How To Apply Advanced Strategic Social Selling In The Enterprise

Social selling comes in many flavors. The rudimentary idea of listening to buyers upstream and engaging meaningfully is powerful. It's also simple. Too simple.Watch how leading companies have extrapolated from this nucleus of the fundamentals, an enterprise approach. The majority of the posts I read out in the space on #socialselling focus in on the basics, and that's great. Many are brand new to the paradigm. But social media is in its halcyon years. In fact I've arguedSocial Selling will go 3.0 into context, smart contact lenses, wearables, AI and holography so if you can shift into a more advanced paradigm of thinking in its application, it will behoove winning organizations who seek an edge against fierce competitors.

Advanced strategic social selling becomes a much more complicated beast when leveraging social media platforms to create traction in larger matrixed enterprise accounts. It becomes highly fractal when you have over one hundred reps rolling this out. How do you manage that? How can you build a unified go-to-market-strategy? New problems and issues arise at scale for country managers. If you're working on a six or seven figure deal with a long sales cycle there are land mines galore to avoid with the basic social selling approached being preached.

For example, even sending a LinkedIn request without understanding if an executive in the power base you're selling into is a friend or foe, can be dangerous. Social selling irresponsibly or without the information in this post, could literally lead to lots of false excitement on your end whilst you're connecting to a ton of perfect clients, simultaneously killing off the exact deal you so desire. Mis-applying social selling or applying transactional social selling as a quick fix in an enterprise long term environ, will just give your savvy competitors traction. I'd venture to go out on a limb and say, enterprise organizations that don't apply social selling at all have an edge based on consistency of enterprise sales process over a competitor going ballistic in LinkedIn without a focused strategic plan of attack.

Please allow me to elaborate... If you're selling in highly contested cloud-based verticals like ERP, CRM, Marketing Automation, Security, and IT, we've all experience the ubiquity of a winner-takes-all incumbent supplier in these deals. There are often long term binding contracts. Just because you've researched the account and added a key CIO, won't ensure interacting with her or advancing your mission. She may be connecting just to report back to her existing solution provider how "irritating" and pushy their competition is. By applying a frontal strategy with social, you honestly may just be making your competitors even stronger, paradoxically.

Part of the heavy lifting here is the nuance that often the key decision makers you're selling to are relying on consensus from a team they deploy. While the operational level folks may have LinkedIn profiles, what you'll commonly find is that C-Suite executes do not have a LinkedIn that's more than a placeholder or they log in very little at best. Who is logging in? Despite the advent and proliferation of social media platforms with early adopters in software tech verticals, still it's been my experience that shrewd executives are positioning their executive assistants in LinkedIn as gatekeepers, just as they had with phones. 68% of CEOs have no social presence at all on the top five social platforms. Penetration of social in the C-Suite will become a given and social selling will fall away as a category yielding simply: selling. But history repeats. Any savvy executive will delegate and block to free-up their time to execute at the helm. So you're going up against gatekeepers in advanced social selling connecting at the highest levels in accounts. Know this as a certainty.

So we see that we've entered an era in which the identical roadblocks and challenges that existed in the heyday of inside phone selling and outside enterprise field selling are emerging. We must leverage thought through strategy as a weapon to break through and "open" deals.

Step one: LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows for passive tracking. Finally! No awkward "hungry" adding of senior people you've only met once in a meeting. Nothing says desperate more than random LinkedIn invitation requests without context. Here are the strategic advantages from LinkedIn's perspective:

• The ideal content delivery platform
• Nurturing leads in the pipeline
• Making direct contact with decision-makers
• Highly tailored relationship mapping

Synchronize this natively in your CRM. This solution is relatively affordable as an enterprise license. I recommend you invest in 5 seats of it immediately and placing your top performing reps on it. The solution has been out in the field for quite some time now and I've been gaining feedback on advanced uses for it from people I mentor around the world. Koka Sexton had a great bonsai tree analogy as he shared the highest value activities to perform in Sales Navigator everyday in this post. Here are some advanced ways to use it:

• Sync LinkedIn with your CRM. At the Account Level you can now track updates within your target companies which can indicate trigger events such as press releases, quarterly reports and new innovations, key hires, funding, etc. At the contact and lead level as your team is following up with a variety of key targets, the LinkedIn overview is presented right in the interface. You can also one-click save the lead rapidly there and see how you're networked via your own team.
• Build in weekly KPIs around how many leads are added to the lead list each week; at least one trigger event tracked per week with each account. Quiz your team on what's happening in named accounts. A great question to ask is, "Who is our biggest competitor in the account? In the executive layer, who are our frenemies?"
• Log in daily to Navigator and watch the streams for suggested leads.
• It's important to cross-reference new lead recommendations with Data.com information (to get phone numbers in order to complete each CRM record, so you can phone once connected). Ensure you're going back in to passively track any updates that executives are putting out. You also want to be reading their Publisher posts and following them on Twitter via Hootsuite, Twitter or other tools. You need to train your sales people almost like stock analysts to 'mind the stream'. Top sellers watch it like a hawk and act. Don't doubt: analyze and then proactively respond. If you see your biggest account has a new CMO, check to see how you're connected within your company and ask for a quick referral. If you are connected take the extra step to connect internally for intel. Zero-Time selling is a concept espoused by Andy Paul. They've also done studies from InsideSales.com that leaders are 100X more likely to answer the phone if contacted in the first 5 minutes of submitting a lead. I take trigger events seriously; when you see one in Navigator, dive on it, send a relevant e-mail – sell the appointment not the product. Then go do all your due diligence to build an agenda for the meeting, send a pre-email to clarify and hone-in on what you want to cover to best utilize the time.
• The elite modern sales manager is building in the advanced social selling methodologies into her daily process as a supplemental. The actions are new and if reps are not held accountable, this will become a nice to have and fall off. They'll also love not using phones so don't go down that rabbit hole. All the previous methods must continue to happen. Social can be a cross-training mechanism at all stages of the funnel, it does not replace everything that worked before! For teams that apply these methods, social selling represents an extraordinary edge. This method becomes advance when we build custom dashboards and track leading indicator metrics around it that helps us to move the needle in key accounts. Remember, you want to give your sales people a fishing rod so they can utilize their good judgment and can self manage. It's near impossible to create a command and control structure over all social interactions. There are just too many touches. Great social sellers often interact with over 200 pieces of prospect content per day, especially when they have networks of over 1,000 connections. Teach the underlying philosophy of Strategic Selling, Challenger Methodology and apply those laws to what they'll be doing in Social. Also, set the tone to time management with how you leverage all of this as a manager, helping to network and sell. Lead by example.

Step two: LinkedIn Publisher as the center of B2B content strategy.

• You're better off having your team put out B+ content twice a week to educate and enable prospects and customers, than waiting around for an entire quarter for Marketing to produce the perfect A+ earth-shattering insight one-pager. By then, the sector will have already moved and that data will be stale. Liberate and empower your people to represent their and your brand – it's a brave new world.
• Teaching your top sales people to write B2B Challenger Sales content is actually deceptively easy. The biggest hurdle is their fear of putting it out there. It's irrational but when sales people are asked to write, even the most confident ones often look like a deer in the headlights, as if they may risk getting fired. It's irrational, it's not like they're keynoting a conference. Managers need to give runway for adopting a B2B sales writing culture and allow their team to make mistakes. The beauty of most platforms where you'd post content is you can endlessly edit the content in real time. Help your people exercise the 'writing muscle'... it's an old world skill desperately needed to differentiate in a Social Selling 3.0 world.
• Top sellers can build up their Social Selling Index (SSI) to over 70 out of 100. Here are some updates to the new Social Selling Index, "the score that LinkedIn can give to a sales professional; a company; an industry; a region; or globally that benchmarks the activity of sales people being active social sellers." They can start to post the same advice and insight they provide in meetings with their biggest accounts in this forum. Strategic sellers who have been in an industry for five or ten years or are highly active selling in the field, know a great deal more than you may think. One technique is to have someone on your sales team do the editing if they are particularly gifted at writing. Again, to cement in this behavior, literally track and tie SSI and bi-weekly writing contributions to compensation. Create bonus opportunities out of thoroughly applying the above. It can make a huge impact on brand equity.

Step three: Challenger Sales marketing collateral to teach with new insight. Marketing and sales must align and meet weekly.

