37 Character Tweet Led to Multi-Thousand Dollar Opportunity.

Still think Social Selling is a lot of hype?

While large and small companies alike continue to puzzle over the impact of social media on sales, these giants in our industry are here to say it’s here to stay.  What giants?  IBM and Microsoft.  And they have the stories to back it up.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with executives from IBM and Microsoft about their social initiatives.  Their results should help convince the most skeptical of executives about the virility of social to produce measurable revenue results.  Joining me in the conversation, which was hosted by The Customer Collective (many thanks!), were Bill Patterson (@bpatter), Product Planning and Strategy Lead for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Doug Hannan (@ibmdough), a business unit executive at IBM.com in marketing in North America.  Here are a few edited excerpts from our conversation.

Turned 37 characters into thousands of dollars

Anneke:  Bill…could you explain how your role at Microsoft relates to social media and sales?

Bill:  We find ourselves today helping organizations take advantage of social media to create much deeper engagement in the line of sales, service and marketing initiatives.  My job is to listen to the best examples – from companies all around the world – of how they use social media to boost their bottom line, so that we can, in turn, help deliver the right tools and solutions to help them take this new channel of engagement to new heights for their organization.

Anneke:  For the sports fans and business leaders among us, tell us about your NBA social media story.

Bill:  Sure.  As sports fans know, sometimes going to a stadium can be tough when your team isn’t performing as expected.  Yet ticket sellers still have a responsibility to fill stadium seats.  What we learned and shared with the NBA – a client of ours – is that one of the best times to sell tickets is during the annual draft process, when fans have the most hope for maybe a change in direction.  By mining social networks like Twitter, one NBA team was able to tap into the pulse and tone of how excitement was building for a player they had selected, and they simply tweeted something along the lines of “Exciting…can’t wait to go to a game next year!”  That simple 37 character response drove new leads and new sales lead conversions into their sales organizations in real time.  It turned into a multi-thousand seat … multi-thousand dollar opportunity.

Anneke:  These players – I was checking Twitter last night – have millions of followers, right?

Bill:  They do.  The opportunity for distribution is quite impressive and really gives these teams and organizations an opportunity to connect in new ways to both their existing fan base and plenty of potential customers, as well.

Quadrupled order volumes in first quarter

Anneke:  Doug, you’re not increasing ticket sales, but you are generating revenue for something recognized by those of us in technology as almost as hot – cloud offerings.  Can you tell us about your program and results?

Doug:  I’m happy to.  We wanted to understand our clients’ needs in the area of cloud computing, and we turned to social media to listen.  There are a lot of conversations happening on the web, but frankly there’s also a lot of clutter.  It’s hard to pick out what really matters.

We created a systematic approach of listening to marketplace leaders, and from there created some messages our sellers can use in their social conversations to foster a dialog with our customers. These messages might include referrals to industry experts, new information on how other clients are using IBM cloud computing, or other relevant information in this fast-paced area.

One of the differences in what we did is that instead of asking each seller to try and understand the marketplace, in a free-for-all environment, we organized our listening and presented messages to the sellers, who could then edit them, send, retweet, etc.  All they had to do was tailor the message to make it appropriate for their particular context.

Anneke:  A lot of companies are trying to figure out how to take one sales rep’s success with social media and scale it across their organization.  It sounds like you’ve found a way to do that.  What were the results?

Doug:  Our results were pretty exciting.  Our pilot included just five inside sales reps using 10 social promotions.  From that we grew our direct contacts by 480%, expanded our reach ten-fold, and quadrupled order volumes within the first quarter.

“Pretty exciting” is some understatement.  Bill and Doug had much more to share.  (I was like a kid in a candy shop!)  Here are just some of the topics we touched on…

• The value of listening and being responsive
• Social media policy
• Metrics
• Scaling social strategy across an organization and around the globe
• Compensation for social teams
• Sales and marketing collaboration
• And so much more

You can hear the entire conversation here – minus a few breaks where we had some recording difficulties.  My apologies!

Are you skeptical about social selling?  What are your fears?  If not, tell us what’s

Tags: IBM, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics, NBA, social media, social networks, social sales, social sales results, social selling, ticket sales

14 Business-Killing Things I Learned About Selling to Tech Buyers

All because of someone I met on LinkedIn  

I was recently engaged in a passionate discussion with a new friend of mine, Kenny Madden, about the importance of understanding sales from the buyer’s perspective. He said something like “Who cares how a bunch of salespeople are defining Sales 2.0; the buyer has no clue what that is and doesn’t care. They just want us to do a better job selling.”  

You might think I would be offended, as co-author of the book, Sales 2.0.  On the contrary, I couldn’t have agreed more, because his in-your-face statement reinforced a basic premise of Sales 2.0 – it’s about a better way of selling to meet the expectations of today’s buyers.  Reinforcing my beliefs further, this discussion would never have happened were it not for social networking (an important tool in Sales 2.0).  Kenny and I have never met face-to-face or even talked on the phone.  We met on LinkedIn, have had several “conversations” on Facebook, and have exchanged e-mail.  Our entire relationship has been carried out online.  How cool is that? 

