Building the Social Selling Process into a Large Organization

Matt Petitjean is vice president of marketing at ADP, Inc., a large provider of business processing, payroll systems, and cloud-based solutions to employers around the world. Besides marketing, Petitjean is also responsible for social selling at ADP. “My charter is enabling the sales force with social tools and techniques,” he says. “We have a big funnel to generate sales leads, and no matter where you interact with the prospect—a trade show, a brand advertisement, a web search, or social media—our efforts are all coordinated, centered, and focused on helping move these contacts through the funnel.”

ADP is a large and successful company with more than 5,000 salespeople located around the world. This makes it a challenge for Petitjean to implement strategies that might appear to involve additional work for the salespeople and their managers. Social media savvy and experience are among the most valued skills when hiring candidates for new rep positions. This previous experience can be easily augmented with in-house rep training. Veteran salespeople and their managers, however, need to be educated to understand how social media can benefit them and help them sell more efficiently. “To be successful, you train people in a way that makes this a part of their job,” he says. “It doesn't become a choice of ‘Do I do social, or do I do something else?’ They need to ask, ‘How do I work this into my selling process?’ and ‘How can I then augment my selling process with these social techniques?’”

Petitjean says there are four important components to the social selling process. He articulates his strategy throughout the organization using this four-part model: tools, communications, training, and measurement.

The first quadrant is the tools. “This could be tools within LinkedIn to help salespeople see who they are connected to,” he explains. “We tell them, ‘If you're going to have a phone conversation, a sales pitch, or an executive overview session with someone, look at their LinkedIn profile first; it's a very simple thing to do.’ We suggest they look at their company's LinkedIn profile as well, to better understand the hot topics they're dealing with.”

Besides social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn, other tools help with more specific sales tasks, such as keeping track of trigger events. As an example, Petitjean offers this scenario: “If I sold payroll to a customer, and that person changed jobs from Company A to Company B, I would want to send a note to that person saying, ‘Hey, I just saw that you moved companies. I'm not sure who you're using for payroll, but if there's anything I can do, please feel free to reach out to me.’” A trigger event could be a company going public or acquiring another firm. Or it could be a company being acquired. Finding those trigger events in social media tends to be easy. Many of the social tools used by ADP are free, and many salespeople were already using some of them, especially LinkedIn. However, other tools, such as those from the Salesforce.com network—for example, Radian6 and Buddy Media—are also either used centrally by ADP or purchased and deployed to the salespeople.

ADP also uses a social media database that includes a large collection of content ready to be used by its salespeople. “We provide legally approved, marketing-approved tweets, LinkedIn updates, status updates, success stories, things like that. These are available in a database that is segmented to align with our sales population,” Petitjean says. “So if you're selling large solutions to enterprise-size companies, you use different types of social media nuggets than if you're in small business sales, or if you're selling insurance, or if you're selling retirement.”

The second quadrant in the ADP social selling strategy is communications. Petitjean communicates to thousands of salespeople, providing ready-to-use content. Because he is in charge of both social selling at ADP as well as marketing, he can align the content with the way that people sell. “We make it really, really easy,” he says. “A rep can just retweet what we say. You know it's approved, and you're helping the brand because you amplify the message. That's the whole point. We have 5,000 or 6,000 salespeople; they should help us amplify the marketing message, just like they help the brand every time they hand someone a business card or show up with a printed piece. You can do the same thing with social, so don't feel compelled to write your own content; feel free to share what we're sharing.”

The third quadrant is training the ADP sales teams so they are able to make use of the company-provided social tools and content. “Training ranges from introductory uses and boot camp training to certifications,” Petitjean says. Some training is delivered in person and can be customized, while other sessions are delivered via the web. Training basics start with setting up a Twitter profile, finding things to tweet, and suggestions for using LinkedIn more effectively. They also provide information about why salespeople should be active on social networks and the long-term benefits for sales.

