Blueprints for social_selling_success

Blueprints for social_selling_success

• 1.
  BLUEPRINTS FOR SOCIAL SELLINGSUCCESS BLUEPRINTS FOR SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS
• 2.
  Blueprints for SocialSellingSuccess | II Our customer success organization at LinkedIn works with sales teams from companies in a range of industries around the world that have chosen to enhance their more traditional sales methods with social selling best practices. To help these sales teams kick-start their social selling journey, we assist them in creating a plan called a “Blueprint for Success.” While the plan details differ based on each sales team’s goals, three themes remain constant: • Awareness • Education • Reinforcement Build on a solid foundation Let’s think about these concepts in terms of creating a blueprint for a house. Creating aware- ness -- and with that, securing executive spon- sorship -- is the foundation of building a healthy and sustainable social selling program. Next is education, which is like the walls and roof of the house. With the right structure through effective education and learning, your sales professionals will embed social selling into their daily sales workflow. Finally, reinforcement -- and with it, accountability -- can be considered the insulation. Insulation is the reinforcement that makes a house livable in the long run. Transforming a sales team into a social selling organization requires a thorough yet flexible adoption plan. To that end, reinforcement is critical for driving accountability. When architects get the blueprint right, the end result is that they achieve their vision of a beautiful, custom-built home. The same is true of a blueprint for your social selling program. If we believe social is going to be part of a the core fabric of business, how do we seize this opportunity? BLUEPRINTS FOR SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS
• 3.
  Blueprints for SocialSelling Success | III Bring your social selling vision to life Your blueprint can bring your vision to life. When the blueprint is executed effectively, you end up with the desired result. What is the vision for your sales organization? What does the ideal sales organization of the future look like? Here’s what we see when organizations fully embrace social selling: • The best and brightest talent wants to work for you because they no longer have to make cold calls. • Instead of counting how many outbound calls their reps made, your sales manag- ers are focusing on how many valuable relationships their reps have established. • Rather than dread conversations with your sales reps, your prospects and customers look forward to chatting with them because they offer valuable insights. Becoming a social selling organization is a gradual transformation. Most teams begin by integrating social selling best practices into their current practices. How long will it take to build your house? If you have 10 sales people, you might be able to implement social selling fundamentals in a few weeks. Of course, it will take longer if you have 15,000 reps. Regardless of the size of your team, the same guiding principles apply: you need to develop a plan incorporating awareness, education and reinforcement. The main objective of your plan is to empower people to adopt social selling. Awareness, education and reinforcement are the fundamentals, but none are a one- time exercise. Get executive sponsors involved early and often. Think about how to educate your teams in a scalable and effective way. And tap into your sales reps’ competitive nature and create a culture of recognition to hold your sales teams accountable for adopting and practicing social selling behaviors. Think about where your organization is along the social selling journey. If you haven’t visualized what you want your sales team to look like, take some time to do it. Then start developing the first version of your blueprint or tweak your existing plan to optimize your chance of success in transforming your sales reps into world-class social sellers. Here’s how two sales leaders applied these concepts to drive social selling awareness, adoption, and results. BLUEPRINTS FOR SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS
• 4.
