Social Selling: The New Practitioner's Guide

Complex sales involve a number of different people. You will find multiple decision makers, buyers, each having a completely different role and need than the next one. As a sales professional, it is up to you to work within the ranges of expertise and knowledge to present your solution in a compelling manner. This is where social selling helps!

Don't Use Social to Generate Sales; Make Selling Social

Some say we can't value social-marketing efforts directly. Others claim that if we can't attribute a return on investment, we shouldn't be doing it. But maybe we're all missing the point. Maybe the problem is not whether social value can be measured in dollars. Perhaps the issue is that we can't measure in dollars objectives that weren't intended to be profitable in the first place.

Relationship Intensity and ROI Measurement

I had the honour, last week, of joining many insightful and intelligent people at the eMetrics conference in Toronto. Self-defined: eMetrics is “big data for Marketers; this is a comprehensive event dedicated to digital analytics and marketing optimization”.

Some very smart speakers sharing case studies, tools and exposés on best practices, tools and, of course, metrics to ensure your business is successful. Attending (and speaking) at this conference reinforces my belief that: without ROI, no business can survive. And, it is critically important for business operators to understand what they are measuring, and to have the skills and ability to draw a path between metrics and business profit. I have no doubt that the conference attendees were introduced to some fantastic tools and methods to help them have further success, and more importantly: measure it.

Search to social: The evolution of hotel bookings

Social has evolved beyond engagement into demand generation. While, at present, users may not necessarily be going to Facebook with travel intentions in mind, it is increasingly becoming a media to reach consumers by both creating awareness as well as now targeting consumers with expressed purchase travel intentions.

The mid to late 2000s saw hotels capitalize on search in an effort to get in front of potential customers, moving them to supplier direct forms of transacting both online and offline.

The Social Selling Iceberg

In B2B selling, Twitter and LinkedIn are valuable sources of leads, but to work on the "below water" steps of the sales process, companies need an enterprise social network.

When people talk about "social selling," they usually mean using the big public social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to find potential customers, and turn these into sales leads. These networks are an ideal place to do this, because they provide a massive ready-made audience. For very simple sales processes typical of business to consumer selling, this may be sufficient as a sole means of social selling.

But B2B selling has a far more complex sales cycle with a lot more people involved, and much more complex relationships between them. Finding leads is just the tip of the iceberg and, as everyone knows, 90 percent of an iceberg is below water. So in B2B selling Twitter and LinkedIn are valuable sources of leads, but they don't provide the right environment for collaboration throughout the sales cycle.

3 Tips For Effectively Growing & Managing Your Online Community

We live in a world where shopping, dating, watching new films and networking can all be done online.  In fact, these actions (and many more) have become a part of our everyday life.  Many of us may experience buyers remorse for purchasing something online that wasn’t within budget, a desire to post a bad review after a terrible movie, or have a sense of regret after a bad date.

4 Ways to Dip a Toe into Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship has arrived. And even though some still look at the concept as quaint or the next level up from volunteering, the idea of having a business with a social mission will, in all likelihood, serve as the future foundation for many Gen Y startups to come. So it makes sense to get in at the ground level.

But if starting up your own social venture sounds too daunting, consider dipping your toe into the waters of social entrepreneurship by way of consulting. Here are four ways to get started. Who knows? Maybe you’ll like it.

Social Selling – This Could Take a While

A few things happened to me this week that remind me how long It can take for new sales techniques to be adopted – and become a habit with sales people.

I was discussing a situation with one of my sales consultant friends where they are seeing a sales force where solution selling is still only a skill of the minority.

This sales force is largely made up of “product presenters” that don’t ask about the prospect’s business. These sales people show up to sales meetings and say things like “check out our new product. It’s great, right?” and “look at such-and-such a feature” rather than saying things like “what are your major business challenges? And how are you going about achieving those?”

Future of Customer Service in a Social World

In the good old days, if we had to contact our bank or for that matter any business, we used to reach out to our phones and give them a call.

The call would then be routed to a call center (usually, after about 10-15 minutes of listening to some music that would be played while we waited for an agent to get free and take our call).

This, of course would be after having had to find our way through the maze of options (which used to be so complicated that it required us to be entirely focused on the options, blacking out everything else in life).

Then the times changed. Emails got ubiquitous and we could write an email to contact with the business. However, we still used the phone as the primary means for contacting someone at the business who could help us solve whatever it was that we were trying to solve.

The 5 Main Secrets of Social Business Marketing

Most organizations currently use the traditional business set up, which gives the executive ultimate control over business operations. That means that the executive makes all the critical business decisions alone. This is a relatively good business strategy although for it to function excellently; the executive has to be exceptionally good and experienced. A much better business strategy however, is social business. Instead of the executive holding complete control over an organization, social business distributes the management and operational powers to all the organization communities. These communities include employees, employers, customers, consultants, volunteers, customers, etc. They are all collectively involved in making the critical decisions in a company and running it. This is a very beneficial business strategy especially when it comes to marketing.