Petitjean says the way they suggest sharing content can also serve to train salespeople. “We explain the tools and tips and new things that are out there,” he says. “We show them a blog article about innovation and how to share it. Or we suggest they send a tweet with a link to the article.”

The final quadrant in the ADP social selling model is measuring and monitoring. While the marketing team pays close attention to what's being said about the company as it affects the overall brand, it's important to monitor agile sales strategies. “If a rep had some very, very positive interaction with a number of clients, I might want to contact someone to say, ‘Hey, John Miller just shared this really great piece of content, and he's getting lots of engagement,’” Petitjean suggests. “It informs what kind of content we should be delivering to the sales force, but it also indicates how other people may want to interact with their clients.”

The team also monitors public social networks for things that might negatively impact ADP. “After we started monitoring, we had to ask ourselves what happens when something goes wrong,” Petitjean says. “So we built escalation and playbook processes. A one-off comment by one salesperson, whether it's a picture or a video or even just a text to a link, has the potential to do damage to the brand.” An important aspect of monitoring the public social feeds of employees is a governance policy that was created to define what's appropriate to say on social networks and what's not. The governance team includes people representing products, sales, service, human resources (HR), legal, and global security.

The ADP social selling model had been used for two years before I had an opportunity to speak with Matt Petitjean, so they've had an opportunity to measure the results. “We've looked at a group of sales associates who used social, versus a control group who didn't,” Petitjean says. “It was fair; we didn't stack the deck to include only the star performers in social media. We also compared these results to the ADP sales organization as a whole. Using key performance indicators important to ADP—which are the same indicators any sales force would reference—we found that the group that incorporated social media in their work consistently outperformed the control group, as well as the sales organization as a whole.”

Rolling out social selling to a sales organization of more than 5,000 professionals isn't easy, yet Petitjean's measurable success at ADP shows that if you have a plan and there's commitment throughout the organization, you can be more successful with social selling.

Hiring for Social Success

The old model of a successful salesperson was somebody who was very diligent at dialing for dollars. That person had to be tenacious and able to tolerate many people saying “no” (some with rudeness). With the new approaches of consultative selling, agile sales, and real-time engagement, sales managers need to look for a new set of skills when hiring salespeople.

“Our best people get on the phones and build trust as step one,” says HubSpot's Mark Roberge, who has hired hundreds of salespeople. “And there's a range of ways one can build trust. A good doctor builds trust when you walk into his office. You see his diploma on the wall, and if he's skilled he immediately gives you his complete attention. A salesperson can build trust from having a great LinkedIn profile, asking smart questions, making observations about the business, or giving someone a free information tip. And once the salesperson has the client's trust, the next step is to figure out what's going through the client's head, what's their strategy, what are their priorities, what are their goals. It's much more about diagnosing and prescribing and much less about pitching and closing.”

So when hiring salespeople, what do you look for in order to differentiate those who act like good doctors? “A couple of decades ago, it was someone who was just smart enough to be able to memorize the 10-page sales playbook and display the aggressiveness of a varsity football captain. This was someone who could get pummeled to the ground 10 times but never failed to get up, and worked tirelessly to make it happen,” Roberge says. “We've moved away from that. I've had management consultants come onboard as salespeople. I've had MBAs come onboard. I've had engineers come onboard. They have a higher degree of business acumen. They have a quicker learning curve. They have a higher level of intelligence. And they can come near the status of a consultant or advisor with the buyers that they are speaking to.”

The other significant attributes of a successful salesperson are social media skills and an existing network of contacts. A hiring manager in 1980 might have asked sales candidates about their Rolodexes and how many people they knew in the sales territory. Now the hiring manager can check out the potential employee on LinkedIn and Twitter, and can see if the person maintains a blog or has a YouTube channel. These personal branding attributes are important in today's selling because they are essential sales tools, and because they are the things a potential buyer will look at when a salesperson makes contact. So if you're hiring salespeople or customer service staff, it's very easy to instantly gauge job candidates' connections before they are invited in for an interview.

