3 Key Types of Metrics for Your Social Selling Program

You’re about to launch your social selling program. You want it to be successful. But there’s one problem: you don’t know how you will measure success.

When it comes to social selling programs, businesses can measure their progress in several ways. Below, you’ll find three types of metrics. Choose the metrics that make the most sense for your objectives, your role, and the maturity of your program.

Training Metrics

It’s easy to get ahead of ourselves when it comes to launching a program. We want to start as soon as possible, and we forget to take the time to build our foundation.

Training should be a key part of any social selling program. Unless you train your team, you will never meet your program objectives.

Here are several ways that you can measure training:

  • Average number of training hours
  • Average time to competence
  • Percentage of employees who are certified
  • Number of training sessions held for employees
  • Percentage of employees above competence
  • Percentage of employees below competence

Tactical Metrics

Another way to measure your social media efforts is through tactical metrics. To state the obvious, these measurements help you determine whether your tactics are working.

Are your salespeople’s posts engaging their followers? Are people clicking on their tweets? Are they retweeting your content?

Many of these metrics are useful for your curators – the people who have to write compelling messages for your sales team. These number will help your curators optimize your program going forward.

Here are different tactical metrics that you can use for the three major social networks.

LinkedIn

  • Number of posts per day
  • Number of followers
  • Number of comments, likes, and shares
  • Number of link clicks

Twitter

  • Number of posts per day
  • Number of followers
  • Number of @ mentions
  • Number of retweets
  • Number of lists each salesperson is listed in
  • Number of link clicks
  • Reach – How many people saw your post?

Facebook

  • Number of posts per day
  • Number of followers
  • Number of likes
  • Number of shares
  • Number of comments
  • Number of link clicks
  • Reach – How many people saw your post?

A few words of advice:

1. Number of posts: The number of posts per day will vary by network. On LinkedIn and Facebook, you want to post between once and twice each day. On Twitter, you can post between 10-12 times per day without annoying your followers.

2. Number of comments: Some people will comment on articles – just to comment on articles. Other people will comment only if they are prompted by a question or a specific call-to-action – something along the lines of, “Let me know what you think.” If you are seeking commentary, play around with different ways of soliciting remarks.

3. Number of link clicks: If you are trying to get people to read your content, there are many factors to consider: When you post, your article’s headline, whether you included a picture, whether you included a shortened link, where that link appeared in the post, the type of content, and the social network that your content appeared on.

Experiment with different factors and figure out what works best for your audience.

Sales Funnel Metrics

With sales funnel metrics, you’re trying to see how your program influences your sales funnel. For example, are you generating new leads? More pipeline?

Sales funnel metrics are focused on money. These are the types of results that executives care about. But funnel metrics should not be the only numbers you analyze. Without strong tactics, you’ll never be able to influence your sales funnel.

Here’s a short list of some of the sales funnel metrics you can analyze:

  • Number of new leads generated from social media/your social selling team
  • Number of social media touches with leads, pipeline, and customers
  • $ of pipeline generated from social selling activities
  • $ of revenue generated from social selling activities
  • The average contract value of your deals generated from social selling
  • Sales cycle – The average amount of time that it takes for your social selling team to close a deal

A few words of advice:

1. Social sellers vs. non-social sellers: If you have a large sales team, you may want to run a pilot before you roll out a social selling program to the entire sales organization. Compare the sales funnel metrics for the salespeople who are using social media to those who are not. See, for example, if your social media team has a shorter sales cycle than your traditional team.

2. Be realistic: There isn’t a magic silver bullet in the sales world. If your current sales cycle is 6 months, don’t expect to suddenly close deals in one week – simply because you launched a new program.

3. Be patient: It’s going to take your team some time to adjust to their new sales mentality. Being helpful and building relationships take time. It’s much easier to deliver cold pitches and hope for the best. But in the end, your patience and hard work will pay off, and you will generate more revenue.

Final Words on Metrics…

We looked at one small facet of a social selling program: metrics. What you measure will depend on:

  1. Your role
  2. Your program’s maturity

HR teams will care about training metrics. Curators and social media managers will be concerned with tactical metrics. And your executive sponsor will be interested in sales funnel metrics.

In addition, the maturity of your program will be an important factor. How long has your program been running?

New social selling teams with long sales cycles may not see revenue growth for a few months. So, looking at revenue may not be the wisest move straight away. Instead, you may want to look at pipeline growth first, or you may want to focus on standardizing tactics across your team.

Bear in mind that, while metrics are an extremely important component of any social selling program, it’s not the only component. All sales programs involve many moving parts. To keep track of them all, we created a workbook. It outlines all the components you need for a successful launch.

3 Ideas for Training Novice Employee Advocates and Social Sellers

Using social media for professional purposes is not innate. It’s a skill that many of us have to learn. Before you launch your social selling and employee advocacy programs, offer your participants some training hours.

It might seem like a hassle, but training will only improve your program. In fact, sales reps who are trained are more likely to stick with their program. And where there is adoption, there are also results.

Here are three ideas that you can use to train your team. These activities are meant to be done in a group setting – either virtually or in person. Adjust them according to your needs.

ACTIVITY 1: TWITTER PROFILE MAKEOVERS

Objective

Employees will be able to:

  • Identify the key components of a Twitter profile.
  • Leverage those key components to promote their professional brand and their affiliation with their company.

The Activity

Show your employees the following Twitter profile (or a similar one):

Have your team list everything that is wrong with this Twitter profile. Sometimes, it’s better to critique a fictional account before employees tackle their own accounts or critique their colleagues’ accounts.

