How to link social media to sales

Social selling can bring teams together and profit the business, but how do you get your sales team on social? Maxine-Laurie Marshall reports

‘Money makes the world go round’. Whether you believe that or not, money does make your CEO’s world go round and keeps you in their good books. So it makes sense that marketers are looking for money to come from all their marketing techniques and channels. Including the slightly unpredictable, relative newcomer: social media.

For most of you social is an accepted marketing channel; great for brand awareness, listening to your customers and prospects, and for customer service. But it’s also proving to be a popular sales channel. Twitter and Facebook already have ‘buy’ buttons, and Pinterest and Instagram recently announced their forays into ecommerce. While large-ticket B2B purchases are unlikely to be bought via a ‘buy’ button, this isn’t the only way to sell on social.

This channel is the only place your sales reps can talk to customers and prospects on their terms; it’s not cold calling and it’s not cornering someone at an event. Social can potentially see the customer talk to sales first without knowing that the person they are engaging with is in sales. However, you need your sales team to be on social for this to happen. So how do you get them on board?

Convincing sales to sell

Firstly, there are some statistics to help you make a case. According to LinkedIn, three quarters of business leaders use social media to help them make decisions, so those senior prospects that sales are desperate to reach can be found on social. In a report by LinkedIn and Oracle, 87 per cent of customers had a favorable impression of a salesperson who was introduced to them through their network. Tom Ball, director of digital at Immediate Future notes the benefit for organisations: “Sales are the connectors for the business – increasing the reach of a business’ social profile by a factor of 10.” 

After delivering the stats, you must use your powers of persuasion. Social may well have fallen under the remit of marketing but social selling requires both departments to be fully bought in. Katy Howell, CEO at Immediate Future warns: “Training in social selling only goes so far. Embracing a change in behaviour takes time, and sometimes a lot of convincing. Often it’s better to start with a seed team from sales: a small group that can be nurtured and motivated as company experts. Their success is championed and others will rapidly join.”

The key though is in gaining buy-in from the sales director. Not just a nod of the head, but willingness to set social KPIs with the team and allow for ongoing training.”

Sylvia Jensen, senior director, EMEA marketing at Oracle Marketing Cloud believes education is the key. She says: “The endgame is for sales teams to view social channels as just another medium for interacting with customers and prospects. This requires them to first invest time and resource into understanding how it works, and, crucially, how to use it to deliver value.”

Marketing’s role

Marketing can, and should, help with this education process. You are likely more familiar with what works on what channels and you should be better equipped to create content. Social selling is about using these skills to help sales sell.

As Jensen explains: “Marketing teams have a unique appreciation for the content and approaches that work best when interacting on social, as well as an established social strategy that sales teams will need to align their own activity with for the best results.”

So while it’s agreed marketing will lead in creating the content for sales to share and use on social, it’s vital you consult your sales team before creating the content. As Andrew Watts, director at KHWS warns, if sales don’t like it, it’s unlikely any prospects will see it: “Crucially, when marketing teams are creating content and engagement strategies, they must get buy-in from the sales team. If the sales team doesn’t believe in the content, it simply won’t be seen by potential customers and the relationships that have to form in order to make a sale will not be forged.”

It’s vital marketing is involved, as Megan Collins, head of marketing at Paragon, warns: “Social platforms should not be used solely for sales purposes, as your followers disappear and it makes it difficult to engage your customers in a two-way conversation. In other words, only using social as a conversion tool will mean that social engagement is zero.” 

Nurturing to selling

With this in mind, it’s worth mentioning nurturing is a big part of social selling. The buyer now does more research independent of a brand’s sales team, so social is the perfect place for sales to present content to help the buyer with their decision making without going for a hard sell. Because social is a great place to nurture prospects, the natural next step is conversion to a sale.

However, even if conversion isn’t done via social, it cannot be discounted as an effective sales method if most of the nurturing has been done on social.