• I'm often puzzled at the strained relations between the Marketing and Sales departments in companies of all sizes. It's critical to break down these silos very early. Your CMO and SVP of Sales need to become close friends. I would even suggest switching roles for one week. Here's why: The B2B funnel starts online in the research and discovery phase. A gifted SVP of Sales could bring a great deal to advanced marketing strategy. A gifted CMO could teach a sales team a great deal about writing with impact, brand positioning and ways to leverage digital methods with a data driven approach. Your interested are aligned, no marketer or seller is an island! The CEO must bring them together to create visionary customer experience!
• Hold a standing lunch meeting that is not just perfunctory with Marketing and Sales. Get out the white board and role up your sleeves. The brainstorm topic is: How are we differentiating our position against competitors in the marketplace? What makes us unique? How are we capturing case studies, testimonials, white papers and sizzling collateral that makes us stand out? Good is the enemy of great. Marketing throwing leads over the wall as resentment builds... this insidious pressure cooker is neither an advanced nor social strategy but is often the dysfunctional family culture in even the most respected enterprises. Some may argue these two camps will always be oil and water. Tie incentives together, build your company in such a way as to cause alignment. I know a technology company where sales can't wait for the next dozen white papers to come out of Marketing because they are so helpful sitting up in ClearSlide. They have a booming YouTube channel with customer testimonials and the sales people in the field are consistently sharing them across various networks, peppering in their own thoughts on the application of the software. Nothing is more effective than customer testimonials, reference clients and the word of mouth that creates a ripple effect globally. This is Cialdini's concept of Social Proof. Open honest communication is key here. Sales needs to inform Product Marketing, Brand Marketing and even the design of the website itself on Web and Mobile. Sellers that consistently close enterprise deals over $250,000 and understand all the idiosyncrasies of complex deal cycles, and understand customer needs and the challenges and problems inherent to the entire ecosystem, need to bring their tribal knowledge to marketing to tighten up, strengthen and improve the entire go-to-market strategy.

Step four: Leverage TeamLink

• TeamLink is a feature built into Sales Navigator that allows you to instantly see the relationship between your network of seats as an internal molecule and how you're co-linked out to the larger network universe. At the hundreds of seats level, it's a massive time saver. You immediately see someone on the team in any country you can ping for a referral. You can see this data inside your CRM if you integrate.

Step five: Social automation with Buffer App. "Mind the string" is anAndy Rudin expression that speaks to constantly taking notes of links you could share back in your posts. Writer's block is a major major fear of sales people just getting started in B2B writing. You need to create a share doc of thousands of titles (yep, thousands) organized by vertical and clustered around your various solutions. If you have access to a system like SAVO, it's a phenomenal way to massively distribute approved collateral: decks, white papers, suggested tweets, infographics, videos, etc. That being the case again, cut your top sales people loose. They'll do you justice and generate massive excitement that will echo in the corridors of your dream target customers worldwide.

As I'm building out these posts, I'm constantly looking for link-out opportunities and ideas for future posts to write about. The devil's in the detail so diving into the weeds of HOW to actually advance social selling is a recurring them for me. It's often just the inertia of 'how do we get started?' We are so slammed, let's try this out next year or next quarter." In that statement, you just paid your commission to a competitor! Your team can create a repository of amazing articles, blog posts and LinkedIn Publisher posts, in a central file so they all can pull from that in what they post. Setting up automated tweets and shares via Buffer to allow for multiple time-zone posting to provide coverage for global organizations is an advanced strategy I learned from Timothy Hughes at Oracle UK. Automation for the front of the funnel as part of an Advanced Social Selling attack is crucial. I'm aware of various stealth start-ups that can generate dozens of qualified LinkedIn meetings per week these hot new start-up companies are leveraging to scale faster. (Inbox me if interested: tony@rsvpselling.com)

Step six: Constantly track and report on trigger events. Pre-call research on steroids!

Major Caveat: The same laws and principles that hold true in advanced strategic selling in the Enterprise hold true for Social Selling. Challenger Methodology, Target Account Selling (TAS) Account Growth, Miller Heiman sheets, Power Base Selling, SPIN and RSVP (disclaimer, I invented this method) must all be mashed-up and employed based on the situation to inform how you leverage this powerful tool. Otherwise you risk over-acceleration, limiting yourself by moving too fast, and falling into a 'push selling' transactional quagmire. I can't stress enough how important a consultative approach is in advanced social selling. Yes, they may not know you're listening but you need to deeply listen as if each prospect is personally talking with you. Approach them with empathy, understanding, seek to first understand, then be understood. Look at the difference,

"John, I read your annual report and noticed that revenue generation via your new marketing automation initiatives is a huge priority. That's what we do. How does your calendar look?"

vs.

"John, It was a pleasure meeting Carol (CMO), at Dreamforce last year. She had mentioned a marketing automation initiative and some of the challenges with picking a vendor. Here's a short video I think you will enjoy that highlights how {your competitor} is leveraging a new approach. The main takeaway I gained in reading your annual report, is this may still be a gap for your organization. Perhaps we can connect briefly and I can provide a perspective from a diverse array of customers I'm meeting within the industry?"

C-Level executives are not a fan of pushy operators. They respond best to insight and finesse, no matter the medium.