What to Look for

Make sure your employees critique the following items:

  • Twitter username
  • Profile picture
  • Biography
  • Cover photo
  • Tweets

Follow-up

Now that your team has identified the problems, it is time to fix them. Ask your team members to do the following items:

  1. Suggest a new Twitter username.
  2. Find a good profile picture.
  3. Write a bio for the “Muffin Man” who works at your company.
  4. Give ideas for what would be a good cover photo.
  5. Write the Muffin Man’s first tweets.

If you need some help, check out our beginner’s guide to Twitter.

Application

Your team members have found the missteps in a fictional account, and they have built a fictional online presence. Now, it’s time for your advocates and sales reps to create their own accounts.

Give your advocates some time to write their profiles (or adjust their current ones). Then, split the employees into groups, and have other employees provide constructive feedback on their profiles.

ACTIVITY 2: TO FEED THE INTERNET TROLLS?

Objective

Employees will be able to:

  • Apply your company’s social media policy to real-life situations.
  • Develop skills needed to respond to disgruntled customers.

The Activity

Your employee advocates and social selling team are rummaging through LinkedIn groups. They come across the following comment in a thread:

Ask your employees how they would respond to the message.

What to Look for

This is your opportunity to standardize best practices across the company. Have answers to the following questions:

  • What does your social media policy say about these situations?
  • Does your company have a designated resource who should handle these problems? Are your employees aware of that resource?
  • Does your company want its employee advocates and sales reps to engage with these people? If so, how quickly should they respond to such complaints?
  • Do your employees understand when they should stop engaging with unhappy customers?

Follow-up

Split your employees into two groups: company representatives and belligerent customers.

Have your company representatives compose a response to the critical LinkedIn post. Then, have your belligerent customers respond. Continue the back-and-forth.

If you do want your employees to respond to upset customers, use the back-and-forth to show when they should withdraw from such conversations. Additionally, use this opportunity to create sample stock responses that your team can use when they are dealing with upset social media users.

If you do not want your employees to respond in such situations, use this scenario to show why they should not respond. Emphasize the fact that situations with upset buyers can quickly escalate.

ACTIVITY 3: TWEETS ARE NOT LINKEDIN STATUS UPDATES

Objective

Employees will be able to:

  • Practice writing for a variety of audiences and social networks
  • Utilize content to engage their followers

The Activity

Give your employees an article, blog post, video, or infographic. Have them digest it. (You always want to read articles before posting them.)

Then, ask your employees to:

  • Compose a tweet to promote the piece of content.
  • Write a LinkedIn update to promote the piece of content.

Work in groups to workshop the Twitter and LinkedIn updates. What works? What didn’t work?

What to Look for

Check for the following items:

  • Images – Both Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to include images. Does the post include one?
  • Hashtags – LinkedIn doesn’t use hashtags, but Twitter does. Make sure that your employees aren’t hasthag happy. One to two will suffice.
  • @Mentions – You can tag people on both Twitter and LinkedIn. You might want to tag a prospect or a thought leader.
  • Optimal length – The optimal length of a tweet is between 120 and 130 characters (Source), while the optimal length of a LinkedIn status update is 25 words (Source).

Use this opportunity to remind your advocates and sales reps that Twitter and LinkedIn are different networks. They have their own idiosyncrasies. Twitter is a great place for abbreviations like ICYMI, but LinkedIn is not.

Your Training Ideas

What ideas have worked for you? Leave some of your training tips in the comments section below!

-Mark

Additional Resources

3 First Steps to Optimizing for Mobile

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If you aren’t thinking about mobile as part of your overall content strategy — you should be. It’s no easy task, but creating a comprehensive content strategy today has to include all important aspects of content creation and consumption, from blogging to social and definitely to mobile. You can probably guess where browsing and content consumption is heading based on your very own mobile habits. Typical online browsing may still be the norm at work, but when I get home and kick off my shoes, it’s my iPhone I reach for instead of my computer. Sure, it’s a smaller screen, but I can browse at a leisurely pace, multitask with Instagram or games, and pick it up and put it down whenever I want. It’s no wonder that mobile web browsing accounted for 30% of all web traffic in 2012 and is expected to account for 50% by this year.

So, if you’re not optimizing your website and your content for mobile, you could be losing out on a whole lot of traffic. In theory, that traffic could be even more valuable than the traditional traffic we’ve all been gunning for. Where do you want to reach your users most? At work during the day, where they are likely too busy to delve into a lengthy piece of content, or at home in their off-hours when they have the time to read and browse for enjoyment? That question doesn’t have a right answer, but if you’re hoping to increase your traffic overall, mobile is undoubtedly an important component to consider. While there are plenty of advanced ways to optimize and strategize for mobile, here are a few first steps to get you started.

1. Make your website mobile-friendly

If you want users to be visiting your site and spending time there from their smartphones or tablets, it absolutely needs to be optimized for mobile. There are two common ways of achieving this. The first is to build a version of your website for mobile — one that is simpler, probably includes less text, and is easy to view and navigate from a smartphone or tablet. If you choose this option, it’s also preferable to include a link to your full website, just in case the user wants to see your full-functioning page. The second option is to use a responsive design for you site, which basically means that the features and content on your site will naturally adjust to fit whatever size device the viewer is using, be that a phone, tablet, or full-size desktop.

2. Stay active on social

If you think that your social and mobile content strategies are two different things, think again. When your users, customers, or prospects are consuming content on their mobile devices, they are most likely using social networking apps to do so. You want your content to reach your followers wherever they are. Spoiler alert: they are all over social. If you can create, share, or curate content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram (just to name a few), you will be getting your content out there and showing up in the mobile apps where they spend their time. Your audience is spending a good chunk of their time in social networking apps on their smartphones and tablets. If you’re reaching them on social, you’re also reaching them on mobile.

