How to create social selling playbooks for your team, Tim Hughes

As part of our social selling and influence course we always finish by creating playbooks for the sales people involved.

The problem with playbooks

The problem with playbooks is that people try and cut corners. I recall at my last corporate role one playbook was created and of course it became an average that nobody used.

The big accounts people said it was for the mid-market team, the mid-market team said it would only work for the names account people and the public sector people said it would only work for the private sector people. It was created, put on a shelf, never to be used again.

Playbooks have to be individualised

What we do here is DLA Ignite is create a playbook for each salesperson. Yes I totally get we have to play off scalability with usability. Our view is that if it takes longer to do, but it's used and will impact on the revenue of the business it's worth doing. Part of our culture I guess.

Playbook, leadership and accountability

Critical with playbooks is the salesperson's accountability. We always create the playbook, with the salesperson and the sales leader. This means we build in the accountability. If a salesperson says they will do something then they will or there are consequences.

Measurement

Modern digital selling, provides your business with set of leading indicators or measures that you can place on your sales team. Critical for this, you can measure sales people before things hit the CRM.

A sales leader said to me this week, "we employed 3 sales people and they sold nothing", leading indicators enable you to measure on a weekly (you can do it daily if you want) if the salesperson is contributing.

Social key performance indicators (KPIs) are

- connection requests sent

- connection requests accepted

- Network growth and in which accounts

- Engagement with prospects - How many likes and comments have you got and received

- How many social posts published

- The amount of post engagement from outside your company

- How many meetings / leads / appointments did they get from this

- How many next actions from these meetings

Each playbook contains

- A smartsheet of target companies (this can be created on a product like FunnelAmplified if required), this is about getting maximum coverage.

- Salespeople define the people they want to connect to and who they need to influence.

- We then define who and how we will get conversations with those people.

- We define the content plan, content that will define who we are as experts and content that will get us conversations.

- We define a social media prospecting sequence.

Playbooks gives you visibility of your business, they also provide your sales people with structure, add to that a methodology of social selling and you have turbo powered the sales engine in your business.

Now Imagine .....

Imagine, I pick you up tomorrow in my car and drive you to a place which is full of your prospects and customers. All you have to do is go up and have a conversations with them.

Remember, social media is, social media. In the past you interrupted somebody with a cold call or an email and pitched your services. As social media is being social on media, interrupting and pitching does not work.

If I walked up to you at a social event and pitched, you would make your excuses and go and talk to somebody else.

So how about tomorrow, I pick you up in my car and we go to a place where all your prospects are hanging out. You can stay as long as you want. All you have to do is have a conversation with them. It's that simple, if you are interested, read on.

What is social selling?

Here at DLA Ignite, we define social selling as

"Using your presence and behavior on Social Media to build influence,
make connections, grow relationships and trust, which leads to
conversation and commercial interaction."

It's not witchcraft, it's enabling your salespeople to work from home, (or the office) and create conversations with prospects and customers. Conversations on social media and conversations that convert.

The problem with the name "social selling" is that people think that this is selling on social. All these pitches that you get on social are not social selling, they are spam.

The other thing you need to know about social selling is that this isn't about "putting out some videos" or "putting flowers on your profile" or "going viral" this is about revenue, EBITDA, you winning business from the competition and having a competitive advantage.

With anything you do on social there are two questions you need to ask

1. How many leads / meetings / conversations will I get from this post / blog / activity?

2. How much revenue / EBITDA am I getting as a business?

So who's social selling?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.

Andrew Ferrier who is the CEO of Display Technology Ltd and in this article it talks about why Display Technology have adopted social selling. His team have also created a social media strategy with help from our partner, Crux.

Their social media mission statement is

“We want to position ourselves as a forward-thinking, knowledgeable team of individuals who are all experts in our own right, therefore, collectively awesome!”

Andrew also says in that post

"Adopting this (social selling) strategy has taken all of us well outside of our comfort zones but the rewards we have seen in a short period of time have created an excitement within the business development team (new term for sales team).

Because of the nature of social media, quite often you can get instant results. Even if that is just a comment left on your post, or a like, or someone taking the time to want to connect with you.

The excitement around the sales team is infectious, it’s no longer a chore to reach out to the market place because the results can be instant and are there, right in front of you."

What sort of results can you expect?

If you check out this video of Chris Mason CEO at Oracle reseller Namos, fast forward to 19 minutes 55 seconds. Chris talks about a $2.6 million win from being on social, after completing the DLA Ignite social selling and influence course.

What happened? They buyer was on social media looking for a solution to their problem, spotted one of the Namos salespeople, who had a buyer-centric profile and asked if the salesperson could help them. That turned into a $2.6 million deal.

Contact any of the DLA Ignite team, Eric, Adam, Nick, Vanessa, Lorena, Priscilla, Lenwood, Alex and they will be more than happy to help.

Go and look at their LinkedIn profiles .... look how they can have digital conversations, create insightful content. This could be your company!

We are the only social selling and influence company in the world to offer a certificate in social selling sponsored by the Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP).

Other articles you might be interested in ....

Would you buy social selling training course from somebody that doesn't use social selling?

How to create budget and build a business case for your social selling project