Many companies are focused on building social selling programs for their sales teams. Somewhere along the way, channel partners have been forgotten. Like your company’s sales team, your partners’ reps are struggling to adapt to modern buyers, who prefer to do research on their own across digital channels, and they could use your support.

In today’s buying environment, any effective channel strategy requires a strong social selling strategy. As you know, managing your channel takes a lot of strategizing, collaborating, and planning – both internally and across your ecosystem. To help you out, we created a short list of things to consider when enabling your channel partners on social media.

Educate Partners on Social Selling Best Practices

If you’ve tried to launch a social selling program at your company, you know that not all of your sales reps are naturals at social selling. The same could be said of the sales reps at partner companies. To ensure that your partner reps are motivated and effective, it’s important to offer social media training that covers questions like:

• How will social selling help channel sales reps sell more?
• How is social media used in sales?
• How do you create outstanding Twitter and LinkedIn profiles?
• How do you write a good tweet or a good LinkedIn status update?
• How do you research buyers on social networks?
• How should channel reps interact with the vendor on social?

By continuously educating your channel partners, they’ll stay abreast of the latest trends on social, and in turn, they will drive more revenue for your business. Plus, you’ll show that you care about them. Your interest in their success goes a long way, especially at a time when 50% of channel partners feel neglected by their vendor partners.

Update Your Channel Partners on the Market

In addition to educating your partners on social selling best practices, don’t forget to help your channel partners understand the market. To be effective at their jobs, channel sales reps must understand the market dynamics, news, trends, growth drivers, M&A activity, etc.

Sure, the best reps will self-educate. But many won’t. So, it’s worth the effort to supply partner reps with content that provides insights about your industry and market.

Share Content and Messaging with Your Channel Partners

Content can transform sales reps. Content helps sales reps build rapport with buyers and establish themselves as trusted advisors. Without infographics, blog posts, white papers, videos, and podcasts, channel sales reps will struggle to amplify your brand, generate awareness, grab buyers’ attention, and create leads.

Remember: Your distributors are busy. It’s likely that many work with multiple partners. They can’t possibly create their own content. They need you to support them with clear, concise content and messaging. Here are a few things to consider:

Third-Party Content:89% of marketers agree that third-party content is perceived as more credible than branded content. By supplying your channel partners with third-party content (e.g. industry insights) to share on social, channel reps can appear more credible. They don’t look as biased because they show that they aren’t simply parroting a vendor’s messaging.

Branded Content: Of course, you don’t want all your content to be third-party content. Some of your blog posts, infographics, videos, and podcasts should be branded, and they should talk about your company’s unique perspective on the market. Most social selling experts recommend an 80/20 split – 80% of the content shared should come from third parties, while 20% of the content shared should be branded.

Messaging: When reps start to use social media, they often don’t know what to write. That’s why your platform should allow you to write sample messages. By supplying your channel sales reps with sample tweets and LinkedIn updates, you make social media less intimidating, and you increase the likelihood that they will participate in your social selling initiatives.

Provide Best-of-Breed Technology

Choosing the right technology is one of the hardest tasks for a vendor. As you go about evaluating social selling platforms, look for the following items:

A Library of Third-Party Content: As we discussed above, third-party content is crucial for any social selling program. It helps build rapport and lends credibility to your reps. That’s why it’s important to find a social selling platform that provides a built-in library of content that your channel partners can share on social.

Messaging: The ability to provide sample messages for sales reps is important. While some will want to write their own tweets and LinkedIn updates, others will need some hand-holding. A good social selling platform will allow you to write sample messages for each social selling network.

Organize Reps into Teams: The needs of your channel partners will vary according to product lines, verticals, and geographies. What’s good for one channel partner might not work for another channel partner. So, it’s important to be able to divide your channel partners into teams. That way, they receive only the content and messaging that is relevant to them.

Empower the Reps: A good social selling solution will allow you to take off the training wheels and empower your channel reps to engage in social selling on their own. It’ll let them write their own messages. It’ll let them research their target accounts on social media and across the web. It’ll help them source some of their own content, as well.

Measure and Improve

When you start your channel social selling program, establish KPIs and measure your partner program’s success using the established metrics.

At the early stages of your program, consider using engagement metrics like the number of clicks. This type of KPI will show you how well your social selling tactics are working, and it will allow you to rejigger your content strategy. As your program matures, you’ll want to include revenue metrics like the number of leads generated or sales closed from the partner channel program.

While data can tell you a lot, it can’t tell you everything. So, don’t forget to check in with partners regularly. Find out if they have what they need, and address any issues promptly. Integrating the feedback provided by your partners can improve their social selling efforts, and it will build trust in the relationship. Open and active communication with partners ensures they remain engaged and interested in prioritizing the product or service.

Good Luck!

Social selling is one of the best ways to reach your modern buyers. Without being active on social, your partners will struggle to meet expectations. Conveying the advantages of social selling, providing training, and enabling partners with marketing materials, messaging, and other support will ensure a lasting, positive program.

Good luck! If you want to learn more about how Trapit can power your social selling program, contact us. We’d love to talk.

Posted byMark Bajus

As CIOs and CMOs of large enterprises know all too well, the adoption of enterprise technology is dismal. Convincing employees to embrace new work tools for internal communication, productivity, or tracking sales can be like pulling teeth. A study by MIT Sloan Management Review found that 63% of executives and managers think the pace of technology change in their organization is too slow, despite a consensus that “digital transformation” is critical for their organizations.

