Chapter 9

Increase Sales

Growing a product's or service's top line means growing sales. However, in today's era of higher-quality items at all price points, many competing offerings are similar and, therefore, hard to distinguish. Certainly, product features, performance, and their price and advertising imagery are still important, and have to be up to snuff. But consumers are increasingly paying closer attention to emotional connection, attachment, and experience—all of which are becoming important drivers of sales.

Take the hot dog, for example. People appreciate franks nowadays for their contribution to enjoying family get-togethers, barbecues, and sporting events, and for their less obvious role in improving kids' nutrition, as parents today serve hot dogs with other foods they sneak in to broaden their children's diets. Selling hot dogs is really about selling love, nurturing, and good times.

Social media listening plays an important role in tuning companies in to their customers and prospects, and providing the knowledge that leads to the creation of compelling and effective sales strategies, programs, and tactics. This chapter looks across the range of sales situations that firms of every size face, to varying degrees and complexity. Our case examples demonstrate applications for social media listening that contributed to successful sales results. Listening assisted in: developing a meaningful sales strategy; finding, and helping to resolve, “pain points” that discourage sales; coping with fallow periods during which companies do not offer updated or new products; and influencing the influencers who hold power over a company's success or failure.

Winning Plays to Increase Sales

The cases we reviewed, and their tactics, led us to identify seven winning plays:

• Transform sales from a product-centered and transactional strategy to one that is service-oriented and builds relationships. Customers and prospects want salespeople to understand their needs and requirements and respect their purchase process. They don't want to be sold to merely because they satisfy vendor or retailer criteria for qualified prospects. This is why it is vital to use social media listening to understand customer and prospect preferences. The case of computer hardware, software, and services vendor CDW clearly demonstrates the value of listening to your best customers. In this scenario, the customers effectively determined the strategy, as described in the section “Develop and Implement a Listening-Led Sales Strategy.” They advised CDW of their views on cold-calling, relationship building, and thought leadership. Matching its sales approach to customer preferences enabled CDW to succeed in a cutthroat business during a challenging economy.

  Relationships are crucial here. With the exception of one-off purchases, companies often look to have trusted connections with suppliers; they add value by simplifying decisions, making business more efficient, and maintaining preference for reorders and the next major purchase. Although CDW is a large, national company, the lesson it teaches applies to just about every company: Listen to how your customers would like you to do business with them. Then make that happen.

• Pick up on early signals of operational or product issues that affect sales; listen to consumers to make timely in-market corrections. Listen for problems that stall sales or erect barriers to purchase, and find ways to overcome them. While rolling out Steam n’ Mash, potato product maker Ore-Ida discovered that consumers were confused—and a bit frustrated—about where to find their speed-scratch mashed potato in the supermarket. Ore-Ida turned to consumers for guidance on solving this findability problem, and eventually received hundreds of suggestions to consider (see “Adjust to Real-Time Feedback for Product Rollouts,” later in the chapter). WhiteWave Foods’ soy beverage Silk faced a perception problem that hindered sales when the company found that people assumed healthy beverages could not taste good. To counter that, WhiteWave ran a program designed to stimulate a product trial by activating social networks of product advocates and listening to consumer reactions. Listening showed the company what consumers appreciated about the product—good-for-you nutrition and good taste—and adjusted its marketing and advertising in response (described under “Stimulate Trial for Products In-Market”). Keep sales moving by removing the hurdles that customers tell you they face.
• Engage customers as a way to battle slow periods or seasonality. For those times when your company faces a slow period or seasonal dropoffs, identify passion points and generate engagement around them. Auto brand MINI did just that when it encountered a year of potential sales decline, because no new model or updates were scheduled. MINI listened to identify and engage owner passions as a way to strengthen relationships, give customers reasons to stay in the fold, and keep sales moving. MINI undoubtedly enjoyed some of these great results because it had advance warning and so was able to develop and maneuver its engagement program, as described under “Engage Customers Around Their Passions,” later in this chapter. This example shows that understanding, supporting, and engaging customer communities can help companies succeed during fallow or slack periods.

