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Social Selling Playbook

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Since when was selling not social? Our playbook takes you through the profile of the social seller, the social buying process and provides you tips and techniques you can try for yourself.
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TMP’s best practice guides SOCIAL SELLING: THE PLAYBOOK By Matt Harper, Senior Planner
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Page 1: Social Selling Playbook

TMP’s best practice guides

SOCIAL SELLING: THE PLAYBOOKBy Matt Harper, Senior Planner

Page 2: Social Selling Playbook

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THE UNTOLD TRUTH OF SOCIAL SELLING

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.”Mark Zuckerberg

It’s not what you think it is. Or rather, it’s more than you think it is.

Social selling is a buzz phrase that’s the victim of blogs, guides and brazen claims across the marketing world.

It’s right up there with content marketing in how it’s been misinterpreted and overly hyped.But the truth is there’s far more to it than a cheesy LinkedIn profile and a few well-placed #tags. Social selling encompasses more than just the use of social media channels to generate leads and communicate with prospects. It’s also the intelligence that props up your best campaigns. It’s the answer to your customer marketing problems. And it’s a huge opportunity to do your B2B Sales and Marketing better and more simply.

The key is understanding what social media is for and why people use it. Social media users tweet, blog and post to share information. They post opinions, their feelings, their wants and frustrations, or in the case of LinkedIn, their professional profile. That’s the case whether they’re big users or passive listeners – it’s all about information. About being more ‘open and connected’.

The opportunity for B2B salespeople and marketers is to record that information and contribute to it. It offers us the chance to understand our prospects and customers better, and to deliver content and conversation in line with that understanding. It’s really just good marketing, done well.

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INTRODUCING

THE PLAYBOOKThis playbook will demonstrate how your organisation could adopt social selling, or use it in new ways if you’re already up and running.It’ll start with understanding what it is, and end with how to deliver ROI. In the middle, there’ll be some nice examples of how you could do it – because it’s important to realise social selling has a number of flavours according to the tastes of your organisation and its sales and marketing teams.

Since when was selling not social?Social selling’s been around a while. We’ll talk you through where it came from and what needs drove it – for the customer, the marketer and the sales person.

A profile of the social sellerYou can’t do social selling without some social sellers. This chapter will give you an overview of the skills and requirements of a social seller – and you might be surprised to learn you’ve probably already got one or two.

Understanding the social buyerThe biggest myth about B2B social media is that it doesn’t have an audience. Let’s knock that one on the head.

Selling socially: how to do itTen examples of how social selling can work.

Closing the loop: tracking, reporting and proving the valueMeasuring the success of your social selling programme isn’t as hard as you might think. We’ll finish off by walking you through some examples of how you might show the value of social selling to your organisation.

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SINCE WHEN WAS SELLING NOT SOCIAL?Sales people have always been a social bunch. It’s the nature of the job to talk to their

prospects and clients on a daily basis. When you think of it like that, social media should be the playground of sales people.

As a term, ‘social selling’ is relatively new. But back in 2008 it started to become a recognised concept – Anneke Seley’s book, titled “Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology”, was an important step in the process of sales people embracing social media.

Of course, it’s no longer really an ‘innovative sales practice’ – it should be par for the course, as integral as a good CRM system and a smartphone. But the important point is that since this time, use of social media has been at the fore of what sales pioneers like Seley have been saying the future of sales should be like.

In 2009 no one had ‘social selling’ in their job title on LinkedIn. At the start of 2013, there were over 1,000. Now, a search for ‘social selling’ turns up almost 4,000 profiles in the UK alone. That’s 4,000 people in this country that recognise it as an important part of who they are professionally.

The important point for sales people is that they can now use different methods and tools to hit their monthly targets. They can be constantly ahead of their prospects’ needs and requirements. And they have greater access to prospects than just email and telephone.

The internet and social media changed not only the way we sell, but also the way we buy. Nearly 60% of B2B buying decisions are made before a prospect is willing to speak to the sales representative. By enabling decision-makers to research services and products online, internet and social media turned this process upside down.

The important point for marketers is how social selling changes the B2B buying cycle. The focus of social media marketing has shifted from promotional objectives and brand awareness to lead generation. Corporate Twitter accounts pushing out PR messages are no longer the way to represent a company on social media. You could even say social media marketing is becoming social selling.

