justifying Your Social Selling Budget

CIO

Here are the chief concerns of a CIO:

• Control costs
• Innovate and evolve infrastructure for the future
• Manage technology security
• Make investments that support the company’s goals

Helpful Tips:

• Paint a picture of the future. Show how sales teams need software beyond the CRM. They need mobile and social media tools, as well.
• Get buy-in from your marketing team. CIOs are more willing to approve technology if several departments are interested in it.
• Indicate that an enterprise social selling platform is a three-in-one deal. By buying from one vendor, your team has a content discovery platform, a digital asset manager, and a social media tool.
• Answer any technical questions about security and integration by leveraging the knowledge of your preferred vendor.

Good Luck!

Getting buy-in for social selling is not always easy. But if you understand your stakeholders’ concerns and position social sales accordingly, you have a good chance of convincing your executive team.

Want Help Pitching Social Selling to Your Company?

Pitching your executives on social selling doesn’t have to be a tall task. Use this slide deck to help you navigate the process.

Social media is a great way to connect with your buyers and have two-way conversations with them. But have you noticed something? Much of the social selling advice is written about social selling in a North American context, when there are plenty of opportunities for social selling in other parts of the world.

So, how do you create a social selling strategy for a global sales team? What does a global social selling program look like? Unsure how to proceed? Let’s take a look at some of the steps needed to traverse geographic and linguistic borders with your sales team.

1. Define Your Target Markets

Before you launch a social selling program, you should define your target markets. You’ll need to ask yourself questions like:

• Where do the majority of our customers live?
• Where do the majority of our sales reps live?
• In what parts of the world are our sales reps already using social networks to engage buyers?
• Is there an opportunity for our product to expand into other regions of the world?
• Are we getting leads from other parts of the world?

And after asking yourself all those questions, you have one final question to ask: Which countries should we focus on?

Quick Tip: If your company is new to social selling, you may want to start your program with one region or country. It’s often easier to start small and then expand to other parts of the world.

2. Identify Local Experts

Once you’ve settled on your target markets, you’ll want to identify local subject matter experts. These people will be able to advise you on topics like:

• Your customers’ buying behavior
• Cultural and linguistic differences
• Social media trends in different regions

Quick Tip: These local experts often make good content curators for your sales team. They’ll be able to sift through blog posts, infographics, and videos, identifying which pieces of content will resonate in their respective regions.

3. Choose Languages for Your Content Strategy

Every social selling program runs on content. If you choose to target markets where several languages are spoken, you’ll have a few decisions to make. For example:

• Will you use one language as your default language?
• Will you translate your original content into other languages?
• Will you curate third-party content in multiple languages for your team?

As you plan your strategy, remember that people enjoy reading in their native language. In fact, nine out of 10 European internet users like to browse in their native language. So, unless your target markets all speak the same language, it’s wise to plan on a multilingual content strategy.

But beware: While it’s tempting to rely on online tools like Google Translator, those tools will prove inadequate. They will not provide you with the nuance needed to engage your audiences in their native languages. (Take it from a former Spanish instructor. You can tell when someone used an online translator.)

4. Think through Cultural Differences

Language is only one consideration for a global content and social selling strategy. Another involves cultural differences. Once again, this is where your local experts can come in handy. They can explain cultural nuances associated with colors, holidays, superstitions, religions, sports, fiscal years, and more.

Sure, some cultural differences are common sense. You don’t want to send content about America’s Fourth of July to a British sales team. But there are more subtle things to consider, as well. For example, many cultures associate black with death, but in China, white is more commonly associated with death. In Mexico, green is a source of national pride, while green can be seen as a faux pas in Indonesia.

Heck, even seemingly innocuous phrases can be problematic. Let’s say that your sales reps want to share a piece of content that says, “In October, companies lock in their budgets for the next fiscal year.” That would make sense, right? Well, it makes sense to an American audience, but in Australia, the fiscal year typically starts on July 1. Why would Australians lock in their budget in October?

5. Choose Your Social Networks for Each Market

Identify the most relevant social networks in each country that you’re targeting, and create best practices for each sales team in its respective country.

