We see this in a number of companies. Random acts of social!
Either the sales management decide to move to social selling, with a days course here and a days course there. There are loads of gurus who will be happy to take money off you for this. Or the Leadership is stuck in the dark ages and the sales team themselves start from the bottom up with their own initiative. Usually with a Hubspot article or even my book "Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers" available on Amazon http://tinyurl.com/gqhfcqj
But what about a social strategy?
Surely now with the news that so many retailers are going to the wall the argument that buyers have not changed their habits does not hold any water.
But random acts of social? Gurus and their "drive by shooting" training? Is that really the way forward?
Social is a strategic initiative that needs to be driven from the board (or C-Level as it's called in the US) there has to be a mechanism for that alignment to take place across the whole enterprise. Sales, Marketing, Purchasing, Supply Chain, Human Resources etc. From the top all the way through the middle managers to the people on the "shop floor".
The prize? The prize here is that social offers you a competitive advantage as well of the (obvious) revenue uplift .... note this is incremental revenue and not some efficiency saving like the "you know who management consultants" will try and sell you.
Is anybody doing this already? Of course they are ...
These results are typical not just in the technology industry, but across a range of companies we have studied. Most organizations fall far short when it comes to strategic alignment: Our analysis of 124 organizations revealed that only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company’s strategic priorities.3