Posted by Joe Galvin on Fri, Sep 03, 2010 @ 10:01 AM
Social media continues to be a rapidly expanding area of interest and untapped potential for sales and marketing leaders. We have published and presented on social media primarily as it impacts branding and reputation on the marketing side. When it comes to B2B sales organizations, its impact has been less profound. Sure, there are some Sales 2.0 advocates citing the value of social media in terms of identification and intelligence gathering for prospecting. The concept of social calling, using social media capabilities to improve the connect and conversion rates in cold calling is a good one, but any real impact from social media has escaped attention of the sales VP.
Social media’s greatest potential value to sales will be internal; enabling sales organizations to develop their own internal digital communities for sales reps to access and share knowledge, strategy, and tactics beyond their existing personal knowledge networks. Personal knowledge networks have always been important to sales reps. Over time they develop relationships with product, marketing, technical, finance, support and other internal resources to help them get what they need. That’s in addition to their network of other sales reps and managers they go to for strategy, tactics and real-time intelligence. In fact, sales organizations that went to virtual sales kickoffs in 2009 budget crisis cited the loss of the networking opportunities at the sales kickoff meeting as justification for returning to the live event. It’s not what you know, its who you know in sales and is a big part of what makes experienced sales reps successful and why new hires struggle to get up to speed.
Enter social media. A number of organizations are already using Facebook-type capabilities for subject matter experts, product specialists or even competitive intelligence teams to provide all sales with 24/7 access to the most current news, intelligence and content. They can maintain running commentary through blogs on their products, markets and competitors that allow any sales rep to tap into as needed. Moderated forums are being used to create discussion communities on important topics like product updates or pricing/negotiation tactics. Sales reps can customize individualized information portals pulling together and monitor the “nuggets” they are interested in. Sales communications functions are adding social media capabilities to portfolio to broaden their reach and impact to sales. Salesforce’s Chatter is another example of social technology being integrated into the SFA platform to allow greater levels of communication and broader capabilities for collaboration. With all the attention focused on how and where social media can impact customer interactions, it’s the ability to foster collaboration within sales that should be the focus.
And oh yeah, collaboration needs to be included in your sales enablement strategy. For many starting out, sales enablement is about content management and that’s a good starting point, but to maximize knowledge transfer to sales, social media and its undeveloped potential must included and a strategy for its execution needs to be created. Leveraging these social technologies will require new skills, capabilities and behaviors on the part of knowledge providers. Sales rep behavior will need to change as well. Collaboration is a two-way street. Being part of a community means giving information in addition to getting it. The strategy to develop this knowledge exchange needs to be considered as part of a broader definition for sales enablement.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jul 23, 2010 @ 10:52 AM
Research analyst Jim Ninivaggi joins Jonathan Block for a podcast on the benefits of applying a time and motion study to B2B field sales (14.7 MB; 16:00).
To listen to this podcast, Click Here.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jun 18, 2010 @ 09:31 AM
Research analyst Jim Ninivaggi joins Jonathan Block for a podcast on tips for selling to senior-level B2B executives (11.2MB; 9:45).
To listen to this podcast, please Click Here.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 09:18 AM
This is a post that should lead to a series of questions; questions you should be asking yourself if you have any responsibility for the social media strategy within your company. Whether you're executing on that strategy yourself, have staff to do it, or have outsourced to an agency, there is certainly no lack of social data you're receiving. The problem is that it's mostly quantitative about activity and gives you very little insight. Having thousands of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook may make us feel good, but it's fairly meaningless if we don't know what the impact of these numbers are on the business.
While we've thankfully evolved away from the notions that social media in not measurable, the pendulum is in danger of swinging too far in the other direction. In other words, too many B2B marketers are being asked to show the direct impact that social media efforts are having on revenue. We continue to advocate that focusing too much on this direct impact goal is misguided; better to focus on the impact that social media is having on the seeding and creation of demand. Many organizations are doing this by tracking the change in response rates when social media is part of the tactic mix, but it's key to discover how it can raise conversion rates at other points in the demand creation waterfall.
And this leads to the questions. Are you using social media for activities beyond the top of the funnel, such as pipeline acceleration or sales enablement? Even if you're not applying social media to these initiatives, are you even tracking these types of activities regardless? Do you know your optimal tactical mix throughout the waterfall? Do you even have any impact beyond the handoff to sales? Without insight into what you do currently (as well as historically), it won't be possible to gauge the impact that social media marketing has on activities beyond the top (or even before the top) of the funnel.
If you're already asking these questions, you're on the path to gain the most insightful measurements of your social media marketing activities. And bonus points if you got the Pink Floyd reference in this post's title.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Apr 02, 2010 @ 08:28 AM
Based on our most recent research, developing an internal community is one of the fastest growing uses of social media, accounting for over 20 percent of B2B social media budget (program and personnel) in 2010. While the benefits of such an internal platform are often easy to identify (such as increased collaboration and knowledge sharing between sales, marketing, support and other functions), developing and maintaining a vibrant internal community for your organization involves not only a measure of serious forethought but also dedication to ensure the community continues to grow and evolve once the inevitable initial enthusiasm ebbs.
An often overlooked component is to clearly identify the goals of the community, as this will be important in determining needed roles, technologies and processes. Start with a pilot, using a smaller group to test features and validate approaches. Measurement is key to demonstrating the overall effectiveness of the internal community. While metrics such as time to value, quicker development of content and collateral, the emergence of new subject matter experts, and faster internal support and training time can be determined through a combination of included platform technology and employee surveying, organizations should also take a disciplined approach by individual function.
With the limitations of static content portals forming a major barrier to collaboration within an organization, the rise of an internal community continues to gain traction. One prevalent argument against such a community platform is that email is the most pervasive communications mechanism within the organization and should be adequate; however, email is not effective for those who aren’t part of a discussion chain nor is it easy to socialize and catalog emails for further use. While an internal community can provide a more effective platform for collaboration and best practices sharing between sales, marketing and the rest of the organization, well-socialized strategy and guidelines, as well as improvements to drive the continued health of the community, are the critical success factors.
Posted by Joe Galvin on Mon, Dec 07, 2009 @ 04:43 PM
Sales enablement is about knowledge transfer. Salespeople need to access and acquire constantly changing information from a variety of internal sources to maintain their state of knowledge readiness and be able transfer that knowledge to their customers. That knowledge needs to be in the context of their company, their products and the value they represent to the customer. Newly developed, upgraded, or acquired products need to be absorbed by sales along with new marketing initiatives and programs that are being rolled out. Sales enablement impacts sales productivity by making content and resources available through tools and technology.
Sales enablement is one component of a broader sales readiness strategy. Sales readiness focuses on the sales processes, skills and knowledge requirements of all sales people. This involves the coordination of various sales and marketing teams (sales training, sales operations, field and product marketing) to define and reinforce organizational sales processes (account management, opportunity management), identify and develop individual sales skills (face-to-face call dialogue, presentation, negotiating) and to transfer knowledge (products, market and strategy) to their clients and prospects. Interlacing these three elements into to a seamless customer interaction is the goal of sales readiness.
Sales enablement is focused on knowledge, making it available to sales and powering their customer interactions with customer ready content. Salespeople can manually sift through the range of unique documents, standalone events or optional learning sessions on their own, or an enablement function can rise to meet this requirement scripting, assembling and synthesizing the best customer messages, content and strategies in a format that the sales rep can readily apply to customer opportunities. Sales enablement teams establish the right set of process to bring content and knowledge to the salesperson from a variety of product management, product marketing and field marketing teams in the format and context that they can absorb and relevant to how their customers buy.