  Furthermore, rather than listening and engaging just in response to a business event that can be planned for, continuously listen to and support customers through time to keep the connections tight year-round. Doing so helps make companies proactive, effectively increases lead time, and avoids the problems that arise from being reactive—such as slow or inadequate response that can cause dissatisfaction and may damage reputations.

• Determine whether personal influence helps drive sales in your category. Some product categories, such as movies, are driven in part by recommendations from family and friends. If word of mouth is important to the success of your category, product, or service, consider using social media listening to identify influencers, their opinions, and sentiments, and then engage them to minimize or maximize their impact on sales.

  It is especially important to understand the timing of conversations and their sentiment to develop an effective strategy. Ethan Titelman of market research firm Penn, Schoen & Berland studies movie buzz (see the “Track Buzz and Influence the Influencers” section). Speaking at an ARF Industry Leader Forum in 2010, Titelman told participants that what people talk about, and the sentiments they express, change before and after a movie's release date. He found that prior conversations are frequently based on expectations and cast, and sentiment is often neutral. People form opinions after the release, once they have made a financial and emotional investment. This results in a different set of topics and reactions, which can be more positive or negative and will influence sales. Companies introducing new products or services that listen only during the lead-up period before new products or services are introduced will get a different impression of their prospects than those who tune in both before and after release. Listen continuously over time to detect and adjust strategy as needed.

  Titelman makes a second important point about strategy: Not all people interested in a movie want to see it for the same reasons. Some are keen on effects, others on actors, still others on the production itself. Still others view it simply as a way to pass the time or go out on a date. Not only must companies understand their influencers; they must segment them into domains and engage with them according to their interests. (If you are interested in segmentation, it is discussed again in Chapter 16.)

• Use social media and listening to re-create or reinvent basic sales tactics. Every product or service needs to promote trial in order to attract new customers and build sales over time. New snack food entrant Pretzel Crisps innovated “social sampling” to deliver just-in-time sampling by: listening to social media to find people expressing the need for snacks; engaging with them; and delivering product to their door, office, or public place (see “Personalize Product Sampling”). The tweets, posts, and reviews generated substantial earned media mentions, which helped consumers get to know the company better and spark increased interest in its products. Silk Soy enlisted advocates to spur trial, and then listened carefully to what people liked and didn't like. Applying the insights it developed, Silk refined its marketing communications to resonate more clearly with customers. Consider the sales tactics your business relies on or would like to execute, and think about how you can apply social media listening to refresh or reinvent them.
• Share insights from sales with other departments or units. Maximize your company's social media listening investment by sharing data and helping colleagues apply this information to their business needs. Insights surfaced in both the Steam n’ Mash and Silk cases that were applicable to marketing, advertising, and product development. Marketers for Steam n’ Mash discovered that despite a flavor disaster with one variety, they had an opportunity for a new flavor, which they subsequently developed and launched. Silk learned that consumers cited the product's nutritional value, variety of flavors, and taste as reasons to keep buying it. Silk incorporated those ideas into its marketing and advertising.
• Do not confine listening data in corporate silos. Consider the many places where listening insights can deliver value in your business and work with colleagues to apply them.

The cases we uncovered and reviewed utilize the following five tactics to keep sales moving:

• Develop and implement a listening-led sales strategy.
• Adjust to real-time feedback for product rollouts.
• Stimulate trial for new and in-market products.
• Engage customers based on their passions.
• Track buzz and influence the influencers.

Develop and Implement a Listening-Led Sales Strategy

Who knows how to sell to customers better than the customers themselves? By tapping into their priorities, preferences, and engagement styles, companies are able to create true customer-centric sales approaches. Executing such strategies promotes relationship building and a sense of confidence. This is important in any economy, but it may be especially valuable during challenging times, when competition is red-hot and closing pressure is intense.

Companies have started using social media listening to get into their customers’ minds and hearts. The example we'll review here leverages a private branded community that involved customers in a program of guided activities, yet did not constrain the free flow of conversation and feedback essential for listening.

