CHAPTER 2

THE SOCIAL TRIANGLE OF ONLINE SALES SUCCESS

Bringing Together Social Marketing, Social Commerce, and Social Support

The on-again, off-again relationship between sales and marketing is not a new struggle. For most organizations, there is a continuous balancing act—sometimes an outright tug-of-war—that occurs between these two internal powerhouses when it comes to the customer acquisition strategy. It often results in a blame game that encompasses everything from the quality of marketing collateral and sales presentations to the effectiveness of callback strategies and lead-conversion rates.

Just when you were getting accustomed to this family feud, along comes social media to add more fireworks to the mix. The idea that you can use social networking platforms, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, to influence corporate revenue growth only increases the importance of having a strategic relationship between your company's sales and marketing teams. Yet, deciding the role each team should play within social media is yet another source of frustration within many organizations.

There's the traditional pushback from both camps. Each one claims, “It's not my job!” That attitude is typically rooted in a general lack of understanding about the importance of social media in the modern marketing and sales process. For many salespeople and marketers, there remains the perception that tweets and Facebook posts are frivolous comments about what you ate for lunch or how angry you are because someone just cut you off in traffic. For those who decide to embrace this brave new world of converting the social customer, the real challenge comes in simply figuring out how sales and marketing should collaborate.

Why bother, you ask? Resolving the issue of cross-team integration for social marketing purposes comes with a big reward. In some cases, annual company revenue could increase by as much as 20 percent when there is healthy alignment with sales and marketing, according to research from the Aberdeen Group.¹

Before I get into how to start the collaborative process so that everyone wins the revenue game, there's one more small but potentially fatal weakness. When it comes to social selling, there is a third component that must be added to the sales and marketing mix and that's the role of customer service. Together, these three stakeholders make up the triangle of social success. Let's take a closer look to see why each has a real stake in the game.

MEETING THE DEMANDS OF THE SOCIAL CUSTOMER

There are skeptics who see social media's role in business as nothing more than serving as a public platform for customer complaints. It is true that consumers have embraced social media as a preferred method of brand engagement because it gives them a voice—often, a very loud voice. And, that very loud, very public consumer voice presents a tricky issue for your company.

Traditionally, customer service has been handled offline and out of sight of the rest of your customers. Most likely, if a customer has had a question about your product or service, or is upset about something, she would have only a handful of options: contact you (her sales or account representative) directly; call an 800 number and speak with someone from a customer support call center (which may or may not be based inside the company); send an email to a generic customer service account found on your website; or write a letter (the kind that must be delivered by the U.S. Postal Office—yes, these do still exist!). In each of these cases, you have always had the upper hand. The ball is firmly planted in your court on how, or if, you want to resolve the issue.

As a salesperson or marketer, you know that an unhappy customer translates into one less positive referral, or one fewer customer testimonials for your next slick, corporate brochure. For the customer service department, these unhappy customers may represent a minor, downward tick in one or more customer response reports. But, more than likely, in the traditional service model, that same unhappy customer would not have passed across desks in sales and marketing as well as in customer service. Unless, of course, it was a truly serious issue that had to be escalated to upper management (think food poisoning at a restaurant chain or the report of numerous pieces of faulty equipment at a manufacturing company). In which case, the issue was likely to jump from a low-level entry point, like customer service, straight to the CEO or legal department before trickling down to everyone else's desks. That was then.

Today, social media has turned much of that staid, stale customer service process on its head. Suddenly, everyone in the company must care, every time.

In its “Social Media Report 2012,” Nielsen reported that 47 percent of social media users engaged in “social care,” or the use of social media for the purpose of customer service.² Additionally, 70 percent of those customers claimed to access social care on a monthly basis. Granted, that last number may seem like a red flag, possibly signaling a small group of active customers who are abusing the access that social media provides to companies. However, social care can mean a lot of different things, from a prospective customer asking for product information or other types of product research to a prospect asking to be put in touch with one of your salespersons. The point is that not all social care incidents are complaints. These new interactions also are not limited to your company's Facebook page or Twitter account. Social customers look for support everywhere, from YouTube videos to non-company blogs, such as industry-related blogs and forums.

