What type of Social Selling organization do you want to be?

Last week, I had a great conversation with Rahul Kumar, CEO of New Horizons Australia. Our topic of discussion included comparing notes around our Social Selling journey in each of our respective organizations. Rahul was the first person that I knew of, who had embraced the Social Selling concept more than five years ago. He has one of the most mature Social Selling practices I have seen to date.

During our conversation, we discussed the challenges we’ve observed over the years, specifically the alignment between Marketing & Sales. Without a doubt the most complex part of Social Selling is teaching your sales professionals how to align the proper content and messaging with the buyer’s journey.  In the past, the Marketing Department was solely responsible for creating lead nurturing campaigns that aligned with intelligence gathered from client interactions via websites, email campaigns, and other marketing efforts. While this is still very necessary, it has also become critical for sales professionals to understand how to replicate this process in “micro marketing campaigns” and in the one on one engagements they have with their clients on a daily basis.

This is further complicated by the natural tendencies that our sales professionals have, which is to always want to sell. Rahul illustrated this point to me last week with the below use of the words “Social Selling” and an emphasis on each word.

• social selling – In this case, both words are lower case. This means that we are going through the motions of maybe doing a few searches each day and a social media post from time to time.
• social SELLING – Here the emphasis is on the SELLING portion of phase. Sales professionals are most comfortable with this because it is what they have always done. They focus on always trying to get results from every engagement and will even be as bold as to offer promotions or discounts via the social media messaging that they send out to their networks.
• SOCIAL selling – When the emphasis is put on SOCIAL, we are more focused on helping our clients succeed by providing them with the information that they need to make better informed decisions about products and services that will help them solve their business challenge. The focus here should be on building strong relationships and partnerships with our customers using the social media platforms that are appropriate for our product lines. It is not about an “always be closing (ABC)” approach, but more about “always be connecting” and helping our clients buy from us.

Regardless of where you are in your Social Selling journey, I encourage you to take a step back and take a close look at how your sales people are interacting with your content and how they are aligning that content with the Buyer’s Journey. If they are focusing on social selling or social SELLING, you will likely want to spend some time realigning expectations and training around SOCIAL selling. In my experience, this is an ongoing challenge that needs to be readdressed on a consistent basis. This practice is one that needs full support from the top down and should underlay each interaction between your sales professionals and your sales leadership.

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this topic, so leave a comment below.