B2B: Involve Your Sales People in Social Media Marketing and CRM Now

In many B2B companies, especially those with a longer sales cycle (or buying cycle if you will), there is at least one division where employees meet customers and prospects without sitting behind their computers and campaign or CRM dashboards all the time: sales.

Of course, it’s not the only division in most cases. Probably, the C-suite regularly meets key accounts, customer service reps are in touch with clients, you might have a place where customers pick up goods (where interactions with your warehouse staff might happen), etc.

All these people-to-people interactions lead to a perception of your company and brand by your clients and prospects. Many businesses underestimate that. Divisions such as sales, can be involved much better in social CRM and social media processes.

In some companies, the role of sales has been reduced by strict lead management processes, whereby the role of sales reps has been reduced to order intake. If your company is full of those and you want more proactive sales people, your processes are wrong or you have recruited badly. In many other businesses, sales reps continue to play a very important role from the early buying process stage onward and are involved, as consultants, in lead generation and even setting cross-divisional marketing and communication priorities.

Good sales people have always listened: do you listen to them?

No matter how your organization is structured: it’s crucial to involve your sales people in cross-channel interactions and in your social media strategy as well. Social media monitoring and other measuring systems are not your only “ears and eyes” in the social space. Real people, including sales consultants, your CEO, customer service and even the copywriter interviewing your customers for client cases, are too.

A great salesperson is someone who listens, empathizes and provides solutions based on the real needs of their clients. Someone who is an excellent communicator and can build relationships based on trust and common interests. So, it should not come as any surprise that great salespeople value social media as a way to sell.

An OgilvyOne survey found that 49% of those salespeople polled worldwide consider social media important to their success and the top performers among them rate it even more highly at 65 percent! The survey was based on 1,000 sales professionals in four countries.

Social media for marketing and business in general is not about telling people what they need or what they should think. It’s about asking them what they need and think and responding. It’s also about being a part of that cross-divisional customer-centric and cross-channel conversation and building brand strategies, which put the customer at the centre of your selling universe, rather than the product or service. Social media really helps sell, if you do it right.

Top sales people have always understood that an important factor of their success is listening and understanding customer and prospect needs, before even opening their mouths to pitch. If you don’t have a good understanding of what your potential client needs, then how can you know what solution to offer them? Smart sales people perfectly understand the ‘climate’ and market situation, in which your business operates, and are an important source of knowledge that should lead to smarter content marketing, blogging, social media and cross-channel initiatives.

Social media and the web provide sales people an extra foot in the door. With social and the web, savvy sales professionals can listen unobtrusively to prospect dialogues and understand better what issues may drive their purchase decisions. However, social activities, including social CRM, should at the same time also include the insights of sales people that have a foot in the door anyway.

Social media as sales interaction channels: sales and social CRM

As well, when the time is there to engage the prospect, you have a channel where you can do so in a non-intrusive and timely manor. If you are there with the right information and offer it in a helpful non-pressured way, you are ahead of the pack. Finally, it’s crucial to involve your sales team in your social media programmes: they most know what social media is (and obviously be social but if they’re not your HR might not be that good) but they also should have social in their “DNA” in order to ask customers and prospects for social profiles on top of the good old business card, explain your content resources and how clients can interact with your business.

And guess what: they only will do so when they feel comfortable enough. In other words: they need to be sure that every element of your social media strategy and plan, regardless of organization and division, works well.

Is your company paying lip service to your frontline troops? Are marketing and PR aware of the reality that good sales people (and customer service reps, etc.) will adopt social media to enhance their (selling) skills, whether you sanction it or not? Are you training and supporting them? Do you involve them in Social CRM programmes and processes? Do you give them access to the online tools that exist and give sales a role in the lead management and social media marketing space? Do you even know these tools exist? And last but not least: do you use the insights and feedback of your sales reps and other customer facing employees?

Social media are interaction channels for sales people as well. Let’s not forget that often relationships really start with very simple connections or mentions. What do you do with them? That’s the real question.

Social sales skills: beyond social media marketing

According to OgilvyOne survey, sales people are not getting the training they want, even though those same sales people express a desire for it. In the US only 9% of those polled stated their companies offered the training while 46% of the respondents want some form of training on social media. It’s worse in the UK by a couple of points and only marginally better in China and Brazil.

Most social skills are inherent and not taught. People who shine in social media have certain sociable traits which make them good at it. Many of those traits are in common with what makes a good sales person and thus, a rich human resource exists in most companies smart enough to develop it. On top of that realize that more people than ever are in your “sales team”, including other employees and even some perfect strangers.

Blogs, Twitter Facebook and LinkedIn can all be very effective tools for sales because they are great relationship building and information-gathering  channels. However, before you can build those stronger and more profitable relationships, you must invest the time into training your front-line troops how to use them.

On top of the usual suspects such as all the social networks, there are a bunch of tools that enable sales to have more control over the lead management process and social themselves, providing them serious and actionable insights and applications to take action themselves. Use and integrate them in your strategy.

The challenge to adopt these tools revolves mainly around the barriers between sales and marketing. Silo thinking is a hurdle to take for every company that wants to be customer-centric and have a single view on its customer, prospects, business and ecosystem. .

Finally, check out the great paper by Brian Fetherstonhaugh, OgilvyOne’s Chairman and CEO on the future of selling below (and read/watch the role of content!).