3. Don’t forget about email

Email marketing may seem like old-news compared to social, video, and infographics, but it can still be crucially important. If you have a smartphone, ask yourself how many times a day you check your email with that device. We won’t judge you. If you are like 72% of email users, that number will be 6 or higher. So, kill two birds with one stone and create some killer email marketing campaigns. Not only will it serve you well for web traffic and conversions, but you’ll also be getting a leg up on reaching your audience on mobile. If a user checks their email over the course of a day on their computer, tablet, and smartphone, sending them an email campaign means that you’ll be reaching them on all three devices, at all different times of the day.

– Kelly

17 Plays for Winning at Social Selling

Ah, Super Bowl season.

Whether you are a lover of football, object to the notion of barbarians throwing around cowhide, or watch the spectacle for the commercials and halftime show, the Super Bowl is hard to ignore.

We thought that we’d help you get into the Super Bowl spirit by writing a blog post, chock-full of plays. Just as quarterbacks have their favorite plays for winning games, social sellers have their favorite plays for winning at social selling.

Take note. Winning at social selling does not mean closing a deal and sending over a contract via Facebook Messenger. Instead, winning at social selling means building relationships and trust so that you earn the opportunity to have offline conversations.

So, with no further ado, here are 17 plays that you can start using today.

LinkedIn Plays

1. Use Alumni Search

Your fellow alumni are often a fantastic resource. If you want to see if any of your former classmates are in your territory, you can use LinkedIn’s free alumni search tool.

By reconnecting with former classmates while you’re researching your target companies, you might just get the “in” that you need at a particular company.

2. Look at the “People Also Viewed” Section

Nowadays, the typical deal involves 6.8 stakeholders. Don’t you wish that you could easily find more stakeholders at key companies? Well, you can!

Head over to the profile of one of your prospects, and then look to the right. The “People Also Viewed” section will show other users similar to him or her, many of which are stakeholders at the same organization. Here’s an example from Bill Harris, the VP of Trapit:

3. Avoid Cold Pitches, Especially on InMail

You’ve probably received a few cold pitches on LinkedIn, and maybe you’ve thought, Hmm… If other people are cold pitching on LinkedIn, it must be working. Otherwise, why would they be doing it? Just because cold pitches are “out in the wild” doesn’t mean that they are successful. In fact, for many buyers, receiving a cold pitch is a huge turn-off.

Focus on adding value instead. Help your buyer. If you are solely talking about your product, social selling will not work for you.

4. Request Introductions

It’s often easier to connect with a stranger if you have a connection in common. As you search for leads on LinkedIn, look for “second-degree connections.” These people are one degree removed from you.

Once you’ve located a second-degree connection, ask your mutual colleague for an introduction. You can see your mutual connections in the sidebar of a LinkedIn page (below the “People Also Viewed” section). In the case below, I’d ask Henry for an introduction to Kim.

5. Be Purposeful with Content Sharing

Some people share content just to share content. But that “strategy” (if it’s a strategy at all) will not result in stronger relationships. Rather, content sharing needs to be purposeful.

Ask yourself:

  • Why am I sharing this piece of content?
  • Will it help my buyers?
  • Will it entertain them?
  • Is this something my audience has not seen?
  • Am I providing context as I share this piece of content?

That last question is key. Don’t just share a URL without typing a few words of commentary. Your buyers won’t see what you see. Perhaps there’s a quote that you love from the article. Perhaps you learned a new statistic. Perhaps you want to share your opinion about the article.

Having a point of view will help you stand out in the LinkedIn newsfeed.

6. Look at Who Has Commented on Your Prospect’s Posts

If you’re like me, you probably gloss over the comments underneath your connections’ posts. Don’t be like me. Use the comments section wisely. It can help you:

Identify More Stakeholders: Many times, a connection’s co-workers will comment on their posts. See what they are talking about, and try to glean information about the relationship between the poster and the commenter. You never know, the person could be a key stakeholder at your account.

Look for Potential Prospects: Imagine that you’re selling to marketing operation managers. Chances are that your customers and prospects are connected to other people who do marketing operations. So, many of the people who interact with your prospects and customers could be a good fit for your product.

Add Value: Comments are the perfect springboard for engagement. Think about how you can respond and add value. Maybe you can agree wholeheartedly with someone. Maybe you can share another relative article. Maybe you have a data point that others haven’t considered.

7. Write a Buyer-Focused Profile

After your photo and headline on LinkedIn, your summary (i.e. your bio) is the most commonly viewed portion of your profile. If you’re in sales, your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t read like a resume for a hiring manager. Rather, tell your story to a potential customer.

Not sure of the difference? Here’s a simple template you can use:

And here’s an example:

Don’t like this template? HubSpot has created three additional templates you can check out.

Twitter Plays

1. Master the Hashtag

Identifying the right hashtags is critical for social selling success. Hashtags allow you to eavesdrop on conversations, join already existing conversations, and start new conversations.

Just think of the benefits. By monitoring conversations, you can learn about your industry and prospects, and by adding value to conversations, you can start to build relationships that could end in a business transaction.

We wrote a series of posts on Twitter hashtags. You can find them here:

2. Listen to Buyers

Before you engage your buyers on the phone, on email, in person, or on social, you need to listen. Listening will help you have more productive conversations.

There are many ways to listen on Twitter. We cover many of them in this guide.

For a quick tip, let’s look at Twitter lists. Twitter lists are an underutilized feature on Twitter. Which is a shame because when it comes to social selling, these lists are a tremendous asset for salespeople.

A Twitter list allows you to organize a specific subset of people and follow their tweet activity. By creating lists, you can group people together and pare down the number of tweets you see at one time.