Ball, of Immediate Future, believes nurturing and conversion should both be considered social selling and can both be measured. He says: “Social drives leads and then cultivates them through to purchase. The key is to track and measure both social attributed sales and assisted social purchases: delivering the most rounded picture of the commercial ROI.”

However, trying to measure retrospectively isn’t going to give you much more than vanity metrics, such as number of likes a post received. Howell believes to track prospects behaviour and to see the success, or otherwise, of your social selling efforts, aligning your tech like marketing automation and CRM is essential.

Collins gives an example of tracking revenue on social: “A good example is to look at social advertising. Say we invest £100 in a Twitter card. That £100 investment records impressions, clicks and the demographic of those clicks. What it does not do is tell us exactly who is making those clicks. But, if the ‘clicker’ then makes an enquiry, this can be tracked from the information they complete in our enquiry form. These potential customers are what’s known as a ‘social lead’. If you have three ‘social leads’ that generate bookings and revenue of £x, you can then establish a direct ROI from social media. 

“Another way to ‘monetise social’ is by following the ‘customer journey.’ For example, the lead may visit the website but not convert, and enquire at a later date. Here, the use of software that tracks social engagement through social channels enables the marketer to cross reference with their own booking data to calculate social ROI. This also applies if you do not do social advertising but want to see an ROI from social.” 

However, a change in attitudes to reporting needs to happen. Howell says on average most companies should allow three-to-five months to be able to show a return from social selling, a far cry from the monthly deadlines some marketers receive. Meanwhile Jensen says: “Attributing value to any individual engagement channel is a challenge. While marketing technology has reached a point where we can accurately track the purchasing journey – both online and offline – to gain much better insight into which activities are proving most effective, the truth is that putting a figure against particular marketing activities overlooks many of the ways they each add value.”

Which social network?

But before you even think results, you must choose your social networks. LinkedIn is the obvious choice for B2B marketers when it comes to social selling. The platform was named the most effective social channel for reaching marketer’s objectives in our Social Media Benchmarking Report and recently announced the availability of its Social Selling Index to all members. Everyone on the network can now see how good they are at selling and promoting themselves and their brand on the network. Watts confidently says: “LinkedIn now owns the B2B social selling space.”

However, Pinterest – an unlikely contender in B2B – has been flagged as having great potential. Founder of Sendible, Gavin Hammar, says: “Right now, Pinterest is the most effective social network for driving sales as you can convert customers near the top of your funnel. This is because users of Pinterest are collecting products they like with a view to possibly purchasing the product at a later stage. Other social networks are more effective later on in the buying process when a social network lead is reminded of your company and returns to make a purchase.”  

With a similar point of view Lee Benecke, social media and content consultant at Amaze, says users on Pinterest are more invested in the idea of making a purchase. He says: “All signs point to Facebook when it comes to ‘top dog’ in terms of social referral traffic but Pinterest is giving it a run for its money. Pinterest piques interest further when you take into account the recently launched buyable pins (US only at present). There is great evidence to show customers are willing to put ‘pinning’ at the centre of their customer journey so suggesting the purchase could happen in Pinterest is not too distant a leap. Something to keep an eye on perhaps.”

Of course, it’s also worth remembering that Facebook has 35 million UK users who check their news feeds, on average, 14 times a day. While many think it’s not the right network for B2B marketers, it is the world’s biggest social network, so you can bet some of your customers are there.

Social selling also comes with further benefits. According to the Getting Started With Social Selling guide from LinkedIn and Oracle, it costs 75 per cent less to generate leads via social media than any other channel.

While Hammar says: “Very often, sales that are made through social selling tend to be of a much higher value than sales made through other channels.” He puts this down to the fact sales can be very specific with targeting on social and get to know high-value prospects on a personal level giving them the competitive advantage.

Ultimately, the digital revolution that has seen brands succumb to a new set of buying rules dictated by the customer, has also led to a host of new opportunities for businesses. As Jensen concludes: “The key to effective sales and marketing is to provide the right content to the right people at the right time on the right channel. And, while it may be incredibly hard to measure its true impact, social selling makes that much easier to achieve.”

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