Over the last 3 years we have been in business we have seen the importance of a clear strategy and a clear process as part of any social selling program. We call it programmatic social selling.
In the past, profile writers and a US focused cookie cutter process delivered via seminar was "good enough". But like this articles states, a company needs a robust process so that leadership can measure students against "best practice" or put another way a "standard".
The problem with profile writers is that that does not initiate change. Social selling is about mindset change and habit change and all a profile writer does is writes your LinkedIn profile. Your sales people do not know or act like they should do in the new social world. We think it's a scam to call something sales transformation when it clearly isn't.
The same with webinars. Webinars are great at exchanging information but the problem companies face is that knowing and doing are two different things. You can teach people to do something. Give them the facts on why they should do it. But it does not mean they will do it. Social selling is about mindset change and habit change and webinars will not motivate all the people, all the time.
What we have developed here at Digital Leadership Associates (DLA) social-experts.net is a benckmark, that we can compare people against. As we know what is best practice / standard we can measure any company and see how digital they are.
This could work for you for screening candidates, in probation you can provide new starters with a baseline they need to achieve in that probation period, you can see if you management make the digital profile, you can profile your competitors and see digital they are, you can use this in recruitment to filter out the people who are not digital. You can use it as part of your digital transformation as a measure for all employees to measure digital mindset. We see it as the "Myers–Briggs" type indicator for digital.
All of this provides you as a business a competitive edge to measure your staff and how digital they are, but also trip out cost out of sales, marketing and human resources, while giving you a revenue and clear process competitive advantage.
Our research confirms year over year: the deeper the customer relationship and the more mature the sales process, the better the sales results. We measure this using the Sales Relationship Process Matrix (SRP Matrix), a framework for assessing sales effectiveness. At CSO Insights, we use the SRP Matrix to plot organizations on two axes: depth of customer relationship and maturity of sales process. Then we analyze key performance indicators such as revenue plan attainment, quota attainment, win rates and attrition. Click here to read more about our most recent SRP Matrix results. With a link to sales results, organizations should continually assess where they are against these two dimensions: relationship and process.