Sales people use their own Twitter handles and LinkedIn profiles to influence the buying process of their prospects and engage with clients. They’re armed with relevant and informative content provided by their marketing teams – at its best, it’s exactly what sales and marketing collaboration should look like.

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Tip: It’s important to have your audience front-of-mind when deciding what social selling looks

like for your organisation. What channels are they most likely to be using? Where will they be looking for content, and how will they share it?

100% of business decision-makers use #socialmediaSource: Forrester

92% of B2B buyers start their search onlineSource: Salesforce

78% of the salespeople who used social media as part of their business practices outsold their peersSource: Salesforce

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A PROFILE OF THE SOCIAL SELLERWho are they?

You can’t do social selling without some social sellers.

But you can’t impose social selling on someone. They need to want to do it – but you can help them understand the opportunity it represents, and how easy it is to do.Think of your social sellers more like ambassadors. Social opportunities come from this approach – through people finding your ambassadors because of who they are, or something they’ve said or shared on social media. Few people would ever actively look for a salesperson or seek their opinion, but they would seek out the opinion of someone with an interesting viewpoint who is qualified to talk about the subject – whether it’s a salesperson or not is irrelevant.

The other way a prospect will connect with them is through some sort of direct contact – such as if your ambassador has tweeted them, or looked at their LinkedIn profile. If that’s the case, they don’t want to see the profile of a salesperson – they want to connect with someone who is going to add value to issues they’re interested in.

Being a product expert, the member of a leadership team, or someone with a clear professional focus or interest, is often enough to make you a good potential social seller. That person might be a passionate salesperson. Or it might be someone in a different part of the business.

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A week in the life…

45mins: schedule social media posts for the week through Hootsuite, provided by Marketing – this means a certain level of activity is guaranteed for the week.

15mins: review social profiles according to the latest guidance on best practice – tweak to add the latest piece of content or short URL.

15mins per day: respond to replies, comments or new connections on social channels – flag interesting conversations to the relevant account manager.

1 hour: read through the latest intel report from Marketing that covers who the top influencers are, what they’re sharing, and which customers have been tweeting about what – follow and connect accordingly.

30 mins: attend sales and marketing webinar sharing the latest updates to the Twitter policy and best practice – including an overview of the latest technological developments.

15 mins: review suggested connections on LinkedIn and send a pre-written invitation.

1 hour: review a draft of a blog written up by Marketing following last week’s interview.

TOTAL = 5 HOURS… OR IS IT?

More like 3 hoursMost of them are probably already doing this to some extent – by checking their LinkedIn profile, or having a look through Twitter or Facebook. You’re just providing them with more guidance on how to do it well and in-line with the company’s usage policy. So social selling becomes a time-efficient part of their job.

AND HOW CAN YOU SUPPORT THEM?It’s not all on the social seller. For Marketing, there are a few key ways to support a social ambassador:

- Supply guidelines on how to write a good social post and be engaging.

- Provide weekly social posts on the latest content that the team can then personalise and share.

- Write social profiles and summaries for them.

- Create a platform for their activity – focus on your marketing campaigns and the role your social ambassadors will have in them, ensuring they have a consistent stream of good content.

- Lead by example – there’s no reason a marketeer can’t be a social ambassador, and what better way of showing how it’s done well by having the ready-made example of yourself?

TIP: Here are the top five things your social ambassadors will need to get up and running:1) Strong social profiles – consider interviewing them

and providing the copy for them.2) Usage guidelines – to ensure they’re safeguarding

your brand.3) Good content to attach to their profiles.4) A list of influencers, customers and prospects they

should connect with.5) Logins for a social management tool (e.g. Hootsuite)

and link shortener/tracker such as Bitley.

The best social profiles aren’t CVs or an overview of the food you like. They talk about your

interests, what drives you to do what you do – such as solving problems, a passion for technology or finding new ways of doing things. Steer clear of referencing specific sales results.

So what would you be asking them to do? Whether it’s using social media as part of a campaign, or as a

programme in itself, here’s what the social ambassador might be doing in an average week:

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The profile

Here’s some best practice guidance on what an ambassador’s profile should look like. This covers LinkedIn, but the same principles apply to Twitter and Google+. If Facebook is relevant to your

organisation, you may want to adopt a more personal approach.

