Social selling is creating change. A recent survey showed 73% of sales people using social media as part of their sales process outperformed their sales peers (Barbara Giamanco & Jim Keenan Survey). Global thought leader in customer-centric business management, CustomerThink, has stated that a warm referral increases the odds of a sales success 2x-4x.
19. 4 Actions to Becoming a Social Selling Pro
1. Build Your PROFILE
Developing a Reputation: Building a strong online reputation that
showcases your experience and increases your credibility
2. Develop Your NETWORK
Building your Network: Developing relationships with people
who can share information and provide referrals
3. Gather INSIGHTS
Gathering Intelligence: Researching social information to
prepare for sales conversations
4. Engage with INSIGHTS
Engage with Insights: Use the information you have learned and
the relationships that exist to reach prospects in a warm way
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20. 1. Build a Strong Professional Profile
Add a photo, experience and skills that showcase the brand of YOU
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21. 2. Proactively Develop Your Network
Build trusted relationships who can support your professional objectives
24. Social Selling Index
• Visibility into company’s social
selling activities
• Identify opportunities for
improvement
• Benchmark against peers and
competitors
Ranks and tracks company utilisation of
LinkedIn as a social selling tool.
25. LinkedIn Social Selling Index
Correlates to sales success
15%
More customer
renewals
31%
Greater team
quota attainment
Source: Aberdeen Group
25
21%
More reps
achieving quota
26. NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N) is the industry’s leading vendor of cloud-based
financials/ ERP software suites. NetSuite enables companies to manage
core key business operations in a single system.
NetSuite: Energising Sales Team with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Challenge:
NetSuite wanted a tool to energise its sales team and boost productivity.
Solution:
Sales Navigator makes account-planning more efficient and gives reps access to highlevel contacts
Results:
Since using TeamLink, sales team has seen a seven-fold increase in second-degree
connections; network grew from 15,730 to 115,891.
InMail connects sales team directly to key decision-makers.
Sales reps are more excited about their jobs because they are seeing fast results,
which motivates them and creates a positive cycle.
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The Internet has transformed how information is created and accessed, and how people connect and collaborate. As a result of this global phenomenon, the way the world works is fundamentally changing. Professionals need to be more responsive and make faster and better informed decisions to perform in an accelerated business environment. Enter LinkedIn. There is now a single, global community of professionals from which a magical new data asset emerges. With more than 200 million professional members representing companies in more than 200 countries and territories, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the Internet. These millions of professionals are adding information to their profiles, sharing important insights, and building their networks every day on LinkedIn.
These three functions are absolutely central to the success of any enterprise, large or small. Traditionally, they’ve been viewed as separate functions with unique requirements. But fundamentally, these functions have more similarities than differences. Whether it’s finding the right talent; engaging the right professional with the right brand message; or making the sale, the needs are the same. You have to be able to 1) identify the right person b) engage them with content that is compelling; and 3) spur them to an action. This is what LinkedIn enables, better than anyone else. LinkedIn has already fundamentally revolutionized how companies find talent. As the three core business functions of Hire, Market, and Sell converge, LinkedIn’s core data assets of millions of professional profiles and the graph of how they are connected to each other will be a critical tool to help companies succeed at all of them.
Challenger – ReframeObjective – Gain agreement that lead generation is a sales responsibilityMarketing typically does not drive majority of pipelineSo we just established that building pipeline is a top X priority for you to hit your number this year. Let’s now turn to see how that happens, how much is done by marketing and how much by your sales team.Research shows that on average 30% of leads come from B2B marketing teams, although it can vary within 10-50%. We’ve only seen a handful of firms above 50%.What about you? What percent of your leads come from Marketing vs on the shoulders of your sales team? Tell me how that process works. How’s it going? How much does your Marketing team pay for a lead? Research shows that it obviously depends on the industry but is on average about $150 per lead. Open ended questions here.(Ideally, irrelevant the number, what is most important is that establish majority is on the shoulder of the sales team).
Challenger – Our SolutionObjective – Demonstrate a simple, fast and easy way to identify the right people you want to speak with
Challenger – Our SolutionObjective – create comfort on the depth of information you could use to build rapport with the potential contactsActivity feed.Updates, presentations videos
Challenger – Our SolutionObjective – demonstrate the power of relationships and how you could turn on this power tomorrow
Finally, once I’ve found the right people on LI SN, identified what to talk about- whether a common connection, experience, or passion, I can engage a prospect or customer directly through InMail, LinkedIn’s internal messaging system.Key point: InMail gives you the power to reach out and message any of our 200 million members, REGARDLESS of whether or not you are connected.Specifically InMail:Goes directly to a member’s LI inbox as well as the primary email address connected to their LI account Gives you the ability to contact decision makers regardless of whether you have their phone number, email or physical addressEach LI SN users gets a pre packaged number of InMails per month and they work like rollover minutes; unused InMails role over to the next month.InMails are best used to reach important, hard to reach prospects or decision makers that are not responding to phone or email messages or that you notice are particularly active on the LI network. Rather than sending a canned email blast, you can take advantage of the wealth of information on their profile and TeamLink to send a personalized, customer high quality message that speaks to their interests and concerns and spells out what’s in it for them to contact you. Quality counts so we stress quality over quantity when using InMail.40% response rate if common connection is mentioned
Some potential final closing questions…What do you think your chances of hitting your number are if you stick with the status quo of building pipe?What chances of hitting your number if significant improvements in your lead gen process?What kind of impact do you think having Sales Nav would have on your hitting your number this year?Can we get into how we do a Pilot Project, or what we have learned about how companies create a scalable social selling program with?