As the Nielsen report so nicely sums up, the new reality is that, “Customers choose when and where they voice their questions, issues and complaints, blurring the line between marketing and customer service.” I would add that social care not only blurs the lines, but it brings with it the potential to impair your entire sales process, both online and offline.

Here are the challenges that social care presents to your company and, ultimately, to your sales pipeline:

• The curtain is pulled back: No longer can you hide problems behind a phone line. If a customer puts an issue out on social media to be addressed, then it's the equivalent of broadcasting it through the radio. Anyone tuned in to that channel has the potential to hear it. That means prospects, customers, and competitors have equal access to your customers' comments; how you responded to or handled the issues; and whether or not the issues were successfully resolved. And if you choose not to reply at all? Well, ignoring a customer is never a good idea, and is handily rejected in any customer service playbook. When it happens on social media, your lack of response is all that much more visible. To sum it up, the power has shifted from you (the company) to the social consumer.
• Competitors gain behind-the-scenes access: As I mentioned above, everyone who cares to listen now has access to this public customer service channel. It's great information to have, too. A competitor can swoop in on an unhappy customer and initiate a conversation about the alternatives to your company's solution. Similarly, competitors use social care as an opportunity to spot your prospects, those potential customers who may have you on the short list as a product or service provider.

  Almost as important to point out is the access that social care gives to seemingly harmless information. For instance, perhaps a customer simply asks whether your product supports a particular device or application, or wants to know when an updated version of your solution will be available. Whatever information you provide is visible; and if that means chatting about a future product release, then you may inadvertently give away some key corporate data that wasn't officially ready for public consumption.

• Immediacy is expected: Social care warrants a faster response than you may be able to provide. Edison Research shows that 25 percent of customers expect a response within one day when contacting a company via social media, and 12 percent expect to hear back within thirty minutes.³ While about one-third of those surveyed were generous enough to allow “a few days or so,” it's clear that serving your customers through social media channels can easily become an around-the-clock initiative, especially if you have customers in other countries.

  What happens if your customer service team can't keep pace? The worst-case scenario, according to results from Oracle's recent “RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report,” shows that consumers will stop doing business with you if they don't receive a response within a week.⁴ It isn't that customers who engage with you online are more impatient or less forgiving than other customers. It's simply the nature of the beast. Social media is a channel for fluent, often real-time communications and consumers, and your customers have become conditioned to expect a rapid response.

• Established, internal processes are interrupted: Perhaps one of the biggest—and, often most frustrating—parts of social care is that it doesn't fit neatly into your current customer service procedures or customer support guidelines. This is where the lines really begin to blur. Who is responsible for managing and routing customer issues that originate out of social media? Who is supposed to respond—and how or through which channel? What if the issue requires a more complicated technical answer? Is it appropriate to contact the person outside the social network?

  Technical support questions can pose particularly unique challenges for companies that have paid support models in which customers must pay to have access to some level of support for particular products or services. I have also seen the challenges social care presents for technology companies that have open source, or free, products. These companies are often strapped for resources and struggle to provide support through traditional customer service channels, even before social care is added to the mix. The problem boils down to trying to merge the “process” of social care issues into your traditional methods of customer service. Does “square peg, round hole” ring a bell?

• Lack of information to meet system requirements: Finally, consider that many companies now use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or third-party solutions to track all sorts of customer interactions. As you may already know, in customer support these solutions basically allow you to create “virtual” support tickets and to log responses. Or, in sales, they let you create a lead that can be tracked from the top of the sales funnel to the very bottom, whether the prospect buys or doesn't. CRM solutions are often used by both customer service and sales and, increasingly, by marketing teams, but there may or may not be one solution used across all departments. You don't have to be part of a big organization to do battle with a CRM. Because CRM solutions are now more affordable and easy to manage, they are becoming widely used by all sizes of businesses. This includes even very small, one-person operations.