1) This is for your job description, not just your title. Find a way of describing what you do that isn’t just what the next professional will have – if you could summarise what you do in two words, what would it be?

2) LinkedIn now allows you to be an author through its content platform – it’s like having a blog hosted on LinkedIn. It’s a great way to promote yourself and your opinion.

3) Summarise what you do – but make it interesting. Why do you do it? What’s the key reason someone should connect with you? What interests you most about it?

4) Add content to your profile – SlideShare links well, but also YouTube, infographics and guides that will help people understand what your organisation does and how it can help them.

5) Use your experience to your advantage – highlight some of the key organisations you’ve worked with over your career or important projects you’ve been involved in.

Tip: Set a diary reminder in the calendars of all of your ambassadors, reminding them to schedule

their posts every Monday. Make sure it coincides with your email sending them the content – 20 mins prior to the meeting, so they get the pop-up reminder just after.

Go through your account settings on all of your social channels. Make sure they’re fully visible

(except contact information, such as email addresses) so people can find you. When you update your profile on LinkedIn, be sure notifications are switched off for your connections.

Page 8: Social Selling Playbook

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UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL BUYERT he most common objection to B2B social media is that it doesn’t have an audience. People think

that C and D-suite executives are too important and too busy to engage on social. Or that even if they do, they don’t want to do business on it. Not true. On both fronts.According to the Global Web Index, B2B decision makers are more engaged on social media than the average internet user – as this table shows:

Decision makers and senior decision makers are more engaged on social networks

(Source)

Average Decision Senior Internet Makers Decision Users Makers

Facebook 42.9% 45.3% 55.6%

Google+ 22.8% 29.9% 36.2%

YouTube 21.6% 25.6% 28.8%

Twitter 21.3% 26.5% 34.2%

LinkedIn 8.6% 11.2% 17.3%

Average Decision Senior Internet Makers Decision Users Makers

Facebook 597.7M 118.3M 66.8M

Google+ 318.3M 77.9M 43.5M

YouTube 300.7M 66.8M 34.6M

Twitter 296.9M 69.2M 41.1M

LinkedIn 120.1M 28.3M 20.8M

The same decision makers think that conversations on social platforms are the most influential in terms of marketing tactics (15%). It means that all of your high-quality content (8%), perfectly-written emails (9%) and professionally-designed adverts (9%) won’t be as effective if your online image doesn’t stack up.

It might sound surprising, but think about it for a minute. Senior executives are bombarded by marketing – email, mail, online advertising. What social media does differently is move away from the noise. It allows those executives to have a conversation, not be shouted at (even the best emails are one-sided by virtue of the lack of immediacy).

If someone is engaging with one of your ambassadors on Twitter, it’s easy to draft a quick response. It’s immediate but your ambassador also has time to research their answers so they can respond in an informed manner. The executive doesn’t have to have an awkward conversation to explain their situation, or receive a disconcertingly inaccurate email that talks about them as a retailer when they’re actually a travel operator.

Tip: A simple way to get started on social selling is to build lists on Twitter. Drop the Twitter handles

of a relevant group (e.g. ‘Customers’) into a list, make it private, and you can then keep track of just what that group is saying on social, meaning you can spot some quick-win opportunities to engage in conversation.

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• Low users: they might have a decent LinkedIn profile, but they’re really just ticking the social media box. Consider what that might mean – if it doesn’t look like they use social media much, they might not be used to fending off enquiries. And their PA might not be responsible for their social profiles. Tweeting or InMailing them might be a memorable event for them.

• Passive observers: they sit back and observe what’s said in the market, or around their interests. You might not be able to get much of a response from them – but make sure they observe you. See who they follow or retweet, and make sure you’re posting content they’ll find interesting as a result.

• Keen dabblers: they do their fair share of chatting on social media, and they’re really getting into LinkedIn. Encourage them by some timely flattery – pretend you’ve come across one of their blogs and tag them in your tweet about what an interesting opinion it is. Don’t crowd them though – they’ll be nervous of salespeople, and they’ve heard about these ‘troll’ things.

• Overactive socialites: the volume of content they post might not seem feasible for a busy executive. Observe the tone and accuracy of their language, is it being run by a PR team or agency? If so that might not be a bad thing – it could give you an opportunity to be more direct. Spend time building the relationship, then give them no excuse not to mention the interaction to their exec with a compelling invite to meet. And if it is the exec themselves, you’ve not lost anything.