You’ve tried everything. Your IT department has chosen tools that are easy to use. You’ve offered a variety of training options for your teams based on their preferred way of working. You’ve celebrated wins and quick adoption. You’ve even implemented penalties.

And yet, your workforce has gone rogue. They’ve read about a great new messaging app, Slack, on TechCrunch, and they’re trying it out within small groups. They’re circumventing productivity tools you’ve spent a lot of money on because Google Docs is easier. They’re hacking together custom sales workflows because CRM tools today simply don’t meet their needs.

The consumerization of IT has made it easier for employees to pick and choose from the latest and greatest tools and create custom workspaces that work for them. It’s also led to a fragmented, broken environment for enterprise productivity.

Let’s face it – you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force him to drink. If business leaders want to transform their organizations and take part in the digital transformation they know is mission-critical, they have to let new work tool adoption occur naturally, from the bottom-up. That doesn’t mean you can’t standardize; it just means you give your employees greater ownership over the process of identifying, testing, and vetting the productivity tools your organization selects.

It’s no longer the IT department’s role to mandate the use of certain standardized work tools – their role must shift to one of curator.

Roping In The Wild West of Enterprise Tools

Giving up control may sound dangerous, but the challenges to adoption of workflow tools have a very real impact on your business. Your teams experience a very real productivity loss when they are coerced into using new systems, and for sales teams on the ground, time is quite literally money. Speed, control, and ease of use are most important for employees to do their work effectively and efficiently; and they know best what works and what doesn’t.

Just as the enterprise is moving to more open adoption software, which allows for better customization, it’s important to recognize that the tools should fit the company’s workflow and needs, not the other way around. Even if you have a champion for a system who is enthusiastic about bringing it to the company, the proof is in how it actually performs for other team members and their needs.

Most importantly, with this bottom-up approach, you improve adoption rates because individual employees have skin in the game. While a top-down approach can breed apathy and resentment, having ownership over which tools an organization adopts is motivating and empowering. Your employees have an opinion on how they like to work. Allowing them the freedom to lead the conversation motivates discussion, debate, and carefully formed opinions.

When you let your workforce bring in in the tools they’d like to use on a day-to-day basis, you also allow the users of the tools themselves to do the testing and vetting. Who better to test the functionalities of the latest CRM platform than your salespeople themselves? When the tools work for your team members, rest assured they will be used to get the job done better and more efficiently.

You also free up your IT department with this bottom-up approach. Your IT people are no longer tasked with identifying, researching, and vetting various enterprise work tools. Instead, they can focus their efforts on higher-value activities, like curating the best of what employees bring in, and ensuring security across the entire system.

There’s money to be saved, too. You might spend less on big enterprise software when tools like Gmail and Evernote are already the preferred platforms for most of your employees.

Training costs virtually disappear since individuals are teaching themselves and their colleagues how to use the tools they prefer. Forget expensive two-day long training seminars or time-consuming, soul-sucking webinars. Let the learning process happen more naturally, and fill in the gaps as you observe them.

From Top-Down to Bottom-Up Adoption

In summary – giving your employees ownership over which tools you use in your organization can save time and money, and your workforce can be happier, more productive, and committed. Especially in today’s workforce in which 80% of millennials say that workplace tech has an influence over their decision to take a new job, now is the time to give your employees the keys to the type of technology and tools they use day to day.

Organizations no longer have the option to adopt new technologies slowly. So what’s to lose?

Start by encouraging individuals to share their existing workflow tools. You might be surprised by how many are already cobbling together their own custom workspaces. Then, encourage some structure around the testing and vetting process. Maybe it’s a weekly team meeting in which teams come together to demo the tools they use for their colleagues, and debate the merits and drawbacks of each. You might even consider providing a modest budget for employees to test out new tools themselves – after all, you’re likely saving a lot of money in the expensive, overbuilt enterprise tools in the long-run.

Have your IT team on standby and ready to help with questions, training, and integration into your existing systems.

This is an exciting time. We’re facing a digital transformation in the way that organizations operate. It’s time to reflect the realities of that transformation internally.

If you’re considering an employee advocacy solution, chances are good that you’re familiar with the benefits. You know that you can reach more buyers, build trust with them, and keep your employees engaged.

The truth is that some platforms can help you achieve your goals better than others. That’s why you need to create a list of requirements before you start your search for a solution. To help you, we created a list of 20 questions that you should ask before purchasing an advocacy platform.

Organizing Your Team

Before you launch your program, you’ll want to organize your team. Consider the roles that you want your team members to fill, as well as how you will onboard your team.

1. What’s the onboarding experience like?

The onboarding experience can make or break the experience for your advocates. If the process is simple and intuitive, they will want to participate. But if it is convoluted and confusing, some team members may quit before they start. Choose a solution with minimal onboarding friction.

2. Can I assign roles and permissions?

For your program, you will need the following roles:

• An executive sponsor
• An internal project manager
• Content creators – people who create branded content
• Content curators – people who discover content, organize it, and write sample messages for your advocates
• Your employee advocates – the ambassadors who push the content to their social networks
• A metrics and analytics team – It could be your internal project manager or your content curation team or someone else

Your company’s online reputation is one of its most powerful assets. To protect your reputation, you may not want all your ambassadors creating content, finding content to share, and writing their own messages. So, roles and permissions are crucial for your business.

Find a solution that is flexible and can accommodate your specific content distribution workflow needs.