Some reps organize their lists according to prospect temperature. They create one list for cold prospects, another for warm ones, and yet another for hot ones.

Other reps choose to group Twitter users based on accounts. Below, you can see a Twitter list for Trapit employees. If Trapit were one of your target accounts, this list would make it easy to research, monitor, and engage with key stakeholders at Trapit.

Note: You can create private Twitter lists so that no one else can see your list of prospects.

3. Learn How to Use Advanced Search

Twitter has two search tools on its web-based application. There’s the search option in the navigation bar at the top of the page, which looks like this:

And then there’s the advanced search feature, which gives you more options for searching tweets and its users. You can find it here: http://www.twitter.com/search-advanced

For instance, you can use Twitter search to find your competitors’ disgruntled customers. Many people take to Twitter to air their grievances. It might be helpful to keep tabs on negative tweets about your competition. That way, you can swoop in and steal your competition’s business. Use the “Mentioning these accounts” and the frowny face in the “Other” section to find those tweets – like this:

That’s just one use case for Twitter’s advanced search features. To find more, check out this blog post: 4 Ways Sales Reps Should Use Twitter’s Advanced Search.

4. Sprinkle in Tidbits of Your Personal Life

Unlike LinkedIn, which is a buttoned-up social network, Twitter is more amenable to personal tweets. It’s okay to tweet about the blockchain technology one day and the Super Bowl the next day (or Led Zeppelin or shoes or whatever you fancy). In fact, mixing personal and professional tweets will make you seem more human and approachable. That’s a good thing.

5. Use the 80/20 Rule

Social selling experts recommend that 80% of the content shared by sales reps come from third parties (other people’s blogs, news, interesting articles, research reports, etc.).

The other 20% should come from the rep’s company.

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

6. Use the Quote Tweet Feature

Retweeting amplifies a message. But it doesn’t add anything of substance.

Believe it or not, there’s a better way to retweet. It’s called “quote tweeting.” (If you’re not sure how to quote tweet, you can read about it here.) Quote tweeting allows you to give more context. Let’s take a look at this quote tweet from Kim Babcock:

By quote tweeting, Kim is able to summarize what she likes about this article. Plus, she’s able to add another hashtag to the discussion, making her tweet more discoverable for Twitter users. And one more thing: Ernest Wilson will be notified that Kim has commented on his content, making him more likely to engage with Kim.

Program Management Plays

1. Align with Marketing around 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 customers are and how those customers use digital channels. As sellers interact with buyers in the field, they need to report back on what they’re witnessing. In turn, marketers have the opportunity to listen, learn, and challenge their assumptions about the buyers.

2. Align with Marketing around Content

The key to social selling is education. A seller’s instinct is to pitch and push the product, but that turns off the modern buyer. Instead, reps need to think about helping customers and becoming a go-to resource of information. That’s why 67% of marketers almost always or frequently support social selling with content (Forrester). Content is a proven way to educate and engage modern buyers.

For more on this subject, see the post: How to Align Social Selling with Your Social Media Marketing Program

3. Get Executive Buy-In

This person will be your social selling champion, particularly in the beginning stages if you don’t have the data to show the true ROI of your sales team’s efforts on social. Perhaps this is your CMO or VP of Sales or another executive. Regardless of who it is, this person should have insight into the company’s overarching business goals and the strategy for achieving them.

Find someone who can relay social selling success up the ladder to an executive, while also establishing credibility and authority to the sales reps. The goal is to get buy-in at the top so that it doesn’t feel like an uphill battle every time you mention your program. At the same time, you must get buy-in from the reps themselves. Otherwise, you won’t see results.

4. Formalize Your Program with Training

Training is mandatory. Without training, you will have Sales Rep A doing one thing, Sales Rep B doing another thing, Sales Rep C doing yet another… You get the picture. Ongoing social sales education helps create uniformity among your team and increases the chances of success.

As you create your training program, recognize that all sales reps will not have the same level of understanding of social networks, and even the socially savvy reps may not have a clear understanding of best practices for using social for selling. A good training program should integrate “How to” and “Best Practices” in the context of sales activities. For example, how does social listening help you with researching prospects?

You also want to ensure you don’t just focus on the tools. Focus also on driving the the right behavior change. As Mary Shea of Forrester argues, sales rep need to “reboot” and shift their focus in the “Age of the Customer.” They need to stop spewing product features and assume a consultative approach that demonstrates their understanding of the customers’ business problems. That means building relationships with the buyers, educating them, sharing insights with them, and telling the customers something new. In short, they need to add value.

5. Invest in the Right Technology

It’s important to choose tools that your teams can easily use to accomplish their key goals.

A complete social selling platform will help marketing and sales teams:

  • Build a social content library
  • Research market trends, competitors, target companies, and prospective customers on the web and on social
  • Attract and engage new buyers
  • Build long-term customer relationships
  • Increase revenue
  • Measure and optimize social engagement

The right social selling solution empowers marketing and sales teams to do all this, serving as the backbone for sales reps’ interactions with prospective and existing customers, across digital channels. What’s more, a best-of-breed social selling platform is easy to use. No one wants to waste time and money on software that users hate or, even worse, bypass altogether.

Want to learn more about adopting the right technology? There’s a blog post for that: Social Selling: Are You Using the Right Tool for the Job?

Looking for More Plays?

These are just 17 of the many, many social selling plays out there. We have a cheat sheet that has a few more tips and tricks. Check it out!

Posted byMark Bajus

17 Go-to Resources for Your Social Selling Strategy

If you were to create a course on social selling, what would you put on your reading list?

To help companies launch their social selling programs, I thought that it would be helpful to compile a kit of go-to resources.

Below, you’ll find a list of links that I’d include in my social selling success kit. It’d be great if you consider adding any of your personal favorites in the comments below.