Greg Alexander from Sales Benchmark Index says a person's network of online contacts is a new set of competencies that should be considered during the hiring process. He calls this someone's social personal branding: the ability to create and perpetuate a digital brand that portrays expertise. “If you are a salesperson trying to open up a new account, expect the decision maker at that potential new client to Google you before the initial appointment. What's your online brand? Previously you didn't have to care about that. Why? The way you made a first impression years ago was you wore a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie; you shined your shoes, brushed your teeth, and combed your hair, and you had a shave. You had a firm handshake, and you looked somebody in their eyes, and this made your first impression. That first impression today now happens online. What's your equivalent of all that? It's a LinkedIn profile typically. That's a new competency.”

Because of that new competency, Roberge and Alexander advocate that organizations clearly define that making a great first impression online should be a requirement when hiring salespeople. What social personal branding attributes should you research before considering someone for a position? Depending on the type of company, you should consider LinkedIn connections, Twitter followers, content creation via social platforms like blogs and YouTube, and more. If you run an existing sales team, you might benchmark a prospective new employee's social personal brand against the salespeople who have achieved the greatest success through social selling.

“Years ago,” Alexander reflects, “when being interviewed for a sales position, the candidate would say, ‘I've been in this territory for 10 years, and I've called on this account, that account, and that account.’ But there was really no way for the interviewer to verify that. Today a sales manager just goes to the person's LinkedIn network and looks over their connections and checks out their social personal branding.”

Alexander says social personal branding is so critical today because of the nature of sales referrals. Because of this, it is essential to hire people with the largest potential referral networks already in place.

“Think about the old ways we used to generate referrals,” Alexander says. “You would go to a trade show, you would meet somebody, and you would swap business cards. But that offline activity didn't scale, because if you hand me your business card, I just know you. Once that activity gets moved online through a network like LinkedIn, then when you hand me your business card, we connect online too and I now know how to connect to everybody that you know. I can peek into your network. That takes a single connection and turns it into thousands of connections. Yes, I could be irresponsible and abuse that privilege, or I can be respectful and use that to my advantage. There's a phrase that we use called ‘social debt.’ This means, if I am a valuable resource for a prospect, and I give and give and give, at some point I'm going to have earned the right to ask for a favor. I might say, ‘Hey, Joe, I noticed in your network that you know Mike Smith, who works at this company. We do work for companies like that. Mike might be experiencing these problems. We have expertise in these areas, and we would like to meet him. Would you be kind enough to provide an introduction?’ That's social referral generation. That's a whole new set of skills required by salespeople. The organizations that are doing that well are producing phenomenal sales results.”

As critical new skills become important in the new social selling model, you need to ensure you're hiring the right people. Over time, you might need to consider if your existing people are right for the new realities. Are they able to adapt? What about the team that manages the salespeople? Are your sales leaders the right people to carry your company forward?

Sales Managers Must Adapt, Too

In my past roles as a marketing executive at a handful of different companies, I interacted on a daily basis with sales managers up to the vice president level. All of these people had been successful individual contributors early in their careers. Because they had met their sales quotas and were among top producers, they were promoted into junior management positions as player/coaches, and then the ones who did well at this level were promoted to director and then VP level, where they managed a few dozen to hundreds of people in their sales teams. I recall that sales managers spent a great deal of time managing the metrics of the people in their teams, with data showing how many cold calls were made, how many leads were followed up on, and the number of meetings booked, all of which were predictive of sales success.

Just like individual salespeople now require new competencies that build social personal branding, sales managers and senior sales leaders must learn new skills and manage a new set of metrics. Managers must realize that when salespeople are interacting on Twitter or updating their LinkedIn profiles, this activity is more likely to contribute toward eventual sales than cold-calling a buyer. At some organizations, using social networking services during work hours is banned. This is ridiculous, of course. But even in those organizations where it isn't an outright policy violation, many sales managers don't allow time for social networking or give credit to the people who use social media effectively to build business.