You're literally adding competitors, blocking deals and mucking the entire thing up by bullheadedly bashing into social with the Tasmanian devil whirlwind approach. It's not impressive you garnered 1,000 new connections in 1 month. It's impressive that you booked meetings with two clients that are most aligned with your solution approach. See the difference? One of the areas where I'm being brought in to train companies right now is "Effective Social Selling 3.0 in the Enterprise." There are unique problems that arise in rolling this out to a larger enterprise team. There are also major nuances and refinements to tune these techniques for efficiency and effectiveness in dealing with C-Level executives in Fortune 2,000 accounts. If you make dozens of clever incremental changes to social mastery and your social technology stack, your sales team will completely differentiate itself from the competition and you'll land more business.

Trigger Event Selling is a topic I cover in great depth in many of my posts. The gating issue has been translucent data capture. Accuracy of the data dictates outcome. GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. You've gotta have a sixth sense for what's happening in your territory and named accounts that you're assigned. As advanced social sellers, we need access to immediate information on our target prospects. In the past, you'd have to actually add that customer on LinkedIn, because there was no other way to see what they were posting. That's PUSH, I'm going to teach you PULL. That move right there, that's the top-spin on the ball. That's the move from beginner to expert social selling. That's the future of enterprise social selling in a nutshell. Help, I'm in a nutshell!! You could engage with executives in Groups but again, the majority of senior executives have no time and are not always in Groups.

There is so much false information being proliferated in the Social Selling movement, leading Enterprise companies need to be extremely careful in execution. The data, surveys and statistic simply do not support the cure-all by which it's portrayed. Is it valuable? Extremely, but it requires a phased approach and integration with ongoing enablement initiatives.

So this whole paradigm of passive tracking is huge. You can now go in, add 100 CXOs and start to see what they're up to in LinkedIn without bothering them. Really? To me, that's the holy grail. When there is major news, a press release, a key hire – management shake-up – or a job change, you are then able to reach out referencing something uber-relevant. You would think most enterprise sales teams are thinking in this way... It's simply not the case. Remember, it's how you use the tools never the tool itself. As Jill Rowley sagely puts it amusingly: "A fool with a tool, is still a fool." Just like it's never what you sell, it's how you sell it. Did the internet suddenly make weak sellers crush it? No. Did the e-mail and marketing automation revolution fix all the problems with selling? It probably created more. It's incumbent on management to implement a solid enterprise level social selling strategy and build in a structure that allows for effective time management: 80/20. Then it needs to be enforced, incentivized against and monitored.

And one more thing...

• Your most senior thought leader in the company needs to be publishing to LinkedIn Publisher a minimum of twice weekly with thought leadership content. They've closed the LinkedIn Influencer program although celebrities and dignitaries seem to continue to slip into it. Pay no mind, you can still make a next-level impact. Have no fear, this content can be ghostwritten if you're insanely busy and lack bandwidth – there are many talented ghostwriters helping CEOs delegate this as we speak. You need a 'thunderclap' social sharing strategy – optional to employees obviously – for your entire sales and marketing organization to share these updates. Don't just blast duplicate content, make sure every person adds in what they think. This is what causes content to rank massively. A thousand people sharing a thought leadership post in every social network adding their opinions to it starts to create a massive content garden. The butterflies (aka; your dream clients) will be landing shortly; I can't think of a more effective organic B2B lead generation strategy. Step two, anyone in the company inspired 'prosumes' this content. They write their own posts, white papers or blog posts about this and share that into networks. Now you start to see the true ripple effect of social selling.
• You will well amortize the total cost of ownership of all these technology platforms on the first close. They're relatively affordable if you look at the ROI of one $250K deal win. You also need to weigh the risk of being late to the party with cutting-edge methods. Arm your salesforce not just with the bleeding edge technology but get them trained on advanced enterprise selling.
• Anyone with a Social Selling Index score over 70 is a business developer whether they know it or not. In one business, the CFO allows his SVP of Sales to power his LinkedIn profile as he's massively connected in their target market.
• Offer a SPIFF bonus to salespeople that can leverage all 25 InMails in a non-spammy way each Quarter. Why? It's almost insane to me that you have a channel that performs exponential better than an e-mail but sales people are so stuck in their old habits and routines they don't use this 'gold in their pocket'. Tailored InMails garner 37% higher response rates than their generic counterparts.

Here are some people I follow on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn that are advancing social selling in the enterprise amidst the cacophony of 'simple'. They've sold enterprise software themselves and are familiar with the Herculean challenges. They speak CXO. They realize advanced Social Selling is a force multiplier and organizational competency not a replacement for world class business development: Koka Sexton, Jill Rowley, Timothy Hughes.

Now it's your turn: How are you advancing social selling to close major business deals? Who do you follow in social who you feel is blazing a trail? Who gets it? What advice would you give a strategic seller holding a $5MM quota on bringing social into the mix to bring accretive value?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: carburesGroup