3. Can I organize my advocates into teams?

To keep track of your advocacy efforts, it can be useful to organize your advocates into teams. For instance, you might want to group your EMEA salespeople into one team and your Americas salespeople into another.

Why? The content that your EMEA sales team needs might be different from what your EMEA sales team needs. And, when it comes time to measure your performance, you will want to track how content is resonating with each team’s audience.

Publishing

4. To which social networks can I publish using this solution?

Where do you want your advocates to be active? LinkedIn? Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest? Google+? Can you share content to those networks – from the platform, without having to copy and paste?

5. Does this tool allow me to schedule posts ahead of time?

Our brains aren’t meant to jump back and forth between tasks. In fact, our productivity decreases by 40% when we try to do two things at once.

If your advocates have to sit at their desk and tweet every hour, they will be distracted and unproductive. But, if your advocates can sit down for 15 minutes and schedule a few posts for the day, they will have more time for other tasks.

6. Does this tool enable my curators to write sample messages for my advocates?

By providing sample messages, you can set your advocates’ minds at ease. They don’t have to fret about whether they are saying the right thing, on the right network.

Additionally, by providing example copy, you can unify your company’s messages across social channels, and, in turn, you can protect your brand.

Content

For employee advocacy to work, your team members need to be active on social media. An easy way to maintain an active presence is by sharing content related to their company and their industry.

7. Can my advocates easily share my company’s content (e.g. blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.)?

Your advocates can reach more people than your company can on its own. So, you want to make sure that they can easily amplify your company’s marketing and sales efforts.

Find out how you can add branded content to the platform and insert it into your workflow. Do you need RSS feeds? Do you have to copy and paste URLs? Is there a web browser bookmarklet?

8. Out of the box, does this tool provide a library of third-party content?

If you want your program to scale, you’re going to need a lot of content. It’s unlikely that your content creators will be able to create enough content internally. Don’t feel bad about it. 68% of marketers are unable to create enough content to satisfy their audience.

To remedy this problem, you will need to add other people’s content into the mix. And that’s a good thing. Study after study shows that buyers trust third-party content more than branded content.

When you evaluate solutions, it’s important to ask whether your advocates can share others’ content from the application – without having to copy and paste. Will your curators have to spend hours building a library of sources? Or does the solution provide a source library out-of-the-box?

9. Does the solution offer content personalization capabilities?

The internet has a lot of content. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will make your job a lot easier. A good platform can help you sift through all the content on the web – by learning what you like and what you don’t like.

10. Does the solution have filtering capabilities?

Want to block your team from sharing your competitors’ content? Not a problem. Want to prevent your team from sharing content with naughty words? Again, not a problem. A solution worth its salt will give you advanced filtering features for your content.

Analytics

To improve your program, you need to look at what’s working and what isn’t. One of the best ways to gauge your performance is through measurement.

11. What types of reports does the solution include?

Social media reports typically include stats like reach, clicks, and retweets. Does the solution provide that data?

Moreover, check to see how flexible the reports are. Can you organize the reports by network, by team, and in aggregate?

12. Who can see the reports?

Okay, this question piggy-backs off number two, but it is worth repeating. Who has permission to see the reports? Can your curators, project managers, and advocates see the reports?

For example, you may want your advocates to see their analytics for their posts. The numbers may motivate them to advocate harder. Alternatively, the data may provide insight into ways that they can improve their social sharing.

13. Will I be able to measure success based on these reports?

Think about your goals for your program. As you evaluate solutions, consider the type of reports that you’ll need to measure success and to improve your program. Will the out-of-box reports provide you with enough information?

Accessibility

14. Does the solution offer a mobile app?

You need to determine whether the platform is a web application, an iOs application, or an Android application. Will your team be able to easily access the application from your company’s computer system and/or mobile devices? If it is a web application, which browsers are supported?

Pricing, Support, and Training

15. Has the vendor provided me with transparent pricing?

Don’t allow yourself to be duped by the vendor. Make sure that you understand the pricing, and ensure that the vendor does not tack on additional charges at the end, right before you purchase the software.

16. How does the vendor handle technical support?

Does the vendor have priority case routing? What types of support does the vendor supply (e.g. phone support or e-mail support)? Where is the support team located and when are they available?

It’s technology; plan on running into snags and needing help occasionally. That said, you don’t want to run into too many problems. So, ask the vendor about its average system uptime during the last 12 months.

17. What is a typical timeline for implementation?

If you have done your homework, fast implementation should be a breeze. Ask your vendor how quickly you can get started with the their solution and what steps they will take to help you get onboarded.

18. What is the vendor’s training program like?

Is their training package included as part of your monthly subscription rate? How many training hours are included in the monthly fee? And who is eligible for the training? Curators? Advocates? Executive sponsors?

General Conclusions

19. Will my team be able to use this tool quickly and easily?

Is the interface intuitive? You don’t want to spend all your time onboarding your team, nor do you want to spend your time acting as internal tech support. Find out what resources your vendor has to support your team in their individual roles.

20. Does this solution give me the full functionality I need now – with room to grow?

Is there anything worse than buying something today and outgrowing the product in 6 months? Who wants to go through the long process of evaluating software – all over again? Who wants to go through the laborious process of training your team – all over again?

Good Luck!

We hope that you find the right solution for you! If you’d like to evaluate Trapit, request a 15-minute demo!

More Employee Advocacy Resources

Something is rotten in the state of sales. Buyers would rather get a root canal than speak with sales reps.