“A sales manager's job is the same today as it was throughout the history of sales management,” says Greg Alexander. “They have to be an effective coach, and their job is to make the salespeople more successful. What has changed is how they coach and what resources the salesperson is given. For example, if I'm a sales manager and I want my team to use something like social selling, I have to teach my salespeople how to create content on networks like LinkedIn. I have to teach them about content that will nurture leads and how to syndicate it across their social connections. Years ago I used to teach them how to make a cold call. It's completely different now.”

This new sales management approach must be understood and encouraged all the way to the top of an organization. Alexander says it's still rare to find sales managers who are good at managing to the new social selling reality, but he lays the blame on senior management. “There are a lot of sales managers that are way behind the curve,” he says. “I'm sympathetic, because it's difficult when companies are still measuring them using old-school metrics and holding them accountable to yesterday's business process execution. I talk to a lot of them in the course of my business, and while many of them tell me they want to use social selling, it's difficult to find the time because their company requires them to do countless other things that consume 100 percent of their capacity.”

As you implement social selling, carry out real-time customer service, and develop into an agile company, make sure that the people up at the top of the organization understand what's required. You'll need to ensure that your management team is operating to the right metrics to drive success in this new world.

Training for Social Success

A salesperson's social personal brand is his or her most important asset, and the ability to communicate and show empathy on social networks is a critical skill for customer service representatives. Yet it is still rare that corporate training for salespeople and customer service staff includes courses on social networking. This needs to change.

If your salespeople are communicating only through traditional channels, you need to start by showing them that social channels can be far more successful. A LinkedIn network, for example, becomes their personal database. Once they have a connection, they have been granted permission and a very personal communication channel is now open to that person. With traditional sales, the telephone and email are the primary way to reach out to a buyer. But with people receiving hundreds of emails a day, it is tough if not impossible to break through. And today, phone calls go directly into voicemail or are screened by support staff. If I send an email, it's now email number 321 in somebody's inbox that day. But if I reach out to a connection on LinkedIn, mine might be one of a tiny handful of messages and it will be looked at. That's a whole new competency that can be taught—both the strategies and the tactics. Salespeople need to be trained on how to expand their reach, and how to make themselves attractive to other executives so that other executives will want them in their network. It's a new skill.

Managers need to build time into people's daily routines to allow them to participate in social media and cultivate their personal brands online. “Take one less hour of cold-calling,” says HubSpot's Mark Roberge. “Take one less hour of going out to that networking event, and spend that hour in social media. Spend that hour on those blogs, commenting, visiting the LinkedIn groups, and running your own blog, and see which one yields more.”

At HubSpot, training on social media is an important aspect of salespeople's introduction to the company. “Every single salesperson that goes through HubSpot sales training creates their own blog. They all amass a Twitter following of at least a hundred people. The business owners that they speak to say, ‘You're the fourth person who's called me. Why should I talk to you?’ That's when the HubSpot salesperson suggests they do a Google search on a topic of relevance, which includes either a blog they wrote or a piece that makes reference to them. They can then say, ‘That's me right there,’ and it immediately positions them as an expert. They have quickly leaped into a consultative doctor–patient type of relationship.”

The same thing is true for training customer service representatives: You need to build social networking into your training programs. For example, new staff members in the social customer service role at American Airlines are put through a rigorous training program. “We work with them on everything from grammar and written style, to knowledge about the brand, to understanding context clues on social media, and when to get involved and when not to,” says Jonathan Pierce, director of social communications for American Airlines. “After training, and before someone can work the public channel, we go into a practical mentored situation for a couple of weeks. And when they finally work the public channel, they undergo a period of quality control and monitoring. We make an important investment in training. It's essential when you start to scale social, as it's a very important part of your strategy.”