How do you manage your social selling program?

Launching a social selling program is not easy. Here are a few key resources that you’ll need for managing your social selling program.

A good social selling program takes planning. This workbook walks you through the steps required for successfully launching your program.

Need executive support of your program? No problem. Download this PowerPoint deck so that you feel prepared speaking to your executive committee about social selling.

You know that social selling will help your organization, but you can’t get executive buy-in. Here are some tips for handling 6 common objections.

Are you looking to build your social selling program? Find the right people for your team by using these interview questions.

Before you launch your social selling program, you need to write a social media policy for your company – with clear dos and don’ts. This blog post explains how to get started.

Without proper training, your social selling program will not take off. Use this training needs assessment to gauge your team’s readiness for social selling.

How will you measure success for your social selling program? There are three key types of metrics businesses can use. Choose the type that fits best with your objectives, your role, and the maturity of your program.

It’s common for salespeople to get excited about social selling. Then, they get busy, and their interest wanes. Results are not immediate, but sticking with the program will produce results. Here are a several ideas to get your team to stick with it.

Choosing the right social selling tool can be tricky. Use these 15 questions to navigate the decision-making process.

How do you do social selling?

In addition to managing your program, you need to arm your employees with best practices. Here are a few key resources that will help them get started:

This e-book covers the basics:

  • Why sales teams currently struggle to meet quota
  • How social selling solves those problems
  • What are the best practices

Use these sample messages to start conversations with prospects on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Here’s what your team shouldn’t do on LinkedIn.

And here’s what your team should do on LinkedIn.

Each social network is unique. Here are some pointers to get your team started on Twitter.

The folks at HubSpot have put together a beginner’s guide to social selling. Their blog post offers some great actionable tips. It’s worth checking out.

There’s a lot of hype surrounding social selling right now, and it helps to have a clear idea of what social selling is and isn’t. This post by Jill Rowley offers clarity.

There are tools that every social seller needs. In this post, you’ll find a list of tools, as well as tips on using them.

Your Favorites

As the topic of social selling becomes increasingly more popular, more and more resources will begin to emerge. This kit of blog posts, white papers, and workbooks only begins to scratch the surface.

Which resources do you love?

Share your favorites in the comments. I’d love to look them over!

-Mark

Are you looking to launch a social selling program?

See how Trapit can help by requesting a demo.

15 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Social Selling Platforms

Choosing the right social selling solution can be tricky. There are plenty of options on the market, and each option has its strengths and weaknesses.

To help you navigate through the decision-making process, we’ve provided you with 15 basic questions that you should ask yourself when evaluating social selling solutions.

Publishing

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

Where do you want your sales team to be active? LinkedIn? Facebook? Twitter? Make sure that your solution allows your team to publish to those networks – from the platform, without copying and pasting.

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

Our brains aren’t made to toggle between tasks. According to the Harvard Business Review, our productivity decreases by 40% when we try to multi-task.

If your salespeople have to manually update their Twitter feeds every hour, they will lose precious time. However, if your sales team can sit down for 15 minutes and schedule a few posts for the day, they will have more time for other tasks.

3. Does this tool allow for batch posting (i.e. posting to multiple accounts at one time)?

If you have several social media accounts, you don’t want to lose time by writing and rewriting posts. You want to be able to push content to several accounts all at once.

Content

In order for social selling to work, salespeople 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.

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

When your salespeople share your company’s content, they amplify the reach of your company’s marketing efforts. More people sharing content means that more people are likely to see your company’s blog posts, videos, and infographics. What will your team have to do in order to share your company’s content? Is there a lot of copying and pasting involved?

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

Study after study shows that buyers trust third-party content more than branded content. If you want your sales team to be seen as a trusted source of information, you may want to consider having them share third-party content. Can your sales team share others’ content from the application – without having to copy and paste and without having to spend hours building their own library of sources?

6. Does the solution have content personalization capabilities?

There’s a lot of content out there. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can save you time. A good tool can help you sift through all that content – by learning what you like and what you don’t like.

Prospecting Intelligence

7. Does this software enable me to keep tabs on my prospects and/or their companies?

Social sellers are always looking for trigger events – those moments when they can reach out to their prospects and sell their solutions. Does the platform provide you with a way for you to look for opportunities to engage with the prospects?

Analytics

8. What types of reports does the solution include?

Standard social media reports include metrics like reach, clicks, and retweets. Are those metrics provided?

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

As Jay Baer has said, insight takes effort. It’s unlikely that a solution will provide you with every report that you would want to run. But does the solution give you enough data to find insights?

Pricing, Support, and Training

10. Has the vendor provided me with full transparency of pricing?

You know what’s the worst? When you’re about to close a deal and you notice a bunch of extra charges… Please don’t let this happen to you.

11. How does the vendor handle technical support?

Does the vendor have priority case routing? Does the vendor provide phone support or e-mail support? When is the support team available? It’s technology; plan on running into snags.

12. What is a typical timeline for implementation?

Does this timeline fit what you had in mind? In general, the quicker the timeline, the quicker you can start using the tool and finding customers.

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

What is the onboarding process like? Does training cost extra? How many training hours are included in the monthly fee?

General Conclusions

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

Is the interface intuitive? You don’t want to spend your time creating complex workflow videos to help your team understand how to use the tool, nor do you want to spend your time answering multiple questions about the tool.

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

You don’t want to buy a tool today and then outgrow the product in 6 months. You would have to go through the long process of evaluating software – all over again. You would have to go through the process of training your team – all over again. Bah-humbug.

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 Social Selling Resources

Image via Mufidah Kassalias

12 Quick, Essential Social Selling Tips (with Data-Backed Explanations)

Did you know that…

Which begs the question: Are you active on social media?