Okay, that might be a little dramatic. But, according to Forrester, 59% of buyers prefer to do research online and not interact with a sales rep as a primary source of research. That’s largely because sales reps spend their time pushing for a sales presentation – rather than helping buyers research and solve their problems.

That has to change. To make their numbers, sales teams need to undergo a cultural shift. Sales leaders and reps alike need to abandon the “This is the way we always did things” attitude. And they must replace it with a “My buyer has embraced the digital world, so, too, shall I” attitude.

For organizations with rigid policies and procedures, this can be scary. But here are a couple steps that you can take your sales team towards a social- and digital-friendly atmosphere.

Step #1: Understand and Assess Your Current Culture

To truly implement change, you have to assess where your team stands right now. More important, you must understand why those traditions and legacy cultural artifacts anchor the company.

Remember that change is a balancing act. If you don’t change, your competitors will, and your sales culture will hold you back from winning in the marketplace. Then again, if you completely remove your team’s cultural foundation, there will be pandemonium and resentment. A good sales leader, instead, needs to decide what traditions to keep in place, what to replace, and how quickly the change must happen.

To assess your current situation and to chart a path towards change, take a look at the image below. Think critically about your situation. Ask yourself, for instance, Are we trying to engage digital buyers in the same way that we engaged our long-standing customers? Is revenue suffering because of it?

Step #2: Decide Which Levers to Pull

Now that you have assessed your team’s culture and have an idea of where you need to go, it’s time to think about which levers you want to pull in order to initiate a cultural change. Here are a few ideas.

Leading from the Top

For sales teams to adapt to the digital buyer, they need visible and vocal champions. That means sales leaders need to embrace digital communications – not just in word, but in deed, as well.

Sales leaders need to actively partner with marketers to create a coherent experience for the buyer. The playbooks they create can’t center on cold calling and “pounce and pitch” tactics – tactics that used to work in pre-internet days. The sales leaders themselves need to use digital channels like Twitter and LinkedIn to build relationships with customers, and they need to encourage their sales team to do the same.

If such leaders don’t already exist in your organization, your company may need to consider hiring additional leadership. Here are a few more resources for your perusal:

Role Definitions

Perhaps it’s time to update your team’s job descriptions. Job descriptions, after all, give your sales reps a clear idea of what’s expected of them.

Many a sales rep is told that they need to master the “sales presentation.” It’s in their hiring docs. By singling out “sales presentations,” companies are giving sellers the wrong impression. They’re telling sellers that they need to pitch the product all the time, everywhere. Instead, they should be told to use content like blog posts, industry news, and reports to nurture, spark conversations, and add value throughout the buyer’s journey.

Hiring

When you find yourself stuck in a sales rut, ask yourself whether you’re hiring the right people. To change your culture, you may need to change your hiring practices and look for candidates with a different skill set. Golfing skills and a secret Rolodex of sales contacts are no longer necessary. What modern sellers need is the ability to educate buyers through online and offline conversations.

Make sure that your HR department understands that you want to hire, train, and reward people based on their online performance – in addition to their offline performance. Here are a few additional resources that may help:

Key Behaviors

Let’s face it. When you’re undergoing a digital transformation, there are many behaviors that you could change. Trying to change everything – all at once – will overwhelm your sales team.

As a sales leader, you need to select a few key behavioral changes that will have the greatest impact – both in terms of revenue and in terms of introducing digitization to your company. For example, as a starting point, you may want to ask your reps to research all of their prospects on LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as share content on those networks daily.

The Bottom Line

To sell to the digital customer requires sales teams to adopt new ways of working. They must adopt a digital culture – one that embraces both online and offline interactions, fosters a culture of learning, encourages sellers to help buyers, and promotes collaboration with marketing. Without both structural changes and behavioral changes, digital transformation will never take root, and companies will find themselves losing to their competition.

So, what are you waiting for?

Here at Trapit, we love social media. As a B2B company, we understand the struggle to be innovative and striking on platforms dominated by consumer brands. However, it’s not impossible to stand out, and we love to share our tips for maximizing impact on social sites. We have explored Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and recently gave you some pointers for tackling Instagram. Up next: Pinterest.

According to Mashable, Pinterest users have increased by more than 145% since the beginning of 2012. That’s a lot of users, so you don’t want to miss out on this audience. This post will give you some tips on how to use Pinterest, and then how to maxmize your results on this site.

How It Works

Okay, let’s start with some Pinterest basics.

1. Boards

On Pinterest, you create groups of related articles or images called boards, which you can share with others. When sharing boards, you can share full boards created by someone, or you can pick individual pieces of content and create your own board.

2. Liking and Repinning

You can “like” something so it will come up on your homepage. Or you can “repin” (a.k.a. “share”) the content right from the screen from which you are reading it. For instance, let’s say that you search for “content marketing.”

You’ll find a wide array of articles and infographics, and at the bottom of the post, you can choose to “like” or “repin” something.

If you click on an image or an article that someone already pinned, a new window will open, and from there, you can visit the original site on which the content is posted. Additionally, you can email or share the link to other social media platforms like Facebook.

3. Being Social

The third part of Pinterest is the social part. Like most other social media sites, you can connect with and follow people. You can comment on their content, begin conversations, all of the great things we love about social media.

Ideas for B2B Companies

Great! Now you have an idea about how to use Pinterest. So, how can it be helpful for a B2B company? Here are some ideas:

1. A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

Pinterest reminds me of Instagram and Twitter rolled into one. It is very visually oriented with short descriptive text. So, imagery is vital.

