Social Selling Mastery

Scaling Up Your Sales and Marketing Machine for the Digital Buyer

Jamie Shanks

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119280866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Ventas

A concrete framework for engaging today's buyer and building relationships

Social Selling Mastery provides a key resource for sales and marketing professionals seeking a better way to connect with today's customer. Author Jamie Shanks has personally built Social Selling solutions in nearly every industry, and in this book, he shows you how to capture the mindshare of business leadership and turn relationships into sales. The key is to reach the buyer where they're conducting due diligence—online. The challenge is then to strike the right balance, and be seen as a helpful resource that can guide the buyer toward their ideal solution. This book presents a concrete Social Selling curriculum that teaches you everything you need to know in order to leverage the new business environment into top sales figures. Beginning with the big picture and gradually honing the focus, you'll learn the techniques that will change your entire approach to the buyer.

Social Selling is not social media marketing. It's a different approach, more one-to-one rather than one-to-many. It's these personal relationships that build revenue, and this book helps you master the methods today's business demands.

• Reach and engage customers online
• Provide value and insight into the buying process
• Learn more effective Social Selling tactics
• Develop the relationships that lead to sales

Today's buyers are engaging sales professionals much later in the buying process, but 74 percent of deals go to the sales professional who was first to engage the buyer and provide helpful insight. The sales community has realized the need for change—top performers have already leveraged Social Selling as a means of engagement, but many more are stuck doing "random acts of social, " unsure of how to proceed. Social Selling Mastery provides a bridge across the skills gap, with essential guidance on selling to the modern buyer.

Part One
Creating a Mindset Shift for a Digital Transformation

Chapter 1
Why Do I Need to Change Now, Not Tomorrow?

90% of customer buying decisions are starting online.

—2011 by Forrester Research

The above statistic is already five years old, but it couldn't be truer. The average buyer in business is just like you and me at night, on our couch, surfing the Internet. Buyers purchase clothes and televisions, and build their future vehicles online. What makes you think they don't also research software, HR best practices, insurance, or corporate healthcare policies?

My business, our clients' businesses, and your business have already forever changed because buyers have changed. Buyers are arming themselves with more information than ever to make informed decisions. They can now connect with their peers on social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to learn about the challenges, pitfalls, and successes of any solution implementation. In 2012, other statistics began to emerge on the change in buyers' behavior that progressed social selling:

• Fifty-seven percent of the buyer's journey takes place before a sales professional is involved.¹
• Seventy-five percent of business-to-business (B2B) buyers use social media to research vendors.²

In 2011 and 2012, these core statistics awakened progressive companies because their sales professionals saw the vital importance that social media played during activity at the top of the sales funnel. Sales and marketing departments would need to change their ways to become resources for buyers before a sales professional would even know an opportunity existed. I can personally count dozens of clients over the last four years who attracted bluebirds (B2B clients) into their sales pipeline through social. At first, I would chalk up these seemingly serendipitous opportunities to great fortune, but it has become very clear that providing value to someone has been the catalyst. In May 2012, Aberdeen Group presented a finding about social sellers: “79% of sales professionals achieved quota in their last calendar fiscal year, compared to the 58% non–Social Sellers who were Average to Laggard in their industry. This had a 16.3% increase in their companies’ overall revenue.”³ Such empirical evidence was hard to ignore.

In 2013, Craig Elias, the author of Shift, presented me with this mind-blowing statistic from Forrester: “74% of buyers are choosing the sales professional and company that was first to add value and insight in the buying journey.”⁴ What does that mean? It means that long before you think about adding value for a prospective buyer via phone, email, or presentation, the buyer has been learning without you. Buyers have been collecting enough information to be able to select which vendors are best for their business. They do all this before ever speaking to a sales professional. Then, as buyers make decisions about vendors, they typically choose the first one who presented them with new ideas, concepts, and road maps. This is scary because all this education is happening without you! Your competition has been teaching your prospective buyers with their blogs, videos, infographics, ebooks, webinars, and success stories. Your buyers are shifting their priorities before you've even called them for the first time. Think about this scenario: You're about to conduct a huge presentation in the buyer's boardroom. You've been preparing statistics, ROI calculations, and reasons why your company is the best vendor for the project. The problem is that when you start your presentation, it doesn't go anything like what you planned in your mind. The client seems completely educated on your market—the features, implementation strategies, best practices, and pricing. In fact, the flow of the conversation seems like a grand inquisition, as the buyer has been prepped with landmine-like questions. Guess what? I, the social seller, was the one who set up those landmines! I, the social seller, had been sharing best practices, implementation road maps, and pricing scenarios to the buyer for months. The buyer now uses my solution as the benchmark and, because I taught him or her all the pitfalls to look out for, your solution seems to feel like it's been sold into the business, rather than being a right fit. While this is a simplistic description of social sellers impact, this is how social media affects buyers—and you.