You should be.

Below you’ll find 12 quick tips to keep in mind as you go about social selling. (For a more complete guide to social selling, check out our free e-book.)

1. Set Goals.

What do you hope to accomplish by using social media for sales? Do you want to connect with 3 new people every day? Do you plan to generate 15 new leads every month?

Write down your goals.

Actually, strike that.

Don’t just write down your goals. Share them with your sales team, and hold each other accountable. Research shows that sharing objectives with others helps you reach them. In fact, goal-setters who provide regular progress reports are more likely to attain their goals.

2. Schedule Time for Social Selling.

You’re a busy person. It’s easy to put off social selling until after you have updated your CRM, until after you have answerd all your e-mails, until after you have complained to marketing that you need more leads, until… You get the picture.

Research from consumer psychology suggests that flexibility can be an impediment to achieving your goals. Being more rigid actually makes you more effective in accomplishing your goals.

So, say to yourself, “Every day at 2pm, I will try to connect with 5 new contacts. Then, I will share one new piece of content with my networks.” It sounds robotic, but it will help you be a better salesperson.

3. Go Where Your Prospects Are.

100% of business decision-makers use social media for work purposes (Forrester). In other words, your buyers are on social media. No doubt about that. You just have to research where they are.

Slides seven through 18 can help you find your audience:

But the best way to find your potential buyers is to ask. Ask your current customers which social networks they are active on – for business purposes. And then go from there.

4. Don’t Try to Create a Social Media Presence on Every Network.

You have 24 hours in a day. You won’t have time to build connections with people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Ello, Snapchat, and every other social network out there.

Research has shown that high performers (like elite violinists) do not spend more time doing an activity. Rather, they simply use their time more effectively by being more deliberate.

In other words, don’t waste your time. Be more deliberate. Choose your networks carefully and choose your prospects even more carefully. Then, create a plan for how you will stay in contact with those people.

5. Complete Your Profile.

To gain someone’s trust on social media, you need to give out some personal information. Your name, your face, your company, your work experience, perhaps where you live. People need to look at your bios and understand who you are.

In fact, according to LinkedIn’s research, B2B buyers are more likely to engage if the professional has a complete LinkedIn profile.

6. Don’t “Pitch-Slap.”

This is a term that I learned from Ann Handley’s handy dandy guide to writing. “Pitch-slapping” refers to the act of walking up to someone and immediately selling to them. Believe it or not, that’s a turnoff for a lot of buyers.

Essentially, what you are doing is the equivalent of a cold call on social media.

When you send someone a cold connection request (and, to boot, you try to sell to them right away), the recipient is less likely to view you favorably. Only 4% of B2B buyers have a favorable impression of cold connection requests on LinkedIn.

Think of it another way. Would you walk up to someone at a cocktail party and begin to talk about your product or service without any introduction? Probably not. The same rules apply to social media.

7. Share Content.

There’s an easy way to avoid pitch-slapping. Share content instead.

Relevant videos, blog posts, news articles, etc. build trust with your audience, and they establish you as a thought leader. Did you know that…

8. Become the Best Student of Your Industry.

Number eight goes hand-in-hand with number seven. To leverage the right content, you have to understand your industry.

At first, it might seem like a daunting task. How can you become wicked smart in a wicked short amount of time?

Well, it will take some time and effort. Think about when you tried to ace an exam in high school or college by osmosis. How did that turn out for you?

Set aside a chunk of time every day (see the second rule). Use that time to build your expertise. In fact, in today’s world, you have to know your stuff.

89% of buyers turn away from a deal if the salesperson doesn’t have insights or knowledge about their business.

9. Ask for an Introduction.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 84% of B2B decision-makers begin their purchase from a referral. In other words, ask your social network for introductions.

Don’t know how? Here’s an explanation of how to ask for referrals on LinkedIn.

10. Research Your Prospects on Social Media.

Take the time to do a Google search on your prospect. Look the prospect up on LinkedIn. And what do they tweet about?

Try to find insights that you can bring into discussions with the prospect.

Why? According to Forrester research, personalization greatly increases customer retention and loyalty. Taking an extra few minutes today can impact your business in the long run.

11. Don’t Worry about Accepting Every LinkedIn Request or Following Every New Twitter Follower.

65% of B2B buyers say that their network is critical for checking references.

Imagine this scenario…

You’re trying to do business with Mr. Prospect. Mr. Prospect looks at your LinkedIn connections and sees that you share a connection. (Let’s call her Mrs. Connection.) So, Mr. Prospect reaches out to Mrs. Connection to do a background check.

Mrs. Connection says, “Actually, I can’t remember why we are connected.”

How’s that going to reflect on you?

Focus on the quality of your connections. Not the size of your network.

12. Consider How Social Selling Software Can Help.

Selling is a complicated process. But software can make it easier. The best social selling tools will:

  • Provide you with business intelligence
  • Help you stay on top of industry trends
  • Allow you to easily share content to your social networks

Here’s a list of 15 questions you should ask when evaluating social selling tools.

What about you?

What are some of your social selling tips? Leave them in a comment below. And while you’re at it, let me know which tips you found to be the most helpful.

Thanks!

-Mark

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12 Questions to Ask before Launching a Social Selling Program

When embarking on the road to social selling success, you may need some guideposts to help you along the way. In this post, you’ll find 12 questions that sales leaders should ask themselves as they develop their programs.

Many times, social selling programs never take off because they haven’t been properly planned. These questions will help you ensure the success of your program.

Good luck!

1. Goals: Why are we launching a social selling program?

There are many reasons to launch a social selling program.