We’ve talked before about thinking outside of the box when creating images for your company. It wouldn’t be a blog post without reminding you that “People buy from People.” So show off your offices, employees, and retreats- anything that gives your company a face.

For some tips on how to show the human side of your company, click here.

2. Organize, Don’t Agonize – As Nancy Pelosi Would Say

The cool thing about boards on Pinterest is that they inherently help you organize. They are based on themes, or related topics. You are already creating tons of great content for your business- whitepapers, blogs, infographics, eBooks, videos, customer testimonials, charts/graphs, etc. So, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel! Each of these types of content can be a board on Pinterest, creating an easily navigable resource for your audience.

For example, Marketo has an entire board dedicated to the company’s infographics:

Another way you could organize your content is based on theme, as opposed to kind of content. If you are focusing on content curation or social selling, for example, you can create boards that are related to these topics.

If you’re feeling like you don’t have enough content in one or more of your boards, you can keep them private until you can beef them up. Then, once they are ready, you can make them public for others to see.

3. Beefing Up Your Boards

If you follow the Trapit blog,you’ve heard us talk about the importance of balancing both original and third-party curated content. Best practices say that a ratio of 4:1:1 should be used (share 4 pieces of third party content, to every 1 soft selling original piece of content, to every 1 call-to-action).

The same idea applies to Pinterest. You can incorporate both original content and content that others have posted to create an amplified message about your brand. According to a Pinerly Study, a call-to-action pin description sees an 80% increase in engagement.

With Trapit, you can discover and pin other people’s content, as well as share your own – all from one platform:

We know that building trust is an important component for businesses when using social media. By curating content you can help show thought leadership, become an outstanding resource, and increase belief in your brand.

4. Keywords are Key

Boards are linked to keywords. When someone searches for a topic, all the boards that are connected to those keywords will pop up. Therefore, you need to make sure you take some time to ensure your boards will be found.

Be sure that you include the link to the original source when you are posting your content. The goal is to drive traffic back to your website, so you don’t want to forget to do this. Think of Pinterest as a springboard to bring people to your site, and hopefully your product.

5. Be Social

Pinterest is a social media platform. Therefore, you need to be social. It is important to engage with others on this venue. Comment on great content, repin things that are interesting, fuel your connections through activity and presence. Be certain you grow your followers, because like with all other social sites–or life in general–it is about networking.

By following these 5 tips, hopefully you can increase your B2B presence on Pinterest.We never want you to be afraid to engage on as many social media platforms as possible, so if you have any questions, let us know! We’d be happy to help.

Until next time,

-Maura

Looking to get started on Pinterest?

Check out Trapit’s Pinterest publishing capabilities by requesting a demo!

Budget season is fast approaching, and it’s never easy, given that there are so many moving parts. You have to use revenue goals and work backwards, determining which technologies to implement and which ones you should ditch.

According to Forrester’s TechRadar for Q3 2016, social engagement and advocacy platforms are delivering significant business benefits for sales and marketing teams. That’s because many companies are struggling to engage their prospects and current customers, and social gives them another channel to use. By implementing social selling technology, companies are able to add value, shape the buyer’s journey, and create authentic interactions between sales reps and their buyers.

As companies look ahead to 2017, many of them are planning to add social selling to their budgets, but some are unsure how to allocate their funds. Here are a few suggestions.

Content Marketing

Content should be at the heart of your social selling program. As Jeff Marcoux of Microsoft put it, “Social sellers need to share a mix of company-owned and third-party external content to be effective and authentic.” Without content, your sales reps won’t have anything to post on social media, and without anything to post, your sales reps won’t be able to add value, attract buyers, and nurture their current customers.

Luckily, many marketing teams are already on board with content marketing. 89% of B2B organizations have a content marketing program in place. That’s good news. Your company may not need to add staff to accommodate your sales team’s content needs.

Make sure you partner with your marketing team to discuss the sales team’s content needs. Remember that your sales team’s needs may be slightly different from your marketing team’s needs. Here are a few things to consider:

• Develop your branded thought leadership content – Yes, your sales need product-related content, but that’s not the type of content that’s most effective on social media. Thought leadership content that educates and challenges the status quo will drive engagement.
• Leverage existing content – Repurpose, and recycle. Don’t let your existing content go to waste. Think about ways you can reuse it. For example, can you a long video and break it into shorter, more digestible videos?
• Sprinkle in third-party content – Your company should not create all the content that your reps share. Social selling experts recommend an 80/20 split: 80% from third parties and 20% from your company. If reps share only company content, they look like corporate parrots, but when they can engage with other people’s ideas, they look less biased and more trustworthy.
• Put content in a sales-friendly format – Curate content in a way that enables sales teams to easily discover, read, and distribute it through their social networks. Otherwise, your social selling program will never take off.

Technology

Like content, technology presents one of the biggest challenges for social selling teams. Some sales organizations try to cobble together makeshift solutions, where they use email and Google alerts to encourage reps to be active on social. In the end, the program fails because adoption never happens. Reps find the duct tape workflow to be too tedious, inefficient, and cumbersome.

