CHAPTER 10

DEVELOPING YOUR SOCIAL SELLING STRATEGY

The Components for a Realistic Social Media Sales Plan

While it's possible to make progress in social selling, and perhaps even generate a few decent leads, even if only occasionally reaching out to prospects through social networks, without a defined strategy it will be difficult to repeat or maintain any successes you may have achieved. High-performing salespeople will tell you that their days are well planned and the techniques used for prospecting are consistent with best practices and based on proven sales methodologies. The same can be said for achieving sustainable results in social selling. You need a plan to follow, and a strategy to guide your actions.

Developing your social selling strategy for a social media sales plan ensures consistency and focus in your social prospecting. There is no shortcut to social selling; it takes time and patience to build online relationships that turn into sales. Without a plan in place, you may eventually question the effectiveness of social media networking, get discouraged, and possibly give up. An organized approach using an articulated social media strategy ensures you have a daily game plan for the online sales process.

A STRATEGY FOR YOU AND YOUR COMPANY

There are at least three types of social media strategies, and it's important to understand the differences among them. The first is all about you. Its objectives usually focus on your professional goals, such as building a personal brand to support career growth. It involves using social networks to make you more visible, noteworthy, and valuable to other future employers (or recruiters). Another common goal is positioning yourself as a social media influencer for your company. For instance, an industry analyst or a reporter would want to build her personal brand on social media, to help support and further the goals of her employer, as well as her own. Ultimately, she becomes an individual influencer in her industry, and her influence reflects positively on her organization.

Having a personal social media strategy also lends itself to your objectives as a salesperson. As you build credibility in your personal social media profiles (on Twitter, LinkedIn, and others), that same credibility extends to your reputation as a trusted, reliable expert in your field. Keep in mind, as a salesperson, you may represent the company or brand for which you currently work, but you (not the company) are the one in front of prospects and customers communicating solutions, making promises, and solving problems. Your personal social media profile, not the company's profile, is what you use to find and engage with prospects and customers. You are the face of the company—online and offline.

This brings us to a second and related type of social media strategy. It is the strategy that is most relevant to you today. It builds on your personal strategy, but takes that a step further because it's focused on developing a social selling plan. However, this type of strategy can be developed for an individual salesperson (or marketer) as easily as it can for an entire sales organization. A social selling strategy is completely focused on social prospecting.

The third type of social media strategy is for your organization and is centered on the company or the business brand. The goals and objectives of an organizational strategy are typically pretty far-reaching, and permeate numerous areas of the company. Social selling is most likely only one goal within that strategy. The organization's plan may also include goals for maintaining exceptional social customer service, assisting the Human Resources team in its recruiting efforts, and utilizing social media to support and further the company's search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. There can be other goals as well, but these are some of the most common. As for the stewards of this approach, your company's marketing communications team, dedicated social media team (depending on how big the company is), or other collective group of employees may own the social media strategy.

There are five primary steps involved in creating a solid (social selling) strategy:

1. Establish goals and objectives.
2. Set the rules of engagement.
3. Conduct research.
4. Know your assets and get organized.
5. Develop an outreach schedule.

Whether you are creating a strategy for an entire organization or developing a social selling strategy for yourself and your sales team, these same five steps will apply. Let's take a closer look at each of the steps involved.

ESTABLISHING YOUR GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

For any sales effort to be worthwhile, it needs to show results tied to meaningful metrics. In sales, those metrics are typically associated with revenue (money you are actually banking from winning deals and making sales) and pipeline (the dollar value of potential revenue based on sales forecasts), and your goals are to hit targeted values for those metrics each quarter. There are also other specific sales and marketing metrics that serve as signals to indicate whether or not you are on track to make your pipeline and revenue numbers. These signals might be particular objectives to ensure you achieve your ultimate money goal. Your goal, for instance, may be to have $75,000 in pipeline for the quarter. One of your objectives supporting that pipeline goal might be to generate 300 new leads. The goals and objectives you establish for your social selling strategy work the same way.

Your social goals may be directly or indirectly associated with amount of pipeline or revenue. Your objectives then become the actions that support or feed your goals, which in this example are revenue-related. You may be wondering if your goals should always include pipeline and revenue targets associated with a particular social network. After all, how else are you going to know if that network is worth the effort? Any time you can tie specific metrics to money goals, it helps provide a better picture of your return on investment for social media.