  What do CRM solutions and their adoption rates have to do with social care? These solutions often require a certain amount of information about the customer in order to bring it into the system and create a lead or support ticket. With social media, you may not even have access to a person's full name, let alone an email address or phone number. Like your internal processes, the software systems that you use to support those processes are traditionally not set up to support social care.

  In Chapter 7, I cover lots of other types of tools and applications that are helpful as part of the social selling process, including some innovative CRM solutions. Here I will simply point out that there are CRM solutions that are beginning to provide a formal way to introduce into the system the customer who originates from social media. This initiative with CRM systems is still in its infancy, however. So the challenge remains—for now.

CAPTURING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

No matter which, if any, CRM solution you use, and regardless of your company's processes for tracking customer service issues, handling social care presents some interesting opportunities. It's also clear that customer service is an important link in the social selling chain. As an example, think about the challenges I detailed above, and then consider the following social care scenario.

Imagine a customer asks your company a question, using Twitter. To make it really interesting, let's say that an intern from the marketing department is the one who first sees the question and then sends it in an email that's copied to the entire inside sales team. One of the salespersons reads it and determines the question is a support issue. She then forwards the email to customer service. All the customer service representatives are busy taking calls and ignore the in-house email, considering it to be a lower priority. Sometime the next day, the email gets someone's attention in customer service. It turns out to be a simple question that merely required directing the customer to one of the company's online support pages. The customer service representative responds to the intern's original email, sending her the response, which includes a link to the website. Unfortunately, the intern only works three days a week and is out of the office until the following Monday.

In the meantime, the customer's original question is still hanging out in the public sphere, awaiting an answer. And, anyone who sees the question in Twitter can also see that no one has responded to it, at least not publicly. As a reminder, the marketing team has set up your company's Twitter feed so that it automatically populates on the sidebar of every page of your website and company blog. That means the latest tweets about your company are constantly in view to your website visitors, even if they don't normally follow you on Twitter.

Obviously, there are many problem points within this scenario, and marketing, sales, and customer service each contributed to the poor handling of the customer request. By the way, while this may seem a worst-case situation that would rarely occur, I can assure you it's not all that uncommon. I've even witnessed this one firsthand! Here are the highlights of what went wrong:

• Slow response: It took far too long to get an answer to the customer.
• Wasted time: Too many people were unnecessarily included in the process, making it a potential time waster, especially for the sales team.
• Faulty process: The hand-off process was broken. The lack of a defined path made it impossible to provide what should have been a quick answer to a simple question; at the very least, the intern should have acknowledged the tweet and let the customer know someone from the company was working on a response.
• Lack of ownership: No stakeholder, or anyone with actual authority, had ownership of the process. This made it easy for the request to slip through the cracks, and go too long without a response.

As a result of a situation like this, your customer walks away with a negative experience that she is likely to share with hundreds or thousands of her social media connections. Potentially, the delay in response also gave one of your competitors the opportunity to start a conversation with the customer and show that they are actively engaged in the process of social listening. At the very least, both competitors and prospective customers have seen you drop the ball and may see it as a reflection of how you treat customers.

On the flip side, I recently experienced a similar situation on Twitter that was handled almost flawlessly. It's a great example of how easy it is to respond to a social media request. Figure 2–1 shows my brief exchange on Twitter with the company, LivePerson. In a happy coincidence, they had tweeted results of some research about how quickly customers expect to receive help when making online purchases. In case you skim over the tweets, allow me to point out that five minutes (yes, five!) is all the time that customers are willing to wait for assistance before leaving and going somewhere else, according to their research. Because I was writing about this very topic when I received the tweet, I felt compelled to ask a question and test their own social media responsiveness. I was pleasantly surprised to have my tweet acknowledged within a minute or two. While LivePerson's social media team couldn't provide an immediate answer to my question (I really wasn't trying to stump them, I was simply curious—I promise!), they did offer to hunt down the answer and get back with me. Though I flirted with the possibility that I would never hear back, LivePerson followed through on their promise. It took a full day to hear back, but I got my answer—and I felt good about the interaction.