When looking for a solution, here are some things you should avoid at all costs:

• Companies that offer little support for your social selling strategy – Many solution providers are great at selling software, but they don’t offer customers any help with training and strategy. As a result, you have a social selling platform, but you have little guidance on social selling best practices. That’s a recipe for disaster.
• Bring Your Own Content – As we said above, social selling needs content, and “good enough” solutions require marketers and sales teams to supply all their own content. They don’t offer a library of content that marketing and sales teams can use out of the box. Or, if they do offer a content solution, it often involves manually importing dozens of RSS feeds. Yuck.
• Lack of flexibility with segmentation – Different groups of sales reps should see different pieces of content. A good social selling platform allows you to segment your sales reps into teams based on geography, role, vertical, and more. That way, your sales reps are always getting the content that is right for them.
• Few social listening features – Social selling is about listening as much as it is about broadcasting. Without social listening features, your sales team won’t be able to understand their buyers and engage properly with them.
• Confusing interfaces – “Good enough” solutions put a lot of the onus on the individual sales rep to configure their instances and find content. Complete social selling platforms are user-friendly and intuitive, thus promoting program adoption among sales reps.

Staff

If you want social selling to work, you need to have a solid leader at the helm. Depending on the maturity of your program, you may or may not need to hire someone for this position.

At fledgling programs, it’s often best to start small and then expand. That means relying on existing resources. Think about which employee is primed to lead the program through its early stages. Perhaps you have a Director of Sales Enablement who is socially and digitally savvy. Or perhaps your Senior Social Media Marketing Manager is eager to launch a social selling program. Whatever the case may be, don’t assume that you need to spool up a VP of Social Selling job description, especially when you’re just starting out.

As your social selling program expands, revisit your staffing requirements. Identify the areas where your team could use more help. For example, do you need better executive support? More content creators? What about content curators? Do you have a training program in place? How’s your metrics team looking? Are you hiring sales reps who have social selling experience? You may need to hire more staff to fill in the gaps in your program.

All right, you’ve thought about your program requirements. You know where your company may need to spend money to launch its social selling program. Now, it’s time to go out and secure budget for 2017! Good luck!

The long-standing tension between marketing and sales has bled over into social. Nearly 80% of companies have not aligned their social selling strategies with their marketing’s social strategies. And that’s having negative repercussions on social selling programs.

In today’s complex buying environment, where large buying committees struggle to arrive at a consensus, building deeper relationships with customers is necessary. That’s why it’s more important than ever for sales and marketing teams to work together. In this post, we’ll discuss how the two departments can align their strategies along three poles: the customer, content, and messaging.

Let’s start with the customer…

1. The Customer

For any social program to work, it needs to be aligned to the customer. Which means that marketing needs to provide guidance on who the target customer is, and sales needs to provide feedback from the field. Depending on your organization chart, aligning around the customer might look like this:

1. Product marketing defines the problem that your company’s product or service solves. The product marketers articulate the primary messages, analyze who the target audience is, and figure out how to position the product in relationship to your competitors.

2. Product marketing communicates the problem, the target audience, and the positioning to both the demand generation and sales teams.

3. Product marketing, in conjunction with demand generation and sales leaders, researches where your customers hang out. Hint: If you have social media marketing and social selling programs, chances are good that your buyers are on social.

4. Sales and demand generation teams continuously give the product marketing team feedback on what’s working and what’s not working. Is the positioning resonating with buyers? Is your target customer interested in what you’re offering? Do you think that you need to change the profile of your ideal customer?

5. Similarly, customer success teams should continuously provide feedback, as well. For example, you might have an ideal customer profile in mind, but with time, you find that 89% of your customers who fit that profile churn out. That’s feedback that both marketing and sales teams need to know.

For more information on this topic, see Irene Sandler’s excellent post on LinkedIn.

2. Content

Successful social media marketing and social selling start with solid content marketing processes. Without content, brands and sales reps won’t be effective on social. They won’t be able to attract, educate, nurture, and persuade buyers. Here’s how you can go about aligning your social teams around content:

1. The content marketing team (or corporate communications team in some cases) meets with key stakeholders to assess the company’s content needs. The stakeholders might include product marketing, sales enablement, sales leaders, demand generation, and social media marketing managers.

2. Using the input from the different teams, the content marketing team creates a content calendar and a content strategy, which blends together thought leadership, product-related content, and third-party curated content.

3. Once the content calendar has been established, the social media marketing and social selling leaders discuss how they can promote the content on social. For example, they might brainstorm ways to break up a longer video into a shorter videos. Or, they might agree upon topics that would be good for third-party content curation.

4. The sales enablement leaders train the sales team on using content to engage buyers. Which social networks to use? How and when to use private messages like Twitter direct messages? What’s the right mix of company-created and third-party content?

Most importantly, the sales enablement team needs to persuade sales of the value of content. They need to help move the sales reps away from product-focused pitching to adding value through content.

5. Instead of simply waiting for leads to come to them, the sales teams go out and act as their own marketing teams. They share content on social and use it as a conversation starter.

6. The sales teams report back to the marketing teams about how the content performed in the wild. Which types of content (e.g. videos) worked well? Which types of content didn’t work well? How does the social selling team’s feedback align with the social media marketing team’s feedback? The marketing leaders listen, take notes, and then adjust the content marketing plan accordingly.

3. Messaging

When it comes to messaging, every company has different modalities. Some companies adhere to a “command and control” policy, where all wording must be pre-approved by marketing. If you’re in financial services or any other highly regulated industry, that might sound familiar.

Other companies might adhere to a suggestive modality, in which marketing suggests messaging and sales teams can personalize it.

Finally, there are some companies that are democratic, in which each individual crafts their own message.

As we look at the question of messaging alignment in this section, let’s focus on the suggestive modality because it’s the direction in which many companies are heading.

1. As we discussed in the “Customer” section at the top, the product marketing team is responsible for identifying the problem, the target audience, and the product’s position in relationship to the competitors. From there, the product team should work with the corporate communications team to establish some high-level messaging and branding.