Since 2004, computer software company CDW has listened to its small, midsized, and large clients through three private communities, which were built and managed by Communispace, a leading vendor (see Figure 9.1). Community members influence or make IT decisions and interact with peers to help shape CDW's policies, products, and services.

Figure 9.1 CDW runs communities tailored to its customer groups. This example showcases the community for large companies. It provides a rundown on events, and social networking features allow members to engage with one another and with the brand.

Reseller businesses—especially IT-related enterprises—are known for being brutally competitive and having very thin margins. They thrive on acquisition, repeat business, and customer satisfaction. In the grips of an economic recession, CDW decided to task its communities with helping the company improve its approach to prospects and to building productive relationships. Based on its social media listening work with the community, CDW sought to make improvements in three areas:

• Efficacy of the cold call
• Sales practices for beginning relationships successfully
• Establishing thought leadership for the brand

Community members reported receiving more cold calls than ever. This was a pivotal finding, one that indicated that CDW had a big obstacle to overcome: to break through the noise caused by the cold-call clutter, then meaningfully differentiate itself, or risk being ignored, and potentially lose future sales. Members provided insights on what made a good first call, advising on language and key points that would help connect callers to customers effectively. The members essentially created a communication approach that reflected their understanding of their own needs and interests while eliminating vendor-centric pitches.

Best practices that the community developed revolved around three elements: the need to truly understand business requirements; service; and “sweeteners” that reduced purchase risk and left a positive feeling. One key suggestion for the sales managers taken from a cold-call idea was: “Think harder about your recommendations for a client's initial purchase.” In other words, don't just sell for the sake of selling; sell to meet needs and establish a relationship. Members also gave guidance on valued offers and promotions, preparing for meetings, and personalizing both e-mail and marketing materials.

Factors including the variety of configurations available, specifications, reliability, software licensing terms, pricing, and trade-offs tend to complicate IT sales. IT buyers and influencers usually turn to independent tests and advice from third parties, whose guidance is a critical input into the process of evaluating, recommending, and deciding on purchases. CDW community members identified five sources that they deemed reliable, and in turn, CDW developed strategic partnerships with a number of those information suppliers. By doing so, the company helped its best customers make better-informed decisions, and thus paved a smoother path to purchase.

Using social media listening to communicate with its communities led CDW to formalize those insights and practices into its Sales Academy training. The change is paying off: Account managers are recruiting more high-quality customers, valued four times greater than over-the-transom buyers they acquire from the Web site or other sources. Average customer value increased 17 percent over the prior year, a testimony to the power of a social media listening-derived customer strategy (Communispace 2009).

Stimulate Product Trial for New and In-Market Products

Programs promoting consumer trials traditionally offer special package sizes, financial incentives, education, or sampling and promoting in stores or at live events. Whichever tactic or combination is used, these programs effectively lower barriers for consumers and encourage them to try new products or services. Listening to and analyzing conversations and feedback from trial programs can better equip companies to understand consumers, thereby enabling them to market and advertise to them more effectively. Trial programs are not just for big companies; they work very well for midsized and entrepreneurial firms, too. Bear Naked is a smaller startup, known for granola and natural foods. It succeeded in growing sales and broadening distribution by providing samples in local specialized stores like Stew Leonard's in Norwalk, Connecticut. The company was eventually acquired by Kellogg's.

Innovative companies that leverage social media and social networks are creating and promoting trial in breakthrough ways, and using listening insights to improve their sales and marketing. The cases we review, Pretzel Crisps and Silk Soy beverage, provide a compelling guide on how to do so.

Personalize Product Sampling

Pretzel Crisps, a thin snack cracker, seeks to move from new entrant to established brand in the highly competitive snack food market. In addition to the standard promotional tactics companies use to build their brands, secure distribution, and generate sales, Pretzel Crisps had an inspired idea for its sampling effort: Listen to social media to locate people who tweeted or posted their need for a snack, find them, and deliver samples to them right away. The company's Field Marketing Director Jason Harty calls this innovation “social sampling”; he provided an example of one such conversation and how social sampling works, shown in Figure 9.2 (Harty 2010).

Figure 9.2 Pretzel Crisps “social sampling” discovers conversations through social media and then delivers samples to the conversants.