There is no social success without openness and transparency

Social marketing changes every day – new tools, new strategies, new best practices. So I had a chat with Adam Metz, VP of Business Development at The Social Concept, to talk about the state of social today. Adam has consulted with nearly 200 companies on how to acquire, manage, monetize, and retain customers from the social web. His first book, There Is No Secret Sauce, has sold or downloaded over 3000 copies, and his second, The Social Customer, recently hit #1 on the Amazon marketing charts.

Everyone is always talking about important social media is for brands and retailers but, in your opinion, has anybody really figured out a way to effectively measure social?

Social Selling Blurs the Line Between Marketing and Sales

In the past, marketing and sales had distinct roles. Marketing generated leads while sales converted those leads. Social media has blurred these separate responsibilities because applications like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have given every salesperson the potential to be an individual marketer. Innovative companies are seizing this social selling opportunity by implementing a new type of collaboration between marketing and sales. This collaborative method can be seen in a social selling pilot by IBM, which reported a 400 percent sales increase.

Let’s Get Social! 5 Ways to Build Your Employee Social Media Culture

You are working on your social media strategy and have determined your target audience, messaging, and how you plan to participate. You have even assigned a resource specifically to manage your social media presence and have begun to see some great results. Now you want to roll it out company wide and encourage your employees to participate. By having your teams participate actively in social media, you can create brand evangelists who will work to create relationships with both customers and prospects.

Place Your Employees at the Heart of your Social Strategy

Having your employees well trained in social media practices is a great asset to any company with an online presence. It can prevent counter productive personal social media activity whilst increasing business efficiency and relationships with customers and other businesses.

The press has been filled with stories about employees that have been disciplined for posts on their own personal social media accounts and interviewees being asked for their Facebook passwords during interviews. Employers realise that what their employees post on their own social network profiles can reflect badly on them as a business. To combat this issue, many large companies are attempting to build an internal understanding between them and their employees around social media.

How Effective is Social Bookmarking For Blogs?

Social Bookmarking sites provide a flexible way for your readers to bookmark your articles and organize them. I’ve seen everyone mention about social bookmarking in post-panda link building. So how effective is

Social Bookmarking actually, to your blog?

There are many sites which users use to bookmark the best of content from web like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and many others. These sites are not only useful for users, but for site owners such bookmarking sites are very effective. Though, there are pros and cons of social bookmarking for example, traffic from stumbleupon triggers your bounce rate where as social bookmarking links are considered very valuable after recent Google algo updates.
Benefits of social Bookmarking

Time as the Social Competitive Advantage

Let’s say we are sitting in a Imagerestaurant having lunch.

You ask me, “how was your weekend?”

Then, I sit there for 20 minutes, saying nothing. Finally, I say “oh, it was great, we went to the beach.”

That would be pretty awkward, right?

3 Easy Steps to Social Selling

Social selling; it’s not asking about your client’s weekend or their kids.  It’s about utilizing social media to increase sales.  Do you know how it works and should your sales reps even care?

Sales has always been about doing business with people you know.  Networking and leveraging relationships through meetings, conferences, organizations, etc., has been the traditional path to create connections.  The advent of social media has changed this model. Gone are the days of sitting at your desk “working the phones.”  With Sales 2.0 technology, customers can obtain company and product data long before they meet with you.  Considering the majority of prospects never (or almost never) take a meeting from a cold call or e-mail, progressive salespeople need to know how to go from click to closed.

7 Traits of Highly Successful Social CEO's

Rising through the ranks is never easy but today it takes more than mere talent or even leadership skills; modern managers, small business owners, entrepreneurs and CEO’s must be adept communicators and social giants. As a social media management firm, we encounter our fair share of budding entrepreneurs, small business owners and top brass CEO’s; there are always a few that stand out head and shoulders above the rest. Of course, our observations are also supported by the research into what makes some CEO’s better suited for social media while others seem to lag behind. Is it age? Gender? Personality type? Nope…none of the above! Do you have what it takes to reach the top? See for yourself by comparing these 7 traits found among highly successful social CEO’s:

Social Networking Meets B2B Marketing

Ed Buchholz found venture funding for his startup on Twitter.

After releasing the first version of its forecasting and management tool for small businesses, 60mo, a 10-person startup in Cleveland, Ohio, needed to raise capital. Buchholz's first choice was Lightbank, a new fund in Chicago. Buchholz tried all the usual channels -- phone calls, emails, submitting through Lightbank's website -- but received no response.

So he Tweeted, "Hey @Lightbank, we should chat sometime. Mid-westerners gotta stick together, yo."

Someone from Lightbank responded immediately, setting up a meeting for two days later. Buchholz left that meeting with an offer.

Writing Your Social Strategy

This is where things get a little tough—you actually have to write the strategy. And this is where all of the social media gurus are going to come up short. Because in all the time it took them to tell you you needed to Facebook and tweet your business, they skipped over The Art of War, The Fifth Discipline, and W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

Blue Ocean Strategy doesn’t even mention social media or CRM in its 239 pages, but it’s all about how to make the competition totally irrelevant (avoiding the battles that create a “bloody red ocean,” or Red Ocean strategy, where rivals battle over a shrinking kitty of profits), reach a ton of customers, and do it all at the lowest possible cost.