Perhaps your team has found that your solution is often “column filler” for buying committees – a solution that committees add to their vendor lists late in the game, just to appease everyone. To win more deals, your sales team needs to engage buyers earlier so that they can shape the solution criteria. Social selling can help with that.

Whatever your reasons may be, write them down and communicate them to your stakeholders. Doing so will help you paint a vision for your team and set clear goals.

2. Process: Are our marketing and sales teams on board?

For social selling to work, you need buy-in from your sales, marketing, and sales enablement teams. When your teams aren’t aligned, the whole program can fall apart.

Sometimes, it helps to create a service level agreement for your marketing and sales teams. Here, you can find an example social selling SLA.

3. Process: How does social selling fit into our sales process?

Social selling won’t replace the phone and email. A good sales strategy works across multiple channels and devices. So, it’s important to take the time to think about how social selling fits into your overall sales strategy.

For example, how will your SDRs and account executives work together? Will they work accounts on social together? If so, how?

4. Customers: Do we have modern buyers who use social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn?

84% of C-level/vice president executives use social media to support purchase decisions (Source). So, chances are good that many of your customers are using social networks for work purposes.

That said, ask your team to investigate. Look at your wins and pipeline from this quarter, and see if any of your customers use LinkedIn and Twitter.

5. Customers: Which customers would benefit from personal 1:1 relationships?

Many times, a company’s lead database out-sizes the sales team. That’s why marketing automation was invented. It helped companies build relationships with large segments of buyers.

But targeted emails are not the same as personal, direct relationships, and companies are starting to realize that. Some customers, especially in complex buying situations, need more hands-on guidance as they try to solve their business problems. That’s where social selling comes in.

6. Resources: Do we have the internal resources we need?

For a social selling program to be effective, you need to fill several key roles. For example, you’ll need:

  • A project manager
  • Content creators
  • Content curators
  • Social listeners
  • Social sellers
  • Metrics & Analytics experts

To learn more about these roles, check out this blog post: Building the Right Team: 8 Key Roles for Your Social Selling Program

7. Resources: Do we have an executive sponsor?

For your social selling program to take off, you need a vocal executive champion. In the eyes of your sellers, this person legitimizes your move from traditional sales to digital sales.

Granted, your reps are smart people. They will recognize whether your executive sponsor is just a figurehead or is actively engaging in social selling. So, choose someone who will lead by example.

8. Content: Do we have the right content mix for social selling?

Content is the lifeblood of social media. Without quality content, salespeople will resort to cold pitching prospects, and relationships will never form. So, it’s important to get the right mix of content.

On the one hand, your sales team needs company-created content. (Your marketing team probably is creating a lot of this already.) This should account for about 20% of what your team shares.

On the other hand, your sales team needs content from credible third-party sources. This should account for about 80% of what your team shares. Why so much? Sales reps need to earn the trust of potential customers, and if they are simply sharing company-created content, they will look biased in the eyes of their customers.

9. Platform: Have we selected the right software vendor?

Take a look at your goals for your social selling program. Then, create a checklist of criteria for your social selling solution. (Not convinced that you need a platform? You may want to check out this post.)

For example, one of the biggest challenges for sales teams is managing content. Many sales reps can’t find the content you need. So, you might ask, “Does this platform offer a shared internal content library that everyone can access?” Or, “Does the platform provide a library of third-party content out of the box?”

10. Risk: Are there any competing initiatives?

As you develop your program, take the time to create a realistic launch timeline. Socialize your launch date with stakeholders, gain support, and ask them to identify any competing or conflicting initiatives. For example, if your sales team is switching CRMs, you may have to postpone your launch date.

11. Pilot: Should we start small and build momentum through a pilot?

Companies often find that starting with a pilot is the best way to launch a social selling program. 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.

12. Feedback: Which tactics and messaging are most effective?

Continuously ask yourself how things are going. Here’s a sample chart that you can use.

Click here to enlarge.

Are You Ready?

Whether you’re just starting down Social Selling Lane or in the middle of it, use those questions to stay on track. If you’d like some more guidance, check out this workbook. It will help you prepare for your program launch.

10 Traits Shared by Successful Social Selling Teams

You’ve read the headlines: 78% of salespeople using social media outsell their peers. Those headlines make social selling sound so easy, don’t they?

But there’s a catch: Your salespeople on social media won’t outsell their peers unless you have the right people on your team.

But who are the right people? What skill sets should you look for? Below, you’ll find 10 essential qualities for your social sellers.

1. Avid Researchers of Buyers

Your marketing team can give you general information on your buyers, as a whole. But before your salespeople contact an individual buyer, they should do some research.

Is she on Twitter? What does she tweet about? Is he on LinkedIn? If so, what’s his role? How will your product or service make his job easier?

2. Interpreters of Digital Body Language

Your salespeople in the field are accustomed to reading someone’s physical voice and body language. Similarly, a good social seller will be able to read someone’s digital body language.

When your prospects post on social media, they share their personality, and they share information about the topics they care about. Interpreting those digital signs is a must-have skill for any social salesperson.

3. Eager Learners

Social media changes as quickly as the weather. If your salespeople want to be effective on social media, they need to keep up with the latest trends.

Moreover, social selling is going to take some trial and error. They need to take your company’s best practices, test them, and adjust them accordingly.

4. Concise

There isn’t a lot of room for long, flowery sentences on social media. Salespeople need to get to the point.

5. Remarkable

At the same time that you have to be concise, you need to have some kind of personality. Every minute, Twitter users tweet 277,000 times, and every minute, Facebook users share 2,460,000 pieces of content.

It’s easy to blend in on social media, so salespeople need to find ways to be remarkable – to stand out. Great content, cool images, exclamation points, emoticons, and emoji help you sound less digitally monotone.