That said, when critiquing LivePerson's interaction, there is something they could have done better. Most definitely they get an A+ for “active social listening”—that is, monitoring their social media channels for comments and questions related to their brand. I give them another A+ for a quick initial response and for following through and providing an answer to my question. After that, however, their performance falters because they didn't successfully flag me as a potential lead. In other words, the hand-off to sales didn't happen.

FIGURE 2–1

From a prospective customer's viewpoint, LivePerson did everything right. But they missed an opportunity—a social selling opportunity. Don't misunderstand. It would not have been appropriate for LivePerson to ask me if I wanted to see a demo of their solution—that would have been a bit too much, too soon. However, I expressed an interest in what they were saying, and I was asking for specific information. Because they let me know that information would be available in the near future, it would have been perfectly reasonable for them to offer to send me the information once it was obtainable. This way, they would potentially capture my name and email address. Or, they could have asked if I would like to be added to an email list to get updates about this or similar research—again, capturing my contact information and transitioning me out of social media and into their internal sales process so that they could begin to nurture me as a lead.

TAKING SHAPE AND CONNECTING ALL THE DOTS

While this chapter could very easily focus only on the importance of taking care of your customers through social media, there's obviously much more to it. After all, the crux of the book is learning how to sell through social media. And doing that successfully requires a united front from your customer service, marketing, and sales teams. As the previous examples show, it's easy for the sales process to get overlooked when marketing is busy educating prospects without also focusing on pulling them through the sales funnel; or for the sales process to get halted when poor customer service impedes the opportunity to sell socially. It's also possible that each of your teams may be doing their respective jobs well, and yet, collectively, you're not excelling when it comes to increasing conversions and growing revenue through social media channels.

Collaboration is often easier said than done. Whether you're in sales or marketing or customer service, there is a risk in deciding to work with others. Each group has something to gain or lose and a change in any process can negatively impact a myriad of goals by which each is measured. For sales, there is often concern with how process impacts commissions and pipeline; marketing may be fighting for a bigger budget and more control over systems; and customer support may be wrapped up in protecting recurring revenues and meeting already tight customer service metrics. It's hard enough to fight your own battles. It can become particularly frustrating when you are told that your welfare is now closely tied to another group's performance. But as the saying goes, with great risk comes great reward.

I might argue that bringing together these three groups to attempt social selling is hardly risky. But I have heard plenty of horror stories to the contrary! This is usually the point where I might insert one of those horrifying stories of the clash of the sales and marketing titans, and try to put a humorous spin on it. Instead, I want to share an interesting fact about hawks.

Have you ever watched a hawk circling its prey? If so, you probably saw not only one hawk, but several of them hovering in the skies. I used to think the large number of birds meant a large animal had already bitten the dust and it was now easy pickings for all the feasting creatures in close proximity. It turns out that's not the case, at least where the breed of Harris hawk is concerned. This type of hawk exhibits a rare form of social behavior when it comes to pursuing its food source. Harris hawks are quite organized, and work together in groups of at least five or six when hunting prey. This socialized hunting strategy has earned them the nickname “wolves of the sky.” It's also earned the Harris hawk the reputation as one of the best hunters. You might see one or two of the birds in a group watch for or track a likely target, while the others implement an orchestrated flight focused on pursuing and capturing the prey. Hunting in a group also allows the hawks to watch out for and protect against other competitors that may want the same prized prey.

Notice any similarities between the social hunting strategy of the Harris hawk and the collaborative approach to social selling? While I'm not suggesting you or any of your colleagues go after a prospect in social media like a predator going in for a kill, I am pointing out that it's possible to devise a strategy for effectively working together to both generate more leads across social networks and to deter competitors from taking advantage of poorly handled social interactions with your customers and prospects.

Social selling barriers are often rooted in an organization's internal chaos, or a lack of formal commitment and structured plan. These barriers not only lead to poor customer support and missed sales opportunities, but to a diminished amount of trust in the brand by the company's customers. How do you bring together sales, marketing, and customer service to combat these barriers?