Source: Pretzel Crisps.

Social sampling uses social media not only to find the conversations but also to multiply the news in this realm by selecting people in offices, public places, and those with active social networks and followers. Fitarella and tamadear, the women tweeting in Figure 9.2, fit that bill perfectly: Both have active and popular blogs, as well as several thousand Twitter followers. They conveyed their enthusiasm and positive experiences through tweets, blog posts, and product reviews. A single “interception” reached nearly 23,000 people; in this way, social sampling revolutionized field marketing for Pretzel Crisps and contributed to building the company.

Stimulate Trial for Products In-Market

Rollouts convey a sense of excitement; the products are new, and marketing and advertising is amped up. Products that have been in the market for some time are, on the other hand, considerably less interesting. The marketing challenge for these is to increase trial, sales, and profitability, and build a customer base. Though we often think of social networks as being online, we overlook the networks that exist offline as well, those that are composed of the people we know, see, visit, and work alongside. These flesh-and-blood networks are especially important because they are formed and cultivated in the places where we deal with one another, and are also where 85 to 90 percent of all conversations about products or services take place (Keller 2009). This is where face-to-face influence can happen.

Some companies are capitalizing on using influencers who leverage their social networks to stimulate trial and collect their conversations. Silk, a leader in soy beverages known for their health benefits, has enjoyed great success with this approach.

Prior research conducted by Silk shows that many people assumed healthy products simply could not taste good. Silk's parent company, WhiteWave Foods, wanted to overcome that perception—an obvious obstacle to sales—by getting people to try the product and talk about it. It embarked on a word-of-mouth campaign designed to stimulate trial by working with word-of-mouth agency BzzAgent.

BzzAgent has a network of roughly 500,000 individuals called (unsurprisingly) BzzAgents, who like to try brands and are encouraged, but not required, to instigate conversations and spread the word about them within their offline and online social networks. After agreeing to participate in a program, agents are matched to brands based on their interests, and report the substance of their conversations back to BzzAgent. The agency then extensively analyzes the content and categories based on such factors as agent demographics, number of people involved, geography, and actions taken—for example, the number of coupons or trial packages distributed (see Figure 9.3). The company then evaluates the data for themes and favorability.

Figure 9.3 BzzAgent's campaign for soy beverage Silk involved 3,000 agents driving word of mouth, which was responsible for stimulating trial and sales, and generating consumer insight that explained brand performance.

The Silk campaign attracted 3,000 agents (see Figure 9.3). More than 90 percent tried the product, and those who did gave out about three coupons each. Of the coupons distributed, 24 percent were redeemed. At campaign's end, nearly 70 percent of the agents said they were likely to continue purchasing Silk, and 78 percent said they knew at least one person whom they had influenced.

Though the raw numbers are impressive, what's even more important is the explanation of why the program had been so successful. Insights from analysis of the word-of-mouth reports revealed that “nutritional value,” “variety of flavors,” and “taste” drove the agents’ favorable opinions. Those findings gave Silk the opportunity to improve its ability to market and advertise more effectively. Silk's example shows the value of listening to offline sources.

Adjust to Real-Time Feedback for Product Rollouts

Sales success occasionally depends on making small, quick changes in marketing, retail, or distribution in order to make it easier for consumers to purchase products or services. This is especially true when new products or updates are first appearing across markets. Getting information about problems as early as possible enables companies to quickly respond to them, and keep products rolling.

Monitoring social media conversations is one way to capture those signals. Another is to directly engage the target market through research communities. These social networks match women, men, and kids (all community members) to products and product trials, encourage product usage, and capture feedback and discussion through conversations, comments, polls, and surveys. Participating in communities and their activities usually requires companies to register and profile in order to recruit the right people.

Potato giant Ore-Ida, a division of H.J. Heinz Co., opted to use a community approach when it began distributing its Steam n’ Mash product nationally. The product was meant to help busy moms simplify mealtimes by making it easier and faster to prepare a comfort food staple—mashed potatoes—and to add variety by offering different flavors. Steam n’ Mash, a frozen speed-scratch product, puts peeled, precut potatoes into a microwaveable bag and provides instructions on mashing, as well as adding milk and other ingredients. Looking to stimulate trial, build word of mouth, and garner feedback for insights, Ore-Ida turned to SheSpeaks, a by-invitation-only social network for women, which has features explicitly designed for research purposes and creating branded experiences.