6. Engaging

Are you doing social selling if you’re simply broadcasting a couple tweets a day?

No. You’re on social media, but you’re not really doing social selling.

For your sales team’s efforts to be effective, your salespeople have to strike up conversations with other people. They have to listen to what other people are saying and respond. In short, they have to engage.

7. Cultivators of Relationships

A typical marketing team will supply Sales with 15% of the leads they need to meet quota. That means your salespeople need to generate 85% of their own leads.

To get that many leads, they need to constantly form new relationships, looking for business opportunities along the way.

8. Fluent in Multiple Social Networks

How you communicate on LinkedIn is not the same as how you communicate on Twitter. (Twitter hashtags, for instance, don’t work on LinkedIn.) A good social salesperson will understand the grammar of each network.

9. Digitally Appropriate (A.K.A. Not Creepy)

In face-to-face interactions, we have certain rules of conduct. We don’t run up to a stranger and give them a big, wet kiss on the lips.

On social media, there are unwritten rules, as well. HubSpot has done some initial research into the subject.

10. Harmony between Online and Offline Personas

It’s naive to think that you’ll conduct an enterprise software sale on Twitter or LinkedIn. Sure, you may use social media to research buyers, to break the ice with new ones, and to stay in touch with current ones.

But eventually, you’ll have to jump on a phone call or meet in person. During that interaction, you’re going to need a personality that is equally as charming as your online persona.

What do you think?

These are 10 traits that we think make for great social sellers. What other characteristics would you add to the list?

Leave a comment below!

-Mark

Looking to Launch Your Social Selling Program?

We have a workbook that can help you plan. Download it today, and learn how to successfully launch your program.

10 Things You Should Not Say to Buyers on Social Media

I get it. Talking to buyers is tough, and it seems even tougher on social media.

On Twitter and LinkedIn, you want to foster conversation. You want to move buyers along their journey. And you don’t want to say something publicly that brings the conversation to a screeching halt.

What might those conversation killers be? Check out these 10 phrases that buyers wish they didn’t hear on social media.

Don’t say: “Are you the decision-maker?”

Yuck. Don’t BANT qualify your connections on social media. Decision-makers use social media to deepen relationships, learn, and be entertained – not answer your pre-sales questions.

Besides, if you’re socially savvy, you should be able to leverage Twitter or LinkedIn to unearth the decision-maker’s name.

Don’t say: “I saw on Instagram that you had a crazy, drunken weekend in Vegas.”

Hmm… It sounds like the Vegas party animal needs to change his privacy settings on Instagram, but it’s not your place to tell him that.

Just because something is public on the internet doesn’t make it fodder for a business conversation. Getting too personal with someone makes you sound unprofessional.

Bonus tip: It’s probably not a good idea to favorite those debaucherous photos on Instagram, either.

Don’t say: “Do you want to buy my product?” [to everyone who accepts your LinkedIn connection request]

Accepting a connection request is not a sales trigger. It’s an invitation to start a conversation and build a relationship that could, one day, end in a sale.

Don’t say: [in response to tweets/comments directed at a competitor] “You can do that better with our product.”

On Twitter, you can track what people are saying to your competitors. On LinkedIn, you can look at the comments on your competitors’ business pages.

It’s tempting to dig through those comments and tweets and insert your company into the conversation. “Hey Alex! You’ll be a happier customer with my company! Why don’t you check us out?”

In internet speak, this is called trolling. No one likes trolls on the internet. Avoid butting into your competition’s conversations.

Don’t say: “Trust me.”

The phrase makes you sound smarmy.

Everything you do on social media should make you look trustworthy – from your profile picture to providing the best content from around the web. You shouldn’t have to tell people to trust you. They should know that they can trust you – based on your interactions.

Don’t say: [publicly] “What’s your e-mail address?”

If you think it’s time to take a conversation “offline,” it’s okay to ask for someone’s e-mail. But don’t request your prospect’s contact info through the comments section on LinkedIn or through a tweet.

Use a more private method – like a direct message on Twitter or a LinkedIn message.

Don’t say: “I can show you a great way to save money.”

There’s a lot of spam on social media. Every day, I receive a tweet or a LinkedIn message with an offer that sounds too good to be true, and I’m sure that you have a similar experience. As a salesperson, you have to separate yourself from the spammers.

If you sound like someone who’s offering business miracles, you won’t win the trust of a potential buyer. Instead of offering people unbelievable deals, offer them content. Educate them. Entertain them. Delight them. Inspire them.

Don’t say: “Can I give you a demo today?” [to everyone who likes, favorites, or comments]

A comment, a like, a favorite – those are not indications that someone wants to see your product. Instead, they’re indicators that you’re engaging your connections on social. Keep it up!

Don’t say: “Nice profile picture.”

LinkedIn and Twitter are not dating sites. You wouldn’t walk up to someone at a business cocktail hour and say, “You have beautiful eyes.” That’d be creepy. Don’t be creepy on social media, either.

Don’t: Retweet, retweet, retweet, retweet, retweet. Favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite.

Would you call a buyer when you wake up, again at noon, and then one more time before going to bed? That’d be overkill. The same is true of social media. Don’t be overzealous. Don’t retweet everything someone says. Don’t favorite everything another person says.

To Sum Up…

Buyers don’t mind speaking with salespeople on social media. But salespeople have to understand what buyers want. Buyers want to be educated, entertained, delighted, and inspired. And it’s a salesperson’s responsibility to keep conversations professional, to build trust, and to foster relationships rather than sell the product.

To help you learn more about the basics of social selling, we created an e-book on the subject. Download our primer on social selling to learn why you need social selling and how it works.

Image credit: Mateus Lunardi Dutra on Flickr.

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