IBM turned its sales reps into social media savvy individuals to reach its audience of IT professionals.
IBM is the world’s largest IT and consulting services company. It has a diverse client base and delivers innovative solutions to help solve some of the toughest business challenges.
IT professionals increasingly use social media for product research. It is estimated that social media will form an integral part of the decision-making process for 75 per cent of IT professionals in the future.
IBM wanted to tap in to the professional IT community via social media to support sales of its Public Cloud service.
From social to sales
The challenge was to find an innovative way to build enduring relationships with this exacting, technically savvy B2B audience. Activity needed to drive sales leads and embrace IBM’s culture of innovation, ideas creation, openness and trust.
Objectives were two-fold: to generate a high quantity of good quality leads via social media and efficiently progress leads from engagement to conversion to sales.
Mason Zimbler was chosen to devise and implement the social media strategy. The decision was rooted in the agency’s B2B technology experience and its ability to synchronise sales and marketing activity.
Three steps to success
An empowering social media programme was developed to enable sales representatives to use social media (Twitter and LinkedIn) intelligently and effectively. At its core, the programme followed a ‘listen and respond’ model. It involved training and equipping sales reps so they could join the ongoing social conversation and use it to identify and progress new opportunities.
The approach can be broken down into three steps:
1. Monitor the social sphere to identify hot topics
The relevance of the campaign depended on finely-tuned, ongoing social listening. Specific areas taken into account included: customer questions on Twitter and LinkedIn, industry themes being discussed, challenges and pain points.
It meant the social framework and tools were tailored with content aligned to specific business needs.
2. Equip reps with a calendar of relevant and timely posts and links
After identifying exactly what issues and needs were affecting the target audiences and influencing social conversations at launch, a social media toolkit was developed. This drew on IBM’s depth and breadth of industry expertise and enabled reps to respond to questions, join debates and make recommendations that went beyond sales-led messages.
Extensive research went into valuable collateral that could be shared with online communities. And the development of recommended hashtags facilitated greater reach and relevance.
Reps were trained so their contributions to online communities would be ‘real’ – individual, personal commentary drawing on a bank of knowledge provided for them. They were also educated in the development of their own social listening skills and specifically advised on the importance of timely responses. This led to them becoming ‘go-to’ points of knowledge for IT professionals. Reps were also educated on how to target key conversations to engage ‘forward thinkers’ and incorporate them into their network.
3. Drive leads to each rep’s personalised digital rep page
To ensure a seamless transition from social conversations to sales conversations, each rep sought to drive leads to their own personalised digital page. This allowed them to share specific content and information about the solution they were selling at an appropriate time.
Cost-effective leads
Social media is growing the top of the sales funnel and driving incremental traffic to IBM’s Public Cloud commerce engine.
Three months after launch, 19 per cent of all Public Cloud Inside Sales Rep Page traffic could be attributed to social media activity – and 11 per cent of these visitors clicked through to commerce sites. This is a great achievement since inbound leads are much more cost-effective than those attracted by paid-for media; they are also better quality, so convert at a higher rate.
Additional results for the first three months include:
• 55 per cent increase in Twitter followers.
• More than 3500 tweets and retweets compared to less than 500 at implementation.
• More than two thousand Owly clicks driving prospects and clients to rep pages and the SmartCloud Enterprise website.
Speaking about the campaign, Cheryl Mikovch, senior marketing manager, channel marketing cloud computing at IBM Inside Sales, said, “This is a progressive social media strategy that has led to better cohesion between our sales and marketing efforts. Most importantly, this is leading to a tangible increase in sales.”