A New Kind of Company

Putting the ideas of this book to work at your organization means you're creating a new kind of company, one that is agile and one that is social. It doesn't matter if you're running your own single-person company, or a small business of a few dozen people, or a major enterprise with hundreds of thousands of employees—the ideas are the same and the nature of the required change is similar.

GutCheck has developed a powerful niche as a web solution that enables people to conduct detailed online research in less time than usual, sometimes within hours. Because GutCheck sells to a savvy audience of people looking for agile market research, the way GutCheck sells and services clients must be aligned to this new reality of speed. Traditional sales and service techniques just don't cut it when buyers are operating in real time.

“We think of the education we provide buyers online as architecture,” says Matt Warta, the co-founder and CEO of GutCheck. GutCheck also delivers content within the sales process that shows buyers why it is valuable for them to use the GutCheck service to do quicker and more affordable research. “Based on what they are doing on our site, we know if they're at that high level where they're interested in on-demand communities, or if they are interested in the next two layers down. When we interact with them, we are very knowledgeable about what level they're at.”

Warta says that his analysis shows that when a buyer signs up for something on the GutCheck site—for instance checking out a webinar or asking to speak to a salesperson—the buyer is about 70 percent toward closing a deal. Armed with the knowledge of what information a buyer has already seen on the site, the salesperson then goes into agile, real-time sales mode, frequently via social networks. The salesperson targets that individual buyer with just the right outreach at just the right time.

“If we see a prospect looking exclusively at our higher-level content on our site, then when we contact them we're going to talk about saving time, doing things quicker, and how GutCheck's services enable them to be successful in their position and advance their career,” Warta says. “But if we discover someone is consuming a lot of our content about how agile market research enables the product innovation process, then we'll talk to them on a completely different track and discuss a more iterative approach to doing consumer research.”

In a world where most sales processes are generic and each potential customer is sold to in the same way, the concept of understanding each individual buyer based on what content they have already consumed is revolutionary. It's a fundamental theme of the new rules of sales and service.

If you know how this process works, your salespeople can close more business by being less aggressive. Warta says that it is important to know when to just let the buyer absorb the information. “We understand that when people are in certain phases of the buying process, we should just leave them alone. We let them get comfortable. If we contact them too early they might think we're too Big Brother-ish. We hire people who have intellectual agility and can go where the customer is leading them.”

Warta and his team use a similar content-centric service approach to support the customer's journey. “Once an account is closed and they've done business with us, we have a team we call our Online Research Strategists, and they are the primary interface with our clients,” says Warta. “When we understand how they are using our platform, and what kind of everyday challenges they are facing in their jobs, we can create content around that. Once we've interacted with them on both the sales and services layers, we can then go back and say, ‘How are you guys handling your product innovation process today? How are you guys handling your marketing and communication testing process?’ We might say, ‘We know that you guys have eight initiatives this year where you're going to go through this product innovation process.’ Or, ‘You're going to go through this marketing and communications process soon. Let's sit down, understand your plans for the year, and see where this on-demand capability can really help you out.’”

Agile, real-time sales and the provision of online content throughout the customer journey continue to drive business. When you lead with content that can influence sales, you're letting the buyers do the work of educating themselves about your products and services. “The great thing about selling this way is that it's very efficient,” Warta says. “It's efficient from the perspectives of time and capital. Instead of having 50 salespeople running around spreading our message, we rely on content to do that.”

You can achieve the same success.

Your Sales and Service Ecosystem

Growing up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, I knew that many of my parents' friends worked at the nearby IBM world headquarters. Back in the 1970s, IBM was known around town for excellent sales training and for the uniform its salesmen wore: dark blue or gray suit, a shirt “of any color as long as it is white,” a subtle tie, and black shoes. In the decades when “nobody gets fired for buying IBM,” the highly trained, identical-looking IBM salesmen were in charge of the relationship with buyers. They controlled the information and they dictated the terms.