  Blueprints for SocialSelling Success | IV My first piece of advice when transforming your sales organization is to find your evangelizers. While we didn’t have a full-blown social selling initiative, we purchased LinkedIn Sales Navigator to help a subset of reps identify influencers in their deals and find NetSuite champions who had moved to new companies. And because these reps were happy with Sales Navigator, we then had evangelizers planted across all of our offices. Based on this success, we quickly rolled out to our other sales teams. My second piece of advice is to dedicate resources. Traditional sales tools that allow you to build a list of companies are tough to keep front of mind with sales reps. We saw Sales Navigator as a tool that would influence and change the way we do business because it allows reps to be more productive and opens up new selling avenues. But to use Sales Navigator effectively, reps need to understand how to optimize their LinkedIn profiles, how to ask for introductions, how to search, and how to find multiple people in an organization. To succeed, you need to designate at least one person who has bandwidth to roll out Sales Navigator and spread awareness of the product. My third piece of advice is to continually communicate and provide visibility into what is happening with Sales Navigator. We invited LinkedIn to participate each year in our sales kickoff, which has helped us tremendously in driving awareness. We also regularly work LinkedIn tips and tricks or contests into our monthly global sales call. And we keep LinkedIn and our other tools front of mind during our sales planning or when we change sales policy. When it comes to providing visibility, we generate customized monthly reports for our vertical leads and front line sales managers, showing their individual reps’ usage of LinkedIn. With this information, our sales managers can have productive conversations with their reps around pipeline and prospecting. Finally, my last piece of advice is to secure executive sponsorship. One way we built executive sponsorship was by running a contest. We had done a fair amount of education on how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. But adoption was spotty when it came to how many companies and contacts the sales team had saved. I proposed a contest where reps would have a short window of time to save their accounts to LinkedIn. The winners would be drawn from those who successfully added all of their accounts and would get a personalized recommendation on their LinkedIn profile from our president. The president helped me recruit the top worldwide sales VPs to participate, giving us 18 sales leaders focused on this initiative. In the end, over 85% of our reps fully participated and the other 15% participated on some level. That gave us thousands more companies and contacts to track than we had just two weeks before, and has driven 2015 pipeline and revenues. ASK THE EXPERT: AVP, Sales Productivity, NetSuite BLUEPRINTS FOR SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS JOAN FITZPATRICK Note: This story was based on Joan's presentation at LinkedIn Sales Connect
• 5.
  Blueprints for SocialSelling Success | V 2012-2013 was a precarious time for the Sacramento Kings. With the threat of the team moving to Seattle, many fans disengaged and many of our sales reps took positions with other teams. Our entry to social selling was the result of new ownership taking over in the spring of 2013. The new owners were Silicon Valley folks who believed sales 3.0 tools would solve several issues: • Better target our fans and reconnect with the market • Get more done with fewer people • Rebuild our staff, offer new tools to existing staff, and help our reps scale faster So we embarked on Sales 3.0, which revolved around three pillars: • Social selling • Accelerated technology • Collaboration And LinkedIn Sales Navigator was perfect for getting us there. Across our social selling program, we focused on creating a culture of recognition and celebration around talent. First, we emphasized how we were investing in talent—both current and future employees. We promised our reps they would no longer make cold calls if they used Sales Navigator. It was a big boost to retention and recruiting. We also shared wins and built a team selling environment. In our daily huddles, we highlighted social selling wins. When reps made deals through LinkedIn, we’d ask them to describe their process: how they found the right people, what search filter they used, and what email they sent. The idea is to help your teammates win because you never know when they might be talking to someone who can help you with a sale. We used gamification as a reinforcement mechanism. We tracked Sales Navigator stats in Salesforce and monitored InMail activity. And we created leaderboards and correlated Social Selling Index (SSI) to top performers -- and integrated SSI with Salesforce. Managers can access dashboards and reports in Salesforce to see ROI and sales reps can use these to demonstrate their wins. When you celebrate, recognize and gamify the right behaviors, you see a dramatic culture shift. And for us, that has translated into a top- performing sales organization. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a 17% jump in attendance, the highest in the league. And we are now number one in new season tickets sold. Social selling and Sales Navigator have changed the way we sell. Along the way, it’s important that executive leadership and owners recognize and celebrate those engaged in the right behaviors -- and do so daily. Remember, it takes 30-60 days for something to become a habit. You can’t just drop in a new tool and expect people to use it. Telling stories, holding huddles, creating public leaderboards, and integrating with existing tools will speed adoption and get your organization on a new track. BLUEPRINTS FOR SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS ASK THE EXPERT: Vice President, Ticket Sales & Service, Sacramento Kings PHIL HORN Note: This story was based on Phil's presentation at LinkedIn Sales Connect