SheSpeaks considers its members “everyday influencers.” The 16,000 participating moms received free product and discount coupons for additional purchases—premiums that they could use themselves or share with friends—along with an information card and a free potato masher.

Participants filled out a pretest form to establish baseline information. Once underway, these “potato moms” had access to a Test Center (microcommunity) for recipe ideas, a discussion forum in which they conversed with other members and Ore-Ida, and an end-of-program evaluation survey. Since SheSpeaks is a social network, the moms could blog, comment, and engage with other community members. Additionally, moms blogged and commented on other sites, like Modern Mommyhood and Nifty Thrifty, spreading word of mouth and expanding the voices that others were listening to.

From a branding standpoint, the program rang up big numbers; it nearly doubled traditional measures, including awareness, purchase, and recommendation intent, over the baseline. Word of mouth reached 1.2 million women.

The insights gleaned from detailed analysis of nearly 1 million posts and the evaluation surveys gave Ore-Ida crucial knowledge on problems to address that affected sales. These problems were that:

• Shoppers could not find the product in stores; it either wasn't stocked, wasn't located where expected, or the package design blended in too closely with other products.
• One flavor tasted terrible and needed to be reformulated.
• Some saw the price point as too high.
• Package size was a bit skimpy; moms desired larger ones that would yield more servings to feed an entire family.

Ore-Ida used the observations to fix its rollout. It asked community members how to solve the findability problem, and users submitted more than 200 suggestions, which the company categorized and used to make changes. Additionally, Ore-Ida earned some extra mileage by deriving insights applicable for other marketing purposes, such as line extension ideas. Cut Red Potatoes, a creamier skin-on potato, eventually joined the family of varieties.

Impressed by Ore-Ida's performance, Heinz CEO William Johnson declared Steam n’ Mash one of the most successful launches in company history. Presenting to a Word of Mouth Marketing Association University session, Brand Manager Kimberly Lang said that social media listening also helped secure product distribution because Ore-Ida could show the data, richness of conversations, and moms’ potato passion. Lang also mentioned that social media listening would become a standard part of the Ore-Ida toolkit, and that other Heinz brands had expressed interest in the approach and results (SheSpeaks, 2009; Pietruski and Lang, 2009).

Engage Customers Around Their Passions

Companies look for growth from improvement and new product innovations. But not all companies have “bright, new shiny objects” for the market every product cycle, so their task is to maintain or expand sales for their current product or service lineups until they do. Since competitors are rarely staying still, but are instead pressing for advantages, poised to pounce on those failing to keep up, this is not a simple exercise at all. Companies without new offerings not only need to protect their products from predation; they also need to remain in their customers’ minds. And they need to do it in a way that's profitable, which usually means avoiding dealing and cost-cutting as much as possible, since both drag on bottom lines. BMW's MINI provides an excellent case in point and showcases the role of social media listening in contributing to its success through engagement.

MINI enjoyed great results following its reintroduction in 2005. But in 2006, it faced a potential problem: No new model would be introduced into a category that is driven by new product introductions. This raised the issue: How could the MINI maintain its sales momentum without a fresh model to add excitement? What could the automaker offer and tell customers? To answer these questions, MINI retained full-service social media listening vendor MotiveQuest to devise a solution focused on increasing online engagement that would keep sales moving.

MINI first listened to social media conversations around the brand and its closest rivals in order to find what made owners tick. The company identified, extracted, and compared category drivers and lined them up by brand. Results showed that drivers clustered in two segments: around the car and around the community. Table 9.1 shows that MINI sentiment around the conversations was unique and clustered differently from competitors. MINI owners viewed the car as a blank canvas onto which they could project their personalities, through customizations and molding—something they enjoy doing and sharing virtually and with others.