Today, IBM has adapted by doing much more than ditching the corporate dress code. The company has thrived more than a century after its founding by making social business a part of everything it does. The company was among the first to encourage employees to participate on social networks nearly a decade ago. This was codified in the IBM Social Computing Guidelines, a document first released in spring 2005. The guidelines, which are freely available to anyone on the IBM site, cover online collaboration via blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds, and social media. IBM has empowered team members to become social employees and build their personal brands by sharing content on a daily basis. As a result, most are active on Twitter, and tens of thousands publish their own blogs.

“You've got to develop that relationship online versus just in person; that's what social is all about,” says Sandy Carter, general manager for ecosystem development and a social business evangelist at IBM. (Carter has also written a book on the subject, Get Bold: Using Social Media to Create a New Type of Social Business.) “Social selling is the ability to build your social graph and be connected socially as a seller—to attract, engage, and connect. It's about knowing your prospects and your clients. For example, I recently went to meet with a very important CEO, and before we met I looked at his Facebook profile and I called up his LinkedIn page. I found out that this particular person really likes art, so I invited him to a private showing at our little IBM art gallery. One of the things that caused him to come and hear more about our products was that connection to art. I think more and more sellers are going to have to be more P2P—person-to-person—not just B2B or B2C. They need to sell to people as people, not as a company.”

Another aspect of traditional selling that has been cast aside at IBM is the notion of a predictable sales funnel with its perfectly defined steps during which salespeople lead buyers to the point of close. “At IBM it is a continuous funnel versus a funnel that moves progressively down,” Carter says. “If you think about any marketing course, you start by identifying a lead and you progress it through the funnel. In the new world it's a set of little tornadoes. You might connect with someone and you engage with them. There's more continuous contact and working toward long-term relationships that make a difference versus a traditional set of lead management capability. So, to me, that means you've got to change the way you do things.”

Carter offers the National Football League as an example of how this works. Indeed the NFL is the most successful professional sports league in North America. “With the NFL, the event of the year is the Super Bowl,” she says. “But instead of generating leads culminating in an event like the Super Bowl—which is what a lot of companies still do—NFL marketing and engagement are like a set of little tornadoes. For example, fantasy football keeps fans engaged all year. Before the Super Bowl they do pre-parties all over the United States, not just in the Super Bowl city. They start things nine months in advance to connect with their buyers—the fans—and they do this in lots of different ways. It's a great example of a continuous campaign, which I think is required in the new social world.”

IBM has made social not just the way it sells today; it has implemented social business throughout the entire organization. It has developed applications that IBMers use every day to solve problems for customers. For example, there's an IBM mobile app that enables IBMers around the world to connect to people inside the company as they work on customer projects. “It's used as the ecosystem inside of IBM to find the right expert,” Carter says. “The expertise could be very broad, like who's the best mobile expert in Canada? Or it could be very specific, like who knows J2EE new rule number 12? It helps you instantly to find that person, socially, based on their expertise. Using all the social tools, we rate that person's expertise, how they've been tagged, their Klout rating, and how many people have recommended them. We're building a social ecosystem on mobile that helps you sell.”

Your Turn

Just like IBM, your organization needs to build social business into all aspects of your sales efforts to buyers and how you service existing customers. But it takes time. IBM has been working at it for 10 years. If you haven't started already, you've got to start now.

I've found that managing fear is one of the best starting points. People are naturally wary of things they don't understand, and engaging with your marketplace using the new tools might provoke some anxiety in you or in others in your company.

There might be resistance at the top. You'll need to be an agent of change to implement some of these ideas, and that's a challenging position to be in, but one that can pay off with great personal and company-wide success.

You can do it.

It doesn't matter what marketplace you're in or what group of buyers you're trying to reach. You can master the new rules of sales and service and build powerful relationships with your buyers and your customers. So get out there!