Unfortunately, tracking pipeline that's tied to a specific social platform can be tricky. Sometimes you can associate specific social media ad campaigns to a single social network, like Facebook, to track influence on pipeline. Or you may be able to associate a specific individual as a lead from LinkedIn, for instance, and tie her actions and buying behaviors into your revenue goals. But at times you may need to set goals that are only indirectly associated with revenue and pipeline. For example, you might consider setting goals that are tied to obtaining a certain number of new leads from social prospecting, or that show an increased percentage of white paper downloads or webinar registrations that originate from social media campaigns. Ultimately, choose goals that you can track and tie them to real dollars whenever feasible.

SETTING THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

The rules of engagement set up the parameters for how you will handle the various stages of your social selling efforts and how you will measure your progress. This step is particularly important if you are implementing a social selling strategy across a larger sales organization or as part of a cross-team effort between sales and marketing because it also addresses who is responsible for handling each area of your social selling plan. Here are the parameters you want to address:

• Decide how you will track and measure progress: Once your goals and objectives are established, you want to agree on how to determine success. Will you track progress on a monthly or quarterly basis? Which indicators will decide if you continue to dedicate resources to social selling? For B2B sales, it may take more time to build leads or pipeline from social selling than it does for B2C sales. Will you commit to a six-month window, for instance, before you measure progress, or will determination be based solely on meeting your objectives and goals for the year? How important is increasing Facebook fans or Twitter followers to your progress? Many organizations use this type of measurement as a simple, straightforward way to prove to executives that your social media efforts are improving.

  If you are considering this as a way to track success, I will caution you that increasing your number of followers, fans, and connections rarely correlates directly to social sales (or revenue, as mentioned earlier). A better indicator, or signal, may be the number of engaged followers you have, and the number of times content is shared, comments are made, or conversations are started. As discussed in previous chapters, social selling is about having positive interactions that help build relationships and eventually lead to purchases; tracking interactions may be a better indicator of your progress.

• Determine roles and responsibility: Divide and conquer is perhaps the best way to think of managing your social selling efforts across a sales team or across several teams within your organization. You may have certain salespeople who are responsible for or have ownership of specific social networks. Janice handles activities in LinkedIn and Robert manages Twitter, for example. Or you may want each individual salesperson to be active in multiple social media sites. So Janice and Robert are each active in Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google +.

  Another consideration is whether to divide up responsibilities by actions instead of by social networks. Perhaps your sales and marketing teams are working together, in which case you may want marketing to handle all content development actions, and also help monitor for opportunities where sales can engage. If you recall, this is similar to the strategy my organization has used where a marketing specialist may identify and start conversations with potential prospects and then transfer the conversation, and the lead, to sales when it gets to a certain stage or when it seems most appropriate. This is the equivalent of a warm transfer, or handing off a lead that is already primed for a more in-depth sales interaction. In this step of your social selling strategy, another decision you need to make is choosing not only who is responsible for monitoring online comments, but also deciding who will monitor your overall success based on the parameters you set.

• Choose your tools: In Chapter 7, I introduced several types of tools you can use for everything from monitoring social networks for brand mentions to assisting with content development. As part of your official strategy, you must decide which tools to invest in and use, and confirm that everyone understands how to use them. This is particularly important if you decide to integrate some of the more complex social selling tools that are typically more expensive. These types of tools may also get integrated into your CRM software (Salesforce, for example, or SugarCRM), or your customer nurturing systems (such as programs like Eloqua or Marketo, which manage your customer emails). The implementation of these tools or the approval of the budget for these tools may stretch beyond your sales and marketing teams, so it will be important to get corporate buy-in to use them.

  Along these lines, there are also some social networks, like LinkedIn, that have additional social selling tools you can purchase that provide your sales team with enhanced views of prospect activity or increased access to prospects. Again, these types of tools are somewhat more expensive but they often integrate with your CRM software. Planning which tools you want to invest in and deciding who has access to them is an important part of your overall strategy.

CONDUCTING YOUR RESEARCH

The next step in your social selling strategy requires a bit of due diligence. The research you conduct will help you determine where you are most likely to make headway in your social selling efforts. Proper research also helps to narrow down the social networks that may prove to be most lucrative for you. As a salesperson, this is similar to the type of offline customer research that you would do to gather information about who your target customers are and where you need to spend time to reach them. For this step, you want to put effort into the following:

• Research where your target audience is most active: If you are in B2C, you may find your potential customers are most active on Facebook, or that they regularly read and comment on certain blogs. For B2B sales, your prospects may be active on both Twitter and LinkedIn, along with certain industry communities or forums. Once you find out where your prospects are, you can put together a plan for interacting with them.
• Review your history of engagement and take note of where you've been successful: This type of information provides a good baseline for where to start interacting. If you or your company have already spent time on social media, review those sites where you have had the most luck interacting with prospects and customers. Look back at previous interactions you have had on social media and note which types of information that you tweeted, posted, or shared got the most feedback or interactions. Your track record may quickly improve once you have a cohesive plan in place that ensures you are consistently active and are offering quality content that your social prospects have indicated they want to receive.
• Build a list of your influencers: Social selling is based on the concept of being, well, social. And, just like in the offline world, there are some people who have mastered the ability to socialize and network. Those people are your go-to contacts for introductions to prospective customers or vendors. They always seem to be in the know. In the world of social media, these networking gurus are called “influencers,” and they usually have a large online network of fans, followers, and connections that actively engage with and respond to them. You want to identify the influencers in your industry so that you can be part of their circle. Engaging with and getting to know influencers is a good way to gain visibility with your potential prospects, or at least find out where they are and what matters to them

  By the way, it's not only external influencers who are important. You also want to identify internal influencers, or those people within your organization who are already active in social media and participate in online communities and groups that are part of your industry. It should be easy to start connecting with your internal influencers and then expand from there to the external influencers you have identified.

• Identify your keywords: Similar to building a list of your influencers, you also want to create a list of keywords, which are specific words and terms that are used in your industry or by your customers. Keywords can be product names or categories of products. They can even be the names of your competitors, names of celebrities, or geographical locations that are particularly of interest to your customers. They can also be terms commonly associated with your products, such as particular features or benefits.

  Once you create a list of the most important or most often used keywords or phrases, you can identify these as words that you want to track in social media. When those words appear, it is an indicator that there may be a conversation occurring that is relevant to you. Social monitoring tools can help automate the tracking of these key terms, or you can conduct manual searches within social networks to find potential conversations based around these keywords.

KNOWING YOUR ASSETS AND GETTING ORGANIZED

As you become more active in social media, you will increasingly see the wisdom in the declaration, “Content is king!” As discussed in Chapter 6, content is the linchpin of your social selling efforts. Quality content is used as a conversation starter. It's used as a proof point or educational opportunity in response to online conversations. Content is the carrot that you can easily offer your fans, followers, and connections when asking them to get to know you, and can help build their trust in you as an influencer and subject-matter authority.

As a salesperson, you probably already use a great deal of content—such as company brochures, product collateral, and PowerPoint presentations—in your offline sales efforts. Those same pieces of content are used online. But social media conversations move fast, so it's important for you to know the content you have available, understand when it is most appropriate to use it, and have a way to deliver it electronically through links you can include in your posts via social media. Basically, this part of your social selling strategy requires some advance prepping and organization, and you want to take the following preliminary actions:

• Inventory your content: Know every piece of content you have available and take time to make it accessible through online links that can be easily posted to social media. Using a spreadsheet is a great way to keep track of your content, along with short explanations of how it is best used and active links so that it can be accessed online.
• Map your content: In that same spreadsheet, map (or associate) your individual pieces of content to specific products, prospect buying stages, customer needs, or common sales objections. If you take time to identify which pieces of content address which concerns, it makes it quick and easy for you to pull the best content for use in response to online conversations or questions. Don't forget to include a mix of content types, such as articles, brochures, videos, and slide presentations. You want to make sure that not all the content is focused entirely on your company or products as well. Some of the content should be vendor-neutral, and all of it should be quality material that is interesting or helpful.
• Update your social media profiles regularly: As part of knowing your assets, you also want to have available a standard description of you or your company that you can use on all your social media profiles. As you have probably noticed, every social network (and many communities and forums) provides the opportunity for you to create a profile that then shows up on your social media account and is visible to others. This is your elevator pitch, or your quick introduction to the social media world. It is a very brief summary, sometimes a couple of sentences or less, of who you are and why you are interesting. It's the introduction that potential prospects will see, and it will help them decide if they want to interact with you. It's helpful to use some of those important keywords and phrases that you already identified in your social selling strategy as being important. By using some of these words in your social media profiles, it helps you be found on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google + when someone searches for those related terms.

DEVELOPING AN OUTREACH SCHEDULE

The final part of developing a useful social selling strategy is to create a schedule of social media posts that will start conversations. The easiest way to do this is to set up a calendar that details when, what, and where you will post content or conversation starters. Conversation starters are short statements or questions that you post online; examples include (but are not limited to) interesting facts, company news and announcements, and polls (where you pose a question and provide a choice of answers).

The goal of posting content and conversation starters is to entice people to interact with you and share your information. This provides visibility to your prospective prospects and begins building relationships. Using the calendar, you may want to map or plan certain posts to coincide with other company events or promotions.

The important part of an outreach schedule is that it helps you budget time to devote to social selling. You may want to commit to a particular schedule based on a formula I use—it's a 3/2/3/1 strategy for posting, sharing, and interacting. My weekly schedule equates to posting three pieces of fresh content that is informative or educational; starting conversations with or interacting with two new influencers; sharing three links (that other people have posted) within each social media platform where I'm active; and commenting on at least one group thread, article, or blog.

This formula works well for me, but you can create any type of schedule and combination of activities that fits your social selling goals. I update this schedule each week, and note it on my social media calendar. As mentioned in Chapter 8, you can also keep a separate spreadsheet of prescheduled posts. Tweets or Facebook updates that you schedule ahead of time should be used to support—but not replace—real-time comments that are part of your outreach efforts.

Outreach posts are used to actively engage people (for example, “What's your favorite social media tool?”), while prescheduled posts may not typically ask for or encourage direct feedback (“Check out this list of top 5 social media posts at www.blogpost.com”). But any type of post may end up triggering a response from someone and that's why you can't use prescheduled posts and expect to completely ignore them—you must always watch for and respond to interactions. I suggest keeping your prescheduled posts in a separate spreadsheet because some social media tools, like HootSuite, allow you to bulk upload, or import a large number of prescheduled posts at one time. And even if you don't keep separate spreadsheets, you should at least note prescheduled posts as part of your main social media calendar.

INTEGRATE ONLINE AND OFFLINE SALES EFFORTS, THEN REPEAT

Although these five steps will help you create a solid strategy to boost your social selling efforts, there are a couple of other factors to consider. In particular, it's worth mentioning that your strategy shouldn't operate in a vacuum. As both social media and the way businesses use it have evolved, I often hear marketing and sales executives lament, “It's changed; social media doesn't work the same anymore. It's hard to have big success right out of the gate.” For larger brands that invested heavily in social media very early, this thinking may be true. It probably is harder to stand out from the crowd with viral, one-hit wonders that take the social media world by storm. But that's because more businesses are figuring out that social media is part of the business landscape now and you really have to have a presence there.

Speaking of not operating in a vacuum…don't keep your social media goals to yourself. Share your strategy with your peers and across teams within your organization. Unlike traditional sales, where there tends to be a competitive nature that is exclusive rather than inclusive, you can be more effective in social media when you have more people within your team or company involved and working toward the same goals. The more educated everyone in your company is about social media and the more they understand the benefits of being socially active, the better chance you have of accelerating your social selling success.

In addition to introducing your social strategy to other people in your organization, your social media or social selling strategy should be integrated with your other sales and marketing efforts, both online and off. Once you build a relationship through social sales and convert that interaction into a lead, that lead shouldn't float out in the social media landscape indefinitely but instead be brought into your other sales processes and nurtured, as you would leads from other sources. That's not to say you pluck or scrape an unsuspecting prospect out of a social media channel and force her or him into one of your other sales buckets. After the lead is nourished in social media, a warm transfer into other nurturing programs is encouraged.

One last critical to-do item that goes along with your social selling strategy is the review process. After you have met your initial priorities, schedule time to analyze your results, review your progress, and make adjustments based on what did or did not work. Then repeat the process—over and over again.

Now that you know the basics of creating an effective social selling strategy, it's time to introduce you to the specific social media platforms where you will put much of your strategy to work. The next few chapters show you how to make the most of your time in social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google +, YouTube, and others.