2. Document the messaging and branding. Place the document in a central location so that sales, marketing, and customer service can easily find and refer back to.

3. Marketing and sales enablement leaders must teach the sales team the core values of your company’s brand. Give them examples of tweets and LinkedIn updates that would be “on brand,” and show them examples of what would be “off brand.” Consider having your sales reps practice writing tweets and LinkedIn updates, and review their work.

4. In your social selling platform, marketing can write sample tweets and LinkedIn updates for your sales team. This will be helpful especially for the beginner social sellers and time-strapped executives. But don’t limit your teams to your pre-written text. Make sure that your sales reps understand that they can make those messages their own. In so doing, they will sound less like a corporate robot, and they will sound more like themselves. Their authenticity will resonate with their buyers.

Get Going!

You might be thinking, What a bunch of hogwash. We don’t need to align our teams. Suit yourself. Until you align your social selling and social media marketing initiatives, your social selling program will never be effective. Your sales team will never fully understand how to use social to build deeper relationships with customers. And ultimately, that’s what social selling is all about.

For more tips on alignment, check out these posts from my colleague Kim Babcock:

Once sales reps take the leap and embrace social selling, a plethora of questions will spring up. They might wonder which networks they should use. They might wonder how often they post. And they’ll certainly wonder how to craft the perfect social post.

The first rule of crafting a social post is this: Don’t sound like a pushy sales rep. For some people, that’s easier said than done. That’s why we compiled a list of tips that will help reps write better social updates. Good luck!

1. Don’t Push Your Product and Services on Social

Adopting a new mindset is one of the biggest challenges for many sales reps. Nonetheless, sales reps must take this step if they want to thrive in today’s buyer-driven world. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the stats:

Here’s why people use social media while they’re at work:

No where does it say that people use social media to receive sales pitches. That begs the question: Why do sales reps continue to push their products and services on LinkedIn and Twitter? Why don’t reps give buyers what they want, namely pitch-free interactions?

2. Focus on Helping Others

Social media users can tell when you’re in it for yourself, and it irks them. Your buyers are looking to connect with people who want to get to know them, help them, and understand their business.

In fact, the book The Challenger Customer dives into this question. The CEB found that the best sales reps used social media to get into their accounts earlier:

More specifically, the best sales reps use social to:

• Connect with potential customers
• Share points of view valuable to customers
• Generate leads

In other words, social sellers aren’t just chatting with friends on Facebook or posting hilarious animated gifs from BuzzFeed. Instead, they are actively positioning themselves as resources of information on social media.

3. Be True to Who You Are

Your buyers are savvy folks, and they’ll see through your attempts to be someone you’re not on social media. Too often, sales reps find a social media “influencer” and try to copy that person’s style. And too often, that strategy fails them.

Why? Because the influencer’s personality does not match their own. If you don’t consider yourself a particularly funny person, you don’t need to be a Twitter comedian. If you don’t consider yourself a philosophical person, you don’t need to tweet quotes of the day and pithy bits of wisdom.

Take the time to think about who you are and craft an authentic version of yourself online.

4. The Batman Rule: Use Colloquialisms

Do you remember the Batman TV show from the 1960s? It was laden with exclamations like Zzonk! and Kapow!

Granted, few people say the words “Zzonk” and “Kapow” in real life. Nevertheless, there’s a lesson we can glean from those silly pop art exclamations: Don’t be afraid to use exclamations and colloquialisms.

When I say that, I don’t mean exclamations like, “This is the greatest offer ever!!!” That makes you look like an internet spammer.(See the first tip in this post.) Rather, I mean phrases like:

• OK!
• Y’all
• Dang!
• Geez!
• Ain’t
• Gotcha
• My bad

Colloquial terms help you sound more human and more approachable on social. Give ’em a try.

5. Use Sentence Fragments on Occasion

Ignore whatever your high school English teacher told you. On social media, it’s okay to use sentence fragments. Got it?

When you write only in complete sentences, your tweets and LinkedIn updates tend to sound academic and stilted – like your marketing department wrote them for you. Sentence fragments help you sound more conversational.

Here are a few phrases you can use and modify:

• Curious if anyone else has tried…
• Just sent my first tweet…
• Want to do…?
• Not surprising: CMOs need to be more active on social [Link to article]

6. Avoid Jargon and Flowery Language, Especially in Your LinkedIn Headline

As a sales rep, your LinkedIn headline should explain how you help your customers. Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, many sales reps struggle with this part.

Some sales reps try to stand out by using fashionable terms like “guru,” “ninja,” or “rockstar.” Those words make LinkedIn users roll their eyes.

Other sales reps try to sound too grandiose or too trendy, and they end up saying nothing. For example, their headline reads “Helping the tech sector generate revenue through big data.” Do you have any idea what that person does? I sure don’t.

Instead, be more direct. For example, you might write, “Fundraising consultant who helps major non-profits raise more money.” Do you have a pretty good idea of what this person does after reading that headline? I do!

When in doubt, run your headline by someone who doesn’t work for your company. Ask them if they understand how you help your buyers. If they can’t decipher what you do, go back to the drawing board.

If you’re new to social selling, consider reading your posts aloud before you post. It’ll give you an idea of how your posts will sound to other people. Ask yourself whether you sound like…

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, don’t hit send. Take the time to rewrite your post so that it sounds more natural – as if you were speaking them to someone.