Successful integration across departments for a social selling model requires the following:

• Buy-in from key stakeholders: Rarely does any type of corporate change get approval for launch, let alone have staying power, without the backing of key executives. When it comes to a structured, integrated social selling plan, this means getting buy-in all the way up to the vice-presidents of each team, and possibly the stamp of approval from the CEO. That's because many companies are still contemplating how much time to spend on social media in general, let alone considering using the time of top-performing salespersons. It's also helpful to also have a champion, someone who is passionate about the opportunity social selling holds, to help sell the idea to all the stakeholders.
• Clearly defined roles across each of the teams: Especially in the beginning, it's probably not necessary for every person in all three core teams (marketing, sales, and customer service) to be involved with social selling. Identify one or two people from each team who can take the lead. Make it clear what each person's role is and create a written definition of those roles to ensure everyone agrees with the plan.
• Development of a formal process: This really comes down to defining the hand-off between divisions. Once you know the individual roles, it's much easier to map out a formal process. It must spell out who will be responsible for different points in the process, how social media leads will be identified and passed to sales, how social care issues will be responded to, the acceptable time frame for response for each, and when and how these customer support issues and lead opportunities will be integrated into your other CRM solutions or other in-house processes/applications.
• Shared resources across departments, when necessary: In reality, especially in smaller organizations, there may not be unlimited resources (time, people, budget) to dedicate to social selling. This is where integration across teams becomes particularly important. You may need to share resources.

  Yes, share! That may mean that a team member from customer service is loaned to the marketing department to help monitor social media channels and route requests and responses. Or, it may be that a member of your sales team is needed to help not only respond to sales requests, but also to participate in social conversations (something that has been traditionally assumed to be a marketing role).

• Commitment of adequate resources, including budget and time: There are never enough resources to go around. But when developing an integrated social selling strategy across multiple departments, it's very important to formally allocate adequate budget and staff and get all stakeholders to agree on it.
• Agreement on the social media platforms to receive your focus: Often, various teams (or team members) will have a favorite social media network, the one where they feel most comfortable. You may be the same way. If you spend most of your time on Facebook, you want to make sure that's where you start your social selling endeavors. While there is an advantage to being familiar with the social media outlet, you also want to make sure it is the right place for your company to start selling. Is it really the network where your customers are? How many social networks can your team reasonably manage to monitor and engage? You can't be everywhere—and you don't need to be. So agree ahead of time which social media platforms are right for your business and ripe with your active prospects and customers.
• Ability to identify and transition the social “hand-off” to the appropriate team: Knowing when and how to hand off a sales lead is critical. Set aside time for your integrated team to discuss what qualifies as a warm lead in social selling and how and when it should be passed to someone (and decide to whom) for follow-up outside of the social network where it was identified.
• Implementation and use of tools that assist with the process: There is a wide range of tools, from social monitoring tools to CRM solutions, that your team can use to make social selling easier. I go into various tools in detail in Chapter 7, but for now, know that it's important for you to identify which tools your teams will use and make sure everyone has access and knows how to use them.
• Integration or modification of existing processes and tools with new applications and procedures: It's very likely your teams will need to bring in new tools that are more specific to monitoring and managing customer interactions on social media. Take time to discuss how you can marry the new tools with your existing applications and processes.
• Flexibility to make modifications if the approach isn't netting the anticipated results: Perhaps this is one of the most critical steps when working with an integrated team approach. The social selling process will present some hits and misses for each and all of the sales, marketing, and customer service teams, especially early in the process. Publicly recognize that there will be some trial and error and that things may not go just as you planned. Most importantly, agree that when that happens you won't immediately bail on the process, but will instead work with the teams to make necessary adjustments and tweaks to find a better process for everyone.

Once you, along with the major stakeholders in the organization, have made the commitment to an integrated approach to social selling, the real fun begins! It starts with learning some basic rules of online socializing. No matter how organized and dedicated you are within your company, you can deter or offend even the best prospects if you are not adept at talking with customers on social networking channels. Are you ready to dive into the ten most important rules for social conversations? In Chapter 3, I review everything you need to know to be comfortable chatting online to ensure you are part of a winning conversation.