Question: I am a big believer in social media and social selling but my sales team is a group of wily veterans and they are really not buying into the program. Do you have any ideas to help me jumpstart their social selling efforts?
If I had a nickel for every time I heard that question I’d have at least a couple of dollars.
Fact is, Social Media has been really disruptive to the way people buy but that doesn’t’ necessarily mean that everyone who sells wants to adapt.
For a lot of long time sales pros they hear about social media and they think about their kids on Facebook and people “Twittering.” They don’t really understand how it can help them and until they do they probably aren’t going to be all that interested in getting on board with any social media or social selling programs.
But there is hope. It comes down to making it make sense to them for the work they do.
How To Get The Sales Team On Board
If you really want to get the sales team on board I recommend following these guidelines.
Introduce them to the premise of social selling. This means spending time mining data and information that helps them understand how social media may help them connect to customers and can lead to sales. For instance, share with them how the average buyer engages with more than 11.4 pieces of content before engaging a vendor.
Provide Tactics: Too many gung ho social media managers and sales managers wanting to use social have found themselves just pushing the hype. Sales executives often need some simple tactics such as how to use social media or content. I usually recommend a very simple program where the sales execs share 3-5 pieces of content a week via LinkedIn or Email with at least 5 different customers and prospects. Make sure the customer gets a personalized message that says why the content is being shared and why it matters to the client. I also recommend setting up a follow up in the email such as let’s set up a call for next week or something similar.
Show Results: Wins don’t have to be just sales. I advise clients to track conversations and appointments generated from the tactics I suggested above. For instance, have the sales person mark down responses to their social selling tactics, coffee or other meetings that they may have led to and then of course any revenue opportunities that can be directly correlated to the efforts.
Social Can Be Done, But Has To Be Small And Simple
I think the biggest challenge for getting sales people to jump in on social is that they are being asked to do too much too fast. They are basically being told the way they have done things for years is no longer relevant and that isn’t true.
Mixing the current things they do that work with new social selling tactics can be synergistic in growing engagement and more importantly revenue from content and social media efforts.
How are you driving social media adoption from your sales team?
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Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.
He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.
Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.