What this doesn’t consider is that everyone treats social media slightly differently. There are a number of profiles executives can take, and each means something a bit different to the social seller:

The growing importance of social media means many top execs will have managed profiles. So you might never actually speak to them. But the important thing to remember is if that’s the case, it’ll be managed for a reason.

You can learn a lot from observing the way they wish to be perceived, the issues they want to discuss and the relationships they want to build.

Social selling is a huge opportunity right now because of the way social buying will develop. Most social buyers will be new to it. They may use social media to engage with content from potential suppliers, or find out more about those organisations. But most won’t consider themselves social buyers. They’ll be testing the water – meaning the social seller has the opportunity to support, guide and flatter them.

There was a time when receiving an email was a novelty, which made it more effective.

We’ve seen big results over the past year with direct mail, partly because it’s so rare these days. The same is true for social selling and buying – its time is now.

Tip: Social selling techniques can also help you plan campaigns. The insight you can get from

a piece of social listening could inform your content strategy or your approach to the sales conversation, as much as it will help you refine the social media part of your campaign, making it worth the investment.

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SOCIAL SELLING: HOW TO DO ITSocial selling has lots of different

flavours. That’s because social media is such a broad term – there are numerous channels at our disposal and a number of ways to use each one.

We’ve picked ten examples to give you an idea of what your organisation could do. We’ve split it into inbound and outbound social selling activity. The ideal programme would include both – but if you’re just starting out, consider starting with inbound, and once you’ve proven its value, more people will want to be involved in the outbound.

We’ve also given each one a challenge rating – based on how much work’s involved in setting yourself up for it. So you can test the water on some of the simpler stuff first.

INBOUNDSlideShare is great for B2B. It’s SEO-strong, and its lead capture form is a really good way of securing details and gating good content. Just make sure you don’t ask for too many details – how about just a name and a Twitter handle. to keep it social? Challenge rating – high

Events should be at the heart of every social strategy. You need a #tag for every event you host and include it on every invite, presentation or brochure – and you need to make sure you’re set up to respond to incoming tweets. Even if they’re seemingly innocuous expressions of excitement, that can be the start of a relationship and a way to follow up after an event. Challenge rating – medium

Blogs are often forgotten about these days. Posting good content with a strong opinion makes people more likely to have a conversation with you – just make sure they can post replies and comments below it. Ensuring your authors have profiles set up on the blog platform will help too. Challenge rating – low

Every organisation will get inbound posts on Twitter, G+ or LinkedIn. The key to managing them well is preparation – have a process for categorising each comment and know who is responsible for responding promptly and escalating the conversation if it has potential. Review inbound leads monthly as you would any demand gen lead to ensure quality, and test and learn new approaches. Challenge rating – medium

Someone views your LinkedIn profile. It might seem innocuous, but treat it like inbound interest. Consider why they might have done it – because you know someone in common (find out who and leverage that connection); because they’ve come across it on another channel or website (connect with them and find out where); or because they’ve searched for you (definitely connect with them!). Challenge rating – low

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Page 11: Social Selling Playbook

OUTBOUNDSocial listening is becoming more sophisticated. A good tool will help you find everyone that’s talking about the issues you’re interested in, then refine that list to find some prospects. The trick is then to reach out to them quickly following a post or comment – make it personal from one of your ambassadors, and add value to their discussion. Challenge rating – high

In the long-term, social listening will also help you map out a list of influencers who are the top social commentators about those issues. It’ll also tell you what they’re posting – so you can assign owners and cultivate relationships with influencers to develop a network to reach out to prospects you’d be interested in. Challenge rating – medium

Marketing automation will give you a closer link to your prospects and customers. Use it to understand who’s looking at your blogs or website – rather than email or phone them, think about getting one of your ambassadors to connect with them socially and give them similar content to keep sharing. Challenge rating – medium

Integrate social with your other marketing if you don’t have an automation system – track who’s clicking on social links on your emails or following your social channels, and send their details to the relevant account manager. They can then connect with the viewer knowing what topics and social channels they are interested in. Challenge rating – low

As part of specific campaigns, you might want to use social media as a channel. You could use InMail instead of a personal plain text email, or sponsored updates instead of banner ads. It allows you to do something different, get greater cross-channel coverage, and be more personal by adding a face to your brand. Challenge rating – low

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Tip: Social listening can be tricky to get right. Testing and learning is the key – but it’s also important to remember that as most systems

are priced on data usage, you’re not likely to end up spending a fortune in the B2B world, since the number of mentions you’re likely to find about your topics won’t be huge, but will be valuable.

