Really, have you looked in the mirror lately!

What’s even more ironic is when I talk with management consultancies who provide digital transformation services and when you look at their teams presence on Social Media, and, well, you see examples like this:

Ok, so that’s an extreme example. You will be surprised though, take a look at a handful of profiles across your org.  

If you provide MarTech, AdTech, SalesTech or any type of services related to digital, surely you need to walk the walk and talk the talk…

Granted, digital means different things to different people but at the end of the day our digital presence needs to give off the vibe we want it to. Regardless of who we are or which team we are part of, sales, marketing, HR, procurement, operations, we are likely to be conversing in the metaverse soon, on Web3 and if we can’t get our digital act together on Web 2.0 what chances have we got of survival. And I don’t mean, sort out your corporate social marketing strategy and provide your teams some brochures or case studies to share, I mean, every single person in your company needs to own their social presence! And don’t expect them to know how to do this. You have a duty to your teams to help them understand how to appear human on social, and by the very nature it will show a human face to your business. You will be amazed at how many people of all generations, including Millennials and Gen Z don’t know how to appear human and sincere on social media.

If perception is not enough for you to change the status quo then take a look at some of the numbers. 

• 79% of applicants search for jobs on social media:  how many of them check you out, the hiring manager and other team members to get a feel for your company culture. In todays candidate led market, where there are up to 5 vacancies for every 1 person looking, you need to treat recruiting as seriously as you treat your sales and marketing approach.  
• Our industry grew by 240% in the last 12 months:  it’s vital your executive team have a social strategy aimed at making the right connections to secure investment or show potential acquirers you set the bar in terms digital presence. 
• Buyers use social to research you:  your prospects, customers and partners are researching you and your teams on social media to get a feel for the company culture - they ask themselves, do I want to work with this company? Do I want this company helping me deliver results from a digital marketing, customer experience or employee experience perspective?
• The buyer journey is 70-90% complete before your buyer engages with one of your sellers: we spend more time researching on digital and asking our peers and friends than we do speaking with sellers themselves. If your revenue facing teams are not walking the digital and social corridors as humans building relationships at scale, how can you expect to grow your business at the rate needed to overcoming a fiercely competitive market.  
• It’s no longer effective to rely on your sales teams to build relationships with your prospective customers and partners alone. There should be a company wide strategy that focuses on this, driven by the executive team. Your organization’s CEO and other executive leadership might not be innately personable or engaging, but they’re primed to be as they already operate as the face of the company.

Being a socially first organisations has significant benefits, I would even say is a strategic imperative for every single B2B organisation in 2022. However, it’s a transformation, that requires a strategy that focuses on up-skilling your entire organisation, starting with your leadership team, who will lead by example and show others the way. The affects this has on attracting and retaining top talent, and the new business benefits this brings to your company will be significant.  

Why is this important?

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 our 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. 

Whilst there was some luck for Namos, typically, from a sales perspective you can expect at least one new commercial meeting a week, one new proposal a month and one incremental deal per quarter.

You can also expect this:

• Commercial conversations increased, 
• Visibility increased,
• Inbound increased,
• Pipeline increased
• Culture improved…

Three things EVERYONE in your organisation must do on Social on your way to developing your Social Strategy:

The first: Have a buyer centric profile 

- Here at Supero we train and coach people to use social media to achieve their commercial objectives. First thing we teach you is that you need a buyer centric profile. Which means?

Stand-out. We know that buyers are doing their research and they use social media to review you, your product and services and it stands to reason that these buyers are not going to approach somebody who has a basic or self filling profile on LinkedIn or Twitter. Why?

Because nobody likes a show off! 

We spend all our time figuring out how we can provide solutions to our customers to make them ‘customer-centric’, so why not do the same ourselves!

Second: A wide and varied network 

- the second thing we teach people in our social strategy coaching is how to connect with people. We know that people hate being sold too, so we coach people how to connect without selling. 

This is a subtle difference. While I totally understand that you might want to pitch to everybody, you will find that you get further by not doing this. When you connect to people, this is your opportunity to have a conversation. And it's conversations that lead to positive commercial outcomes.

Your network needs to be in the accounts you want to influence (sell to, hire or acquire) and the more people you are connected to in the these accounts the better.

Why a large and varied network? The way search works on LinkedIn is slightly different to Google. Search is based on your network on Linkedin. The wider and varied the network you have, the more likely you will show up on a search by one of your buyers, candidates or acquirers. Then bingo! you get inbound. 

Third: Insightful and educational content - We know that our buyers are looking for insight.

Buyers have business issues and you can solve them. Buyers are savvy, they are just like you and me. They know a company brochure or company content will say "buy our company because we are great", we know that, because everybody says that.

It's not original and it's not differentiated. We know it will be biased and so we avoid it.

As buyers, we are looking for somebody that can offer us insight, somebody who wants to help us, somebody who wants to educate us.

One of the companies we are coaching, the sales guy has just received an RFP, so we suggested, why not use the management summary you are going to write as the basis for a blog? 

If we have a client interested in measurement of social, then there must be other people wanting that knowledge as well. The blog is below, by the way. 

To quote Howard Tiersky "The ‘buyer-first mentality’ should be the core mantra! Digital companies that are thriving right now are customer-centric. The same goes for our social media profiles. If we want to utilize them to get sales, then we should always think of the buyer every time we post."

What additional results could you look to obtain?

Just taking what your people are doing at the moment, cold calling and sending emails and transferring that onto social, isn't social selling. The results in doing that will be minimal.

It's time for you as a business to rise up and get trained on a proper social selling methodology, that will enable you to crush your numbers.

Some clients that we have worked with have seen some truly staggering results which might make you raise an eyebrow, but they are true.

• one client generated over 100x as many qualified meetings from their social activity as they did from their marketing department
• a sales team generated over £400,000 in revenue and and additional £400,000 in open pipeline per person in just 6 months
• activated sales teams create great content and huge visibility - we have an instance where each salesperson in a team was generating over 350 engagements per month and over 100,000 views on their content
• sales and technical teams creating content provide the opportunity to produce a groundswell of micro-niched tactical documents specifically to target particular organisations & industries facing particular challenges. No marketing department is capable of competing with this mechanism.
• more than 40 quality candidates applying for a role as a direct result of a single post on social media.

The results of doing this can be outstanding but this is not a tactical change. This is not a “training programme for some of the team” this is a significant transformation (in the truest sense of the world) in the organisation which not only makes it more competitive today…but every day from now forwards.

My company, Supero have partnered with DLA ignite, the most influential business in Digital Selling today. Co-Founders Adam Gray and Tim Hughes have spent 7 years building their Social Selling methodology and I am proud to be their partner and official reseller of their program.  

If you have questions about this article or would like to learn more, DM me and I’d be happy to connect and explore what this might mean to you and your organisation.  

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