Choosing your networks should involve a combination of research, gut instinct, and conversations with customers. For example, let’s say that you are thinking about using WhatsApp in some of your target markets. You could start by doing research on where WhatsApp is popular. Here’s a chart from Statista:

Given these statistics, WhatsApp might not be the best idea in the United States, but if you’re doing business in Hong Kong, it could be a terrific idea.

That research is just the starting point. Next, you need to determine whether your customers would want to engage salespeople on WhatsApp. If you’re an experienced WhatsApp user, you might have a hunch, but you should also confirm your gut instinct by talking to customers. Ask them where they spend their time, and inquire about professional appropriateness. Under what circumstances would buyers want to interact with salespeople on WhatsApp? Under what circumstances would it be creepy? Finally, use that information to establish WhatsApp best practices with your sales team.

6. Choose Technology That Supports Global Social Selling

Technology is one of the biggest challenges that any domestic or global social selling program faces. Without an infrastructure in place, sales organizations struggle to share messaging and content with their reps, promote adoption of social, standardize best practices across the team, and measure results.

When thinking about a platform for global social selling, here are a few questions to ask:

• Does this platform integrate with a variety of social networks that our global customers can use?
• Does this platform work on both Android and iOS devices?
• Does this platform allow us to organize sales reps by geographies?
• Can we provide our sales reps with messaging and target it towards specific regions?
• Can we build a multilingual content library using this tool and segment that library according to geographies?

Are You Ready to Expand Your Social Selling Program?

Social selling may start as a regional or domestic activity, but once one team sees success with social, the rest of your sales organization will want to take part. And that will require you to think differently about your social selling program. In this post, we’ve covered a few of the key questions that you’ll have to answer as you build a global social sales program. Good luck!

Want to learn more about planning your social selling program? Check out our workbook:

Your colleague leans over and asks you if you would like to grab a coffee.

When you answer, what runs through your head? Do you think about…

• How much you want to procrastinate?
• Whether your boss would approve of your break?
• What time of day it is?
• What you have to do after you drink that cup of joe?

In this blog post, I’ll teach you the questions that you should ask so that you can lifehack your coffee intake.

First and foremost, should you be worried about your health?

Over the years, coffee has received a bad rap. However, according to Dr. Rob van Dam of Harvard University, you don’t have to worry…

…if you are not drinking more than 6 cups of joe a day. Drinking as many as 6 cups of coffee is not associated with an increased risk of death–much less an increased risk of death from cancer or cardiovascular disease.

With that little disclaimer out of the way, let’s lifehack your caffeinated beverage intake!

What time of day is it?

During the day, there are certain times when we are naturally perky. Our bodies produce a hormone called cortisol, which makes us feel awake and alert.

According to Steven Miller, Ph.D., our bodies naturally produce cortisol:

• Between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.
• Between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m.
• Between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.

In order to lifehack your coffee intake, you do not want to drink your coffee while your body is producing cortisol because it will diminish the effects of your coffee intake. Instead, you want to drink coffee after your cortisol levels have dropped.

Specifically, you want to drink your coffee:

• Between 9:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.
• Between 1:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m.

To help you out, ILoveCoffee has created an infographic:

What type of work should you do after you drink a cup of coffee?

In a previous post, I explained why alcohol helps boost your creativity. To recap, alcohol helps your brain relax. It enables you to stop being hyper-rational, and it allows you to see new connections. For instance, you want to drink alcohol before brainstorming activities.

Coffee, unlike alcohol, is a stimulant, and the caffeine does not help your brain relax. Instead, it stops your brain from slowing down, which makes creativite endeavors difficult. But fear not! Caffeine is good for other types of activities!

When your brain is in overdrive, you want to do tasks that seem second-nature to you. Caffeine can help you if you are tired and working on tasks that are very straightforward and don’t require a lot of abstract thinking. In other words, you want to work on data entry, simple arithmetic, or line editing (if that is easy for you).

Conclusions

Generally speaking, you want to drink your coffee:

• Between 9:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.
• Between 1:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m.

When your caffeine high kicks in, you want to start work on simple tasks. Perhaps some data entry. Some simple arithmetic. Creating charts for a power point presentation – anything that is easy for you or has a set workflow.