So what does all of that have to do with selling to tech buyers?  Kenny, true to his word, decided to listen to a bunch of tech buyers – 1.6 million to be exact – to get their perspective and learn what they want from those of us who sell to them.  From his online survey, here are the 14 business-killing things he shared in a recent blog. And – using another Sales 2.0 technique – I’m passing it on to our friends and colleagues.

The 14 worst things an IT vendor can do (in no particular order)

1. Cold call – don’t do any research about my company or business
2. Lie about your products
3. Don’t listen
4. Slam the competition
5. Assume IT decision makers have linear buying stages – you have to be on, “always on,” regardless of where I am
6. Poor, generic advertising and marketing that provides no useful information about you or your company
7. Not responding
8. Not being open about pricing
9. Pretending you have a relationship with my company when you don’t
10. Refuse to leave a voicemail with the receptionist
11. Argue
12. Thinking that I’m ready to buy simply because I downloaded a whitepaper
13. Making your technical information hard to find on your website
14. And my personal favorite…Thinking that the IT department has no juice; only selling to the C level (All they do is pass it to IT to vet)

Kenny, who works in market development at Spiceworks, the fastest growing IT social business network, went on to share the 13 best things an IT vendor can do, along with summary recommendations.  You can read his entire blog here.

 Another cool thing about Kenny…he expresses his passion for sales and marketing in art.  Here’s one of my favorite pieces from his collection, titled “I am not a Lead.”   

That’s the story of my latest great find on social media.  I found a new friend and like-minded colleague.  I gained some new insights into selling to tech buyers that I can pass on to my team and all of you.  What’s your best social networking story? 

Tags: IT vendors, Kenny Madden, LinkedIn, Sales 2.0, selling to IT, selling to tech buyers, social media, social networking, Spiceworks, technology sales

Headed to #sds11 and #ls_2011…See You There?

I’m off to Phoenix tomorrow for the SiriusDecisions Summit (#sds11 on Twitter.)  With so many companies looking to improve the integration of their sales and marketing organizations and measure the revenue contribution of marketing programs, I look forward to learning about how companies are going about aligning the functions and how that impacts their revenue results. I’m also glad to see that SiriusDecisions has organized breakout sessions around the topics of Social Media, Sales Enablement and Online Marketing. These are key areas where our clients are asking for strategy and implementation assistance and it will be fun to bring a sales leader’s perspective to these conversations. If you’ll be at the conference, come say “hi.” I’ll be at the Wednesday evening reception  signing books in Clickability‘s (now part of Limelight Networks) booth and talking about how marketing – especially your web site – can increase selling and buying productivity. I’ll be tweeting pithy take-aways from the sessions, too.

From Phoenix,  I head to Minneapolis, where the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP) is hosting their third annual Leadership Summit (#ls_2011 on Twitter.)  And what a year it is for inside sales leaders! Studies are showing that inside sales is growing 15 times faster than field sales.  Conference organizers are expecting over 300 attendees: a 30% increase from last year. At the summit, I will be leading an executive panel on Opportunities and Challenges in Inside Sales. I will also be presenting Social Selling for Executives: What the Management Team Needs to Know to Succeed with Today’s Customer as part of a special Social Selling University workshop immediately following the Summit.

Hope to see you there! Any information you’d like me to report on from either conference? Questions you’d like me to ask the panel of sales executives?  Packing advice for both Phoenix, where it is 90 degrees F as well as Minneapolis, where it is 60?!

Tags: AA-ISP Leadership Summit, inside sales, online marketing, sales enablement, SiriusDecisions Summit, social media, Social Selling University

How does Sales 2.0 help your customers?

If attendance at the Sales and Marketing 2.0 conference (formerly known as the Sales 2.0 conference) is any indication that Sales 2.0 has struck a chord with today’s sales and marketing professionals, last week’s event in San Francisco proved companies are indeed looking for ways to improve the way they market and sell to today’s customers. More than 500 people met to hear keynote presentations and panel discussions that included more than 40 sales and marketing leaders. But if Sales 2.0 is “a more effective and efficient way of selling for both the buyer and the seller, enabled through technology” (my simplified definition), what is the impact of Sales 2.0 on our customers’ businesses?  How are their experiences with us improving, and how is that translating to improved results?

That’s why I kicked off my highly interactive presentation (“Social Media that Generates Qualified Leads and Revenue”) with a description of “Customer 2.0,” a new kind of buyer — one who, according to Sirius Decisions, spends 70% of the buying process online before ever speaking to a sales person.

See video of Anneke speaking at Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference, November 2010 (thanks to Barbra Gago!).