Tip: Sponsoring an update on LinkedIn is a fantastic way to

reach new audiences, particularly because you can target based on something as specific as job function and company name.

Here’s a simple process for sponsoring an update on LinkedIn:

1) Set up an ad account by selecting ‘Advertising’ from the drop-down menu in the top-right of your profile (make sure you’re a registered user of your business account first).

2) Select ‘create your business account’ and fill in the details.

3) Register a card so you can be billed for your activity.

4) To start your first campaign, click on ‘create new campaign’ and choose ‘sponsored updates campaign’.

5) Fill in the details it asks for, then select your target audience according to: location, company, job title, function, seniority, school, skills, LinkedIn groups, gender or age.

6) Set a budget for yourself (start small) and a cost per click – you can change this as your campaign progresses, and set a daily limit to make sure you don’t spend all your budget at once.

7) Log back in to review performance and refine your campaign every day.

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CLOSING THE LOOP: TRACKING, REPORTING AND PROVING THE VALUEIt’s easy to over-think how you track your social media success. Partly because

it’s been written about so much. You can get into all sorts of difficulty trying to painstakingly profile all your new followers every month, or report on the average view times of every YouTube video.

Treat it like you would a demand generation campaign.

Report on all solid leads by creating a lead sheet for the handover to the relevant person or to Marketing. And report monthly on your social selling activity – whether it’s part of a campaign or a separate programme – through a dashboard.

The key to proving the ROI of your social activity is:

- Know who’s engaging with your social channels (marketing automation system; profile your followers).

- Track this through to your CRM system.

- Understand how their business activity changes over time in relation to social touchpoints.

If your organisation isn’t sold on social selling, you might want to provide more than just hard numbers. You could provide another page on your dashboard that gives an overview of the top interactions every month with a brief commentary – so your internal audience starts to understand what you’re doing on social, rather than seeing it as a dark art.

You could also incentivise your programme – include a ranking system for your top five social ambassadors every month, and offer incentives like you would for any sales team.

Here’s what your dashboard might look like:

Tip: Make use of the automatic dashboards provided by social

listening tools, SlideShare, YouTube or management software. For example, SlideShare will give you an idea of where your views are coming from – an important measurement when showing its value, since it might demonstrate how many new viewers you’re getting through organic search, vs. another channel which might be more about ‘known’ individuals.

ROI

714Contacts engaged

Top engagers

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1. Mark Polson (6 tweets)2. Holly MacKay3. Chris Daems4. Robert Caplan5. Gregg McClymont

Audience engaged

Top 5 engagements with our ambassadors Top 5 influencers engaged

Segment Channel Content

Jan June Jan June Jan June

Audience engaged Segment Channel Content

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B2B

B2C

Prospect

OtherGrow acct

Key acctTwitter

LI

Other

YT

C-suite

Other

Business growth

Product 1

LI Engagement Twitter: clicks, mentions & RTs

Followers: LI, Twitter, YT Top Tweets

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A FINAL THOUGHT…Social media is the most talked-about subject for modern

salespeople and marketers. Social selling offers those of us in B2B a way into social media – with a series of techniques and tactics to really get the most out of it.

But it allows us to go further. To date, social strategy has been seen as a box-ticking exercise in most of our industry – something that we’re under pressure to deliver, without the time to focus on developing properly. Social selling is the modern B2B development not just of social strategy, but also of demand generation strategy, and other tactics we’re much more comfortable with. Meaning it represents more than a way into a global trend – it’s part of the future (indeed, the present) of sales and marketing.

This playbook can be your starting point or your check point on your social selling journey.

Either way, it’s a journey that will adapt and change over time. If you’d like more information, connect with me on Twitter (@MattDHarper) or LinkedIn (uk.linkedin.com/in/mattdharper/).

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For feedback and questions relating to this guide, contact Matt Harper.

[email protected]

The Great Barn, The Old Estate Yard, East Hendred, Wantage OX12 8JY

01235 833233


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