Why Giving Salespeople RSS Readers Is a Bad Idea

When companies start social selling programs, they often turn to their star social sellers for guidance. Sales leaders ask their top performers how they use social networks and what tools they use. With that intel, sales leaders ask the rest of their salespeople to replicate what their star social sellers are doing.

When sales reps don’t adopt these new tactics and tools, sales leaders jump to conclusions and decide that social selling doesn’t work.

Instead of ditching their programs, sales leaders should be asking themselves why their tactics and tools didn’t work. Often times, it’s because their early adopters rely on tools that don’t scale across the entire enterprise. Take RSS readers, for example.

Many companies give their salespeople RSS readers like Feedly, tell their reps to find their own content, write their own messages, and post updates on social media – all without any assistance from marketing. Not only is that your CMO’s worst nightmare. That’s a recipe for very low adoption rates. Here’s why.

The Keys to Getting Employees to Adopt Technology

Before we jump into RSS readers specifically, it’s important to understand why employees adopt technology. Researchers in management science have identified two key predictors:

  • Perceived usefulness of the technology
  • Perceived ease of use of the technology

In other words, employees are more likely to adopt a new solution if they think that the technology will help them do their jobs and if they think that the technology is easy to use.

RSS Readers Make Social Selling Complicated

The problem with RSS readers has to do with the second predictor: perceived ease of use. RSS readers are inherently tedious. To share one piece of content using an RSS reader, here are all the steps that salespeople must undertake:

  1. Set up an account
  2. Spend hours finding their own RSS feeds, importing the feeds, and building a library of RSS feeds
  3. Comb through hundreds of articles every day
  4. Decide which articles are relevant to their buyers and read them – every day
  5. Copy and paste the URLs into a social media management tool
  6. Write messages for social media updates
  7. Schedule and post their social updates

Sales reps get to steps 2, 3, and 4, and they think, “No, no, no, no, no, no! Too much work!” So, they quit before they even start, and your social selling program never takes off.

Sure, the go-getters will figure it out. Their eagerness to use social networks trumps any software problems. However, for the majority of your salespeople, there isn’t enough infrastructure in place to support their efforts on social. They need:

  • Hand-picked content delivered to them and stored in a central library
  • Sample messages written by marketing or sales enablement teams
  • Click-of-the-button sharing

And they need it all in one place.

With those elements in place, not only will your salespeople be more likely to participate in your social selling program; sales leaders can create a repeatable social selling process that can be scaled across the enterprise.

Moving Beyond RSS

There’s a reason that companies have stopped cobbling together social selling solutions. They’ve abandoned the “duct tape” combination of RSS feeds + social media management tools for their sales team. And it’s time that you did the same. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to your team.

As social selling continues to produce revenue and as more salespeople share content on social media, you’ll want to look past RSS readers and find a product that is built for social selling.

RSS Feeds + Social Media Management Tools Can’t Do It All…

Find out how Trapit’s platform can help your sales team spark engagement and drive revenue on social. Contact us to find out more.

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