I told the story of my LinkedIn connection to Justin Davison, an IT manager outside Pittsburgh, whom I’ve never met, but with whom I’ve had numerous thought-provoking online conversations. Justin, emblematic of many of today’s buyers, felt so strongly about letting us sales people know we must change our ways in order to succeed that he posted an “Open Letter to Vendors” called “Moving Beyond Cold Calling” on SpiceWorks, his community of choice.  In Justin’s words:

“My time is limited, but my workload is not.”

“Unprepared sales people impair my focus and productivity.”

“In the world of social media, I am not secretive about the projects I am working on.”

2.0 customers such as Justin make it easier for us to be effective and useful sales people who don’t waste buyers’ time trying to sell them something that’s not relevant. We can read their personal and company blogs and Twitter streams to find out what they are thinking about and what’s going on in their business and industry. We can check out their connections, work histories and slide presentations on LinkedIn. We can discover their friends and and hobbies on Facebook. And we can view their personal and company videos on YouTube.

But even if your customers haven’t chosen universally to share details of their personal and work lives on social media, there are still ways to make selling and buying more effective for our customers. With business intelligence products such as those promoted at the show (InsideView, iSell and FirstRain), we can capture deep, consolidated company and industry information and, thereby, identify prospects most likely to benefit from our offerings. With marketing automation products (such as Marketo, Eloqua and those integrated into CRMs such as Oracle CRM OnDemand), we can detect which Web pages our clients and prospects linger on, as well as the content they download. This information gives us hints about what work challenges they may be facing. Armed with this information, we can tailor our conversations accordingly and help our customers solve the problems they face — rather than pitching them on a generic solution.

Sales 2.0 helps customers be more efficient, too. By providing robust and valuable information online, and sales and product expertise by phone, we respect the buyer’s time. With scheduling-automation products such as TimeTrade, we can significantly curtail the process for finding mutually available time on everyone’s calendars — which can be time-consuming and exasperating for our customers, as well as our sales people.

Justin Davison lists the top-priority projects he is working on in his online profile. Gerhard Gschwandtner, the producer of the Sales 2.0 conferences and creator of the Selling Power media empire, predicts the day will come when our prospects enter their own opportunities into our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications — the ultimate acceleration and alignment of the buying and selling process. 

How is your Sales 2.0 approach helping your customers — and making them more effective and efficient?

Tags: Customer 2.0, Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference, social media

Sales 2.0 Thinking: Get an Outside Perspective

We are all insanely busy these days. In our day-to-day jobs, we are so focused on execution that it’s difficult to think about how to improve performance and productivity.    Here’s an idea:  talk to people outside your company, compare experiences and share ideas.   I’ve been interviewing Sales 2.0 leaders for my new book project and they all have one thing in common: they find time to call their peers doing similar work in other organizations, attend conferences and networking events and read about how others are improving results in sales. These Sales 2.0 practitioners seek out and are open to outside perspectives.

Last week I traveled to Atlanta to deliver several Sales 2.0 workshops, thanks to the invitation of Mark Barry of OpenView Partners, Marge Beiler of RareAgent, the AA-ISP (American Association of Inside Sales Professionals) and others who sponsored the events. I call these events workshops rather than presentations for a reason. I am not the only person contributing information: participants share their successes and challenges and everyone learns from each other.   In order to be a credible and current Sales 2.0 “expert”,  I feel I need to be continually learning from my clients and those that come to hear me speak.

In my Sales 2.0 workshops, I start by presenting the key concepts of Sales 2.0, what is driving it, and how companies are producing better results by practicing it. Then I get to my favorite part: facilitating a conversation with the audience.  In two days in Atlanta, I got to hear from Venture Capitalists and investment partners, business executives running venture-funded start-ups, sales professionals,  inside sales managers, inside sales reps, recruiters, trainers, and several other service providers, all of whom were eager to learn – from me as well as from other participants – what is working in the new world of selling and buying. Here are some of the things I learned:

1. In order to engage prospects, stand out from the crowd.

• At one company, e-mails that include a humorous video are getting a 20% better response than those without
• Prospects appreciate a personal touch: hand-written note cards and physical mailings are being well-received

2. Companies are experimenting with allowing inside sales reps to work from home.

• Most managers agree that this works well as special recognition for senior reps who are performing (but not recommended for new hires)
• Bringing the sales group together (face to face) is still important for team-building
• One company found a loss in productivity with remote reps

3. Large, established companies are learning from smaller companies.

• Much of what start-ups (and we in the Sales 2.0 community) take for granted is new learning for the Fortune 500
• There is huge potential to expand the role of inside sales within large companies (and improve their margin and customer satisfaction)

4. Sales teams are using social media  but don’t yet know how to evaluate the results.

• Most managers buy in to using LinkedIn in the sales process; many are skeptical about Facebook and Twitter
• Connecting to customers and prospects is a good idea

Read also Mark Barry’s excellent blog post about these events, Sales 2.0: Succeeding in the New World of High Productivity.

What have you learned by looking outside your company for new ideas? And where do you find them?

Tags: inside sales, Sales 2.0, social media, telework, video