Good luck riding that caffeine high!

-Mark

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Image credit: Michael Dales

Employee advocacy programs can be anxiety-producing for legal teams. What’s that? Employees will be posting on social media on behalf of the company? *Sweaty palms* Legal won’t be able to approve every single word tweeted by the advocates? *Sweaty forehead and heart palpitations*

Nevertheless, many companies, including those in highly regulated industries, manage to launch successful employee advocacy programs. The trick? Those companies work with legal to set the rules of compliance at the outset. They establish a structure to ensure compliance, monitor the program’s progress, and create contingencies plans for when something needs deeper review.

Here are eight steps you can take to mollify the legal team’s worries and win their support for your employee advocacy program. Good luck!

Tie Your Program to Organizational Goals

To gain support from legal (and other departments, too), you’ll need to show how employee advocacy supports the larger goals of your organization. Educate the legal team on the strategy behind your proposal.

For example, many executives believe in the potential of digital to improve their relationships with customers. As a result, digital transformation initiatives have become top priorities for many companies, and your employee advocacy program could be seen as a way of improving customer relationships online.

Get Buy-in from Company Leadership

As the leader of the employee advocacy program, it is your job convince and convert your top leadership to buy into your plan. A visible champion of your program signals to the rest of the company, including legal, that your social business initiatives are critical to the success of your company.

Educate Your Legal Team on Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is a relatively new concept for many people at your company. Your legal team is not an exception. (In fact, lawyers might think that employee advocacy has something to do with advocating for the rights of employees.) So, don’t just throw a new term like “employee advocacy” at them without explanation.

Define employee advocacy for them. Walk them through what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And don’t forget to show them what best practices will look like.

Loop Them in Early (but Not too Early)

Timing is hard. If you include the legal team too early, they’ll nix the project before it starts. (“Too much risk.”) If you include the legal team too late, they’ll be upset and nix the project after you’ve put in all that work. (“Not enough time to review and approve the program.”) And if they don’t nix your project, you’ll miss out on an opportunity to learn from them about the risks and regulations in your industry.

So, when is a good time to loop in legal? While the answer varies from company to company, many of our customers approach legal when they’ve met these three criteria:

• They have a defined business case
• They are able to tie employee advocacy to organizational goals
• They have an executive sponsor

Show Them How You’re Mitigating Risk

Have a risk management plan, and then, walk the legal team through the ways you’re working to reduce risk. If you’re planning on asking your marketing team to curate content and write sample messages, indicate that. If your advocates will use a dedicated hashtag to tweet about company-related material, let the legal team know.

Collaborate with Legal on Your Social Media Policy

Your legal team understands your company’s risk and regulatory environment, so it’s important to solicit their input when designing your social media policy. As you design your policy, keep in mind that some of the risks will be specific to your industry. For example, in financial services, a customer’s privacy is paramount. It might be cool to see a celebrity at a bank, but employees should not be tweeting about it or snapping videos for Snapchat.

You’ll be tempted to write a long list of don’t statements. (“Don’t do this! Don’t do that!”) But avoid that temptation. Try, instead, to be empowering. Ultimately, your goal is to build a governance plan for your employee advocacy program that protects your brand and enables your employees to be great advocates who can achieve their business goals through social.

So, try to include positive language. For example, instead of including a rule like, “Don’t pick fights on social media,” you could write, “Be a good online citizen” or “Ponder before you post.” Both of those options express the etiquette and mentality required for employee advocacy, but they do not dwell on the negative.

Train Your Advocates

Training is a great way to reduce risk. A good training program will not only bring to life the company’s social media policy, but it will also be attuned to the individual needs of your advocates.

Recognize that all employees will not have the same level of understanding of social media, and even the socially savvy advocates may not have a clear understanding of best practices for using social for business.

Designate a Legal Liaison

Appoint someone to meet with the legal department on a regular basis. It could be monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly. During these meetings, legal should indicate if anything has changed that could affect your employee advocacy program. (Perhaps governmental regulations have changed.)

If changes have occurred, the liaison should work with legal to propose a strategy and a timeline for dealing with the changes. The liaison will be responsible for announcing the changes to the program’s stakeholders and participants in a way that will stick (perhaps during a training session with free pizza – just a suggestion).

What Have You Done to Secure Legal’s Approval?

The tips above will get legal to say “yes” to your program, while limiting the friction between your team and their team. However, this list is not exhaustive. So, I’d like to hear from you. What have you done to foster a relationship with your legal department?

Leave a comment below.

If you’re looking for more resources, here are a few that can help:

There are plenty of blog posts about the benefits of employee advocacy for your enterprise. And there’s no shortage of content about getting executive buy-in for your advocacy program either.

But what about getting employee buy-in? Without the support of your employees, your advocacy program will never take off, you will miss your KPIs, and your program will belly flop. So, what’s a marketer supposed to do? How do you frame employee advocacy for your employees?

Simple. You answer one key question, which is this: What’s in it for your employees (not for your company)? Let’s take a look at the different ways to position advocacy with your employees.

Reason 0: Build The Company’s Brand

When marketers try to pitch employee advocacy to their employees, many lead with this particular line of reasoning. They try to get their colleagues excited about amplifying the brand’s message, and they are disappointed when their co-workers aren’t as excited as they are.

Unfortunately, the “Help us increase awareness!” plea will work only with a very small section of your workforce – marketers, a couple members of the C-suite, and a small percentage of employees who strongly identify with your brand.

Generally speaking, if you want to get your employees excited about social media, stay clear of this reason.

Reason 1: Expand Professional Network

If you’re going to lead with something, lead with the idea of network expansion. This is the number one benefit of employee advocacy for your advocates:

Today, a successful professional network is global. Attending local meet-ups or grabbing a coffee seems quaint, if not impossible. To develop solid professional relationships, it has become increasingly important to master the nuances of virtual networking, and, as many employees know, social media is a critical nexus in that network.

Reason 2: Keep up with Industry Trends

When marketers run employee advocacy programs, they tend to circulate company-created content, and that’s it. As a result, they are doing employees a huge disservice. While company-created content can help educate the workforce about internal campaigns and news, employees ultimately want to extend their field of knowledge beyond the organization and learn about the industry.

In part, this means having access to a platform that allows employees to read a wide variety of content from around the web. But it also means engaging in social listening (e.g. following industry-specific conversations through hashtags on Twitter). By helping your colleagues connect with content and communities, you will get them excited about using social media, and they will bring their newfound knowledge back to the company.

Reason 3: Build Digital Literacy

With so much talk about digital transformation, feeling “current” and “with the times” is important for employees, and advocacy is a great way for employees to build their digital literacy on social media. This is especially true if your program includes social media training.

You might be thinking, Only some of my employees will be interested in building their digital literacy. Probably the ones who didn’t grow up with social media. I mean, why would millennials need to build social skills? They already know how to use it.

Well, in fact, millennials care a lot about building their social literacy. Some see it as a competitive advantage on the job market. Others understand how to use social for personal reasons. They may know how to get the lighting just right when photographing a $50 entree at a chic restaurant, but they do not understand how to harness social networks for professional purposes.

The “professional purposes” part is crucial. Crying, “Build your digital literacy!” from the rooftops won’t attract employees. But when you frame social media in the context of someone’s professional duties, it’s much more intriguing.

So, show your employees how social media skills can help them sell more or help them be a better manager.

When we talk about networking on social media, we typically focus on networking outside one’s own company. However, social media offers advocates the opportunity to network within one’s own company, as well.

Let’s say that you work for a company with 10,000 employees, who are scattered across the globe. Chances are that you won’t meet most of them in a face-to-face setting, but through social media, you can start to build bridges within your organization, connecting with your colleagues who work in other departments and in other offices. In so doing, you build your reputation and visibility within your company, making you a strong contender for that promotion or for a secondment opportunity.

Every employee advocacy program has its marketing goals, but don’t lose sight of your employees’ goals. Those are equally as important, if not more important, because your program’s success is contingent on whether or not you meet your employees’ goals and expectations. Without program adoption, you won’t see results.

If you want to learn more about how Trapit can help with your employee advocacy program, contact us. We’d love to speak with you.