So, there you have it – my tips for sounding less salesy on social. What are yours? Feel free to share your tips in the comments section below.

Social selling has become a mainstay of many B2B sales teams’ strategies – and for good reason.

Social selling leaders have 45% more opportunities per quarter than social selling laggards. Plus, B2B sellers who embrace social selling are 72% more likely to exceed quota than their peers who don’t.

There are many reasons why social sellers are more successful than their peers. One of those reasons has to do with the length of the sales cycle. The strategic use of social networks can accelerate sales conversations. In this post, we’ll discuss four ways that social selling can speed up the sales cycle, as well as help nurture high-quality prospects. Let’s dig in, shall we?

Social Selling Creates Better Conversations

Savvy social sellers do much more than broadcast marketing messages on social. They also listen closely to their prospects. They try to identify their buyers’ interests and business problems so that they can build stronger relationships and have better conversations, be they on social, through email, or on the phone.

As a starting point, here are a few areas you can research:

Keep in mind that social listening isn’t just about researching individuals; it also enables reps to tap into conversations about their industries.

By keeping up with the latest trends, reps will have more knowledge to share with prospects and have more productive, intelligent conversations, cutting down the time needed to “win over” potential customers. Customers, after all, want to learn something new about their business, which brings me to the next point…

Social Selling Warms Up Leads

Social selling can help you prime decision-makers at target accounts before sales conversations actually begin. Sales reps can do this by routinely sharing a mixture of educational industry content, as well as branded content, with their contacts on social.

By educating prospects and starting to build awareness about their company before hopping on the phone, reps can increase the likelihood that the account will close once the prospect reaches the decision-making stage.

Social Selling Helps You Identify More Decision-Makers

B2B sales are complex. Nowadays, 6.8 stakeholders are typically involved in the decision-making process, and unfortunately, most marketing department won’t be able to source all 6.8 names your sales team will need. That means sales reps have to shoulder the responsibility of identifying and engaging members of the buying committee.

For that, social networks are a godsend. Let’s say that you are trying to sell a CRM to Trapit. You’ll probably need buy-in from sales management, marketing management, and finance. To identify the key stakeholders at a target company, you can head to LinkedIn and search for the people you need to engage. In the top menu bar, for example, enter “Trapit Marketing.”

Which would yield results like this:

By using LinkedIn, you can start to identify who you need to contact and create a plan for engaging those people.

Social Selling Nurtures Current Customers

Social selling isn’t just about fostering relationships so that reps can build pipeline and close deals. It’s also about staying in touch with your current customer base with the goal of closing upsell and cross-sell deals faster.

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.

For a few ideas about how to use social networks for nurturing customers, see this post: Social Selling Doesn’t Stop at the Sale.

When these benefits of social selling work together, they have the effect of accelerating the sales cycle, enabling reps to engage buyers faster, warm them up speedily, and, ultimately, close deals more quickly. But be warned: Organizational buy-in for social sales is key for finding success. Without the support of your sales enablement, sales, and marketing teams, your deals can quickly derail.

Want to better understand the organizational harmony needed? There’s an ebook for that. You can download it here.

‘Tis the most wonderful time of the year!

It’s budget season. Around the world, sales leaders are looking at spreadsheets, scratching their heads, and wondering how their team will make their numbers.

In the era of the self-directed buyer, hitting revenue goals is no easy task.

According to SiriusDecisions, enterprise sales reps will need to source roughly 90% of their own leads. (Enterprise accounts are defined as companies with over 1,000 employees.)

Mid-market sales reps will have to source between 75% and 85% of their own leads. (Mid-market is defined as companies with 101 to 1,000 employees.)

SMB reps will have to find between 55% and 70% of their own leads.

So, where are those sales-sourced leads going to come from?

The Struggle to Engage Buyers Today

To state the obvious: For salespeople to hit their numbers, they need to have conversations with buyers. They need to spark engagement. But buyers are becoming increasingly difficult to reach.

As sales leaders know, buyers don’t answer phone calls. An academic study found that it takes 330 calls to set one appointment. So, if setting an appointment is the goal of your outbound phone calls, your tactics are effective only 0.3% of the time. Ouch.

To add insult to injury, not only are people ignoring your sales calls; they’re deleting your sales emails. The average email open rate hovers around 20%, meaning that 80% of your emails are deleted or land in someone’s spam folder.

Think about the implications of that statistic. If only 20% of your emails are being opened, how many of your emails are actually getting responses? I assure you that it’s less than 20%.

Social Selling: Your Best Option for Engaging Buyers in the Digital Age

To recap, buyers are ignoring your salespeople’s phone calls, and they’re deleting emails. Where does that leave you?

You have two options.

Option 1: Play the numbers game. Make thousands of phone calls and send thousands of emails. Keep doing that until you secure enough appointments.

Option 2: Change your approach, and go where your buyers are.

Hint: They’re on social media. Did you know that…

That’s why social selling is table stakes at this point.

But…

Here’s the catch. Don’t think that your inside sales team can transfer traditional inside sales tactics to social media. Social selling requires a different mentality.

Here’s a summary of how a traditional inside sales approach differs from a social selling approach to inside sales.

As with traditional inside sales methods, the ultimate goal of social selling is to build pipeline and grow revenue. With social selling, however, your approach is different. Social selling requires a thoughtful outreach plan, a strong content strategy, and a desire to educate.

Ready to Learn More about Social Selling?

Maybe you agree that social selling is a must-have for inside sales teams. Maybe you’re still skeptical. Regardless, here are three resources that can help you out: