Aberdeen View: Social Selling Powers B2B Success

See on Scoop.it – Social Selling for B2B

Practical Perspectives for the Midsize Business. Brought to you by IBM.

Synopsis…

Collaborative selling

[The] most effective sales teams utilize collaborative applications, generally integrated into the CRM, to facilitate a virtual water-cooler environment and encourage user-generated content that helps add to the overall tribal knowledge of the enterprise.  As a result, sellers more effectively tap into the collective wisdom of a larger circle of knowledge.

Intelligence-gathering 

Research Fact: the Best-in-Class are 90% more likely to use “Predictive social intelligence: using current data about prospects / customers to highlight most likely repeat purchasing patterns,” compared with other companies. The form factor of this informal user-generated content is often of benefit to sales reps seeking to end-around the polished and scrubbed pronouncements of corporate PR teams. Even better, it creates the opportunity to cut through red tape via…

Direct messaging

We repeatedly hear in about scenarios in which a prospect does not answer the phone or e-mails but responds quickly to a direct message. I’m sure that many of us have a love-hate relationship with our inboxes – and perhaps someday direct messages will become more annoying than they are now – but today, this communications modality is fresh and new enough to make it the communications channel of choice between seller and buyer personas.  Try it a few times; you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The Non-Salesy SME

[A] wise sales professional will actually not make a sales pitch within their social networks, but rather become a subject matter expert whom their prospects and customers come to associate with helpful knowledge. The easiest way to do this is to simply re-tweet (curate) the content that the product experts, engineers, or intellectual leaders within your organization are producing; there is little need to create fresh content, given the remarkably easy curation tools within social networks.

See on www.midsizeinsider.com