Table 9.1 Conversations and sentiment around the MINI concentrate on customization and sharing, and serve to set conversations about the car apart from competing brands.

Upon digging deeper, MINI learned that creativity, discovery, participation, collaboration, fun/play, and self-expression drove these findings. This quote illustrates the points well (MotiveQuest 2007):

I have never been involved in another car culture. Friends who are tell me when they meet MINI owners that our culture is in some ways very familiar—complete obsession with the MINIS—and in some ways very different—it seems to transcend the car. We get to know each other on a much more personal level.

With these insights at hand, MINI developed an advertising strategy and tactics for messaging and community engagement. The program it created included three elements, which were launched sequentially and with time in between them: special invitation mailing; live events; and because each MINI contains a digital identification chip, digital billboards that personalized messages to drivers passing by. These led to sales.

The impacts of the mailings, events, and billboards raised MotiveQuest's proprietary Online Promoter Score, a measure of the number of people online recommending the brand to others. The Online Promoter Score is predictive: Any increases or declines foreshadow ups and downs in sales. MINI's score increased with each campaign event, which predicted an uptick in sales about one month in advance. (We will look at this measure more closely when we turn our attention to social media listening-based measures and analytics in Chapter 18.)

Track Buzz and Influence the Influencers

Social media shifts authority and influence from traditional mainstream voices (e.g., institutional chiefs, professionals, pundits, critics, fashion editors, and other tastemakers) to respected online voices, and eventually to people conversing and sharing their opinions with one another. The availability, transparency, and accessibility of knowledge gained online has broken, in Harold Innis's apt phrase, “the monopolies of knowledge” enjoyed and controlled by companies, institutions, governments, and elites. This transfer is not new or unique to social media; it occurs whenever new communications technologies take hold. Innis himself researched these changes in his book Empire and Communications, which began by exploring the impacts of moving from stone tablets to adopting papyrus in ancient Egypt and on through millenia to the printing press; each new change in media put one empire in decline and gave rise to a successor (Innis 1972). Today, that successor is the “empire of the customer,” whose knowledge, values, and tastes increasingly influence one another, and influence marketing and advertising every day.

Companies know how powerful word of mouth from friends, family, and trusted associates can be. Ninety percent of consumers in over 50 countries claim that these referrals are the most “trusted form of advertising,” with review-writing from “virtual strangers” coming in second at 70 percent (Nielsen 2009). Consequently, they're discovering the value of social media listening to pick up the signals about what people are saying, feeling, experiencing, and sharing about their products and services. The movie industry, which typically measures success in weeks, understands this and has been among the earliest adopters of regular social media listening for marketing.

One major studio listens to online conversations as a means of evaluating marketing efforts for all its films in distribution. It then drills down into individual movie performance to determine if it needs to take actions to increase ticket sales.

The movie studio consults customized reports, prepared by its partner, Collective Intellect, that provide granular insights and analyses that are derived from text analytic software (see Chapter 2 for a discussion). Those reports contain lists of topics, themes, and influential authors for a specific film or actor, or for movies in general. If the studio decides it should, it will dig deeper to segment people's interests and concerns and develop communications targeted to them, or it may engage with those individuals and present them with special offers and promotions, like early viewing or tailored content, to boost attendance and sales for specific releases.

The movie studio example is more nuanced than a generic PR-type “influencer” program, where companies reach out to, say, key bloggers in the hope that they will choose to write about them. Social media listening identifies people who are influential in a specific area, understands their viewpoints and sentiments around a particular product or service, and generates insights for developing programs and messaging designed for them. Applying those insights can help companies make the adjustments necessary to their marketing and advertising, and increase their chances for sales success. However, influencer programs require balancing reach and scale, which every company needs to assess for itself.

Summary

Emotions, connections, and relationships between companies and customers are sales drivers that are growing in importance; traditional differentiators are the price of entry. Social media listening provides companies with the signals needed to craft sales efforts that are grounded in customer understanding. Companies using social media listening have kept sales rolling by developing and implementing customer-centric sales programs; re-creating or reinventing sales tactics, such as sampling and stimulating product trials; and overcoming problems or changing perceptions that stall sales growth.