It's time to take an objective look at your business. Has it become more difficult to reach decision-makers over the phone or via email? Are these time-tested ways of reaching out having the same effect they did even a few years ago? Also, the buyer is not just one person anymore. According to the CEB, “There are now on average 5.4 decision-makers, champions and influencers, all part of the buying decision.”⁵ Are you effectively nurturing and influencing these five or six champions, influencers, and decision-makers in the organization with the phone? This is another reason social media has become a tool for sales professionals. With one article shared socially, I'm able to educate and become a resource to an account's 5.4 decision-makers—and thousands of others—instantly. This kind of scale is unmatched by the phone or email.

In 2014, LinkedIn did a study of 5,000 buyers in leadership positions and found that “92% of buyers want to deal with the sales professional who is the known thought-leader in their industry versus 17% of buyers who still don't mind being cold called.”⁶ By 2015, a new analysis had emerged: 34 percent of all B2B researchers are Millennials.⁷ While the decision-maker might be a Gen Xer or Baby Boomer, the functional users and champions who support buying trends are digital natives.

Where does this leave you and your organization if you're not leading the customer conversation? You're a ghost, lost in a sea of screaming voices. What is the probability that you'll be found? You are working at a Fortune 2000 company and, for a brief moment, roll your eyes and think, “This doesn't apply to me. I work at XYZ Company, and we have a brand as the market leader.” If this is your reaction, your future is in even more trouble! At a macro level, Forrester studies suggest that one million sales roles will be wiped out by 2020. These declining roles will be order takers (decline by 37 percent); explainers, sales professionals who demo (down 27 percent); and navigators, relationship-nurturing sales professionals (down 17 percent). All these roles are reduced because they do not present a face for the industry. You're not the consultant shaping the buyer's journey; you're only answering questions along the way. At a micro, personal level, people who work at a big business are not very nimble. They can't start guerilla marketing campaigns like their smaller competitors.

Don't think for a moment that because of your business card, you're an obvious vendor choice. People buy from people first; then they buy into the solutions that a person represents. Your corporate business card might get you a few more meetings than competitors at smaller companies but, many times, the value ends there. Nimble, smaller competitors can unleash ground-breaking insights that disrupt your sales cycles. Now your buyer is armed and dangerous with market information, so how are you going to stand out? Why do they need you?

If an information technology or telecommunications company is not executing social selling at global level in 2016, it's no longer an early innovator—they're late to the party. As LinkedIn mentioned at its 2015 SalesConnect event in Las Vegas, 2016 to 2020 will be about crossing the chasm for many technology-focused companies. For those of you in other industries such as professional services, health care, finance, or manufacturing, your markets are changing rapidly! This isn't a scare tactic, but a reality check.

You need to change your mindset more about social selling's involvement beyond the sales role. How are sales operations, sales enablement, and, especially, marketing influencing your digital interactions with buyers? The size and scale of your organization is irrelevant here. Throughout this book, we'll use the word global as a ubiquitous term for all of your organization. What's most important is that you change your mindset from me activity to we activity, taking a global view. We is only important if it improves your entire organization's ability to serve your buyers. That's it! Nothing else matters with social selling or any type of innovative sales process. Your sales approach must have a positive impact on your ability to enhance your buyer's experience. I've seen B2C (business-to-consumer) companies change their digital approach years ago to enhance a buyer's experience. Unfortunately, B2B (business-to-business) companies have been approaching social selling as a series of individually executed sales hacks to create quick wins, but they have done little to improve long-term trust within their buyer-to-seller interactions.

I know it's hard to think of the long game here. I get it: You're measured with monthly or quarterly goals that make it difficult to think about your commercial approach two, three, five years from now. You're looking for a material impact to be made this quarter, and social selling tips, tricks, and tactics will book you immediate meetings and create quic...