How to Implement a B2B Social Selling Program

As the conversations around social selling continue to bubble up, it appears that scores of organizations are starting to move past understanding the benefits, to determining exactly how to implement a program and how to tie the results to their overarching business KPIs.

Simply do a Google search asking "what is social selling" and you'll be served up over 200,000,000 pages of content that might help you answer that question. That's a lot of data to sift through, and with the pace in which the world is moving it could be 2050 before you get through it all and devise your plan.

Let's try to break it down into some steps that can get you moving down the path a little faster.

What does social selling mean?

At it's core, social selling is the process of developing relationships as part of the sales process. Today this often takes place via social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, but can take place either online or offline. Let's just stop there and agree that you know it's perceived value. 

For B2B companies, you'll probably find that your sales team is already sharing content, firing up their Likes, Shares and Comments and implementing what I would call "random acts of social". There's no definitive strategy. Perhaps there's some sales executive support and your marketing team is pumping out content they're trying to get the sales team to share. But you're just as likely to find that everyone is acting in silo's across the organization. I believe the key to a successful social selling program is collaboration and teamwork -- aka alignment.

Who should own the social selling program within the organization?

Over the past few years your Social Media Manager has most likely been laying some of the groundwork. Creating a social media policy to mitigate the risks associated with those random acts of social is imperative. Working with your Legal/Compliance teams to create the policies and best practices are an essential part of heading risk off at the pass.

Creating and offering regular training on the particularities and best practices of the various social platforms is where your Social Media Manager can facilitate progress. Their role typically lives within your Marketing team. So Marketing should own social selling? Not so fast.

How about your sales ops team? Sales operations is a strategic function that is in place to help reduce friction in the sales process, increase team efficiency and execution, and drive sales excellence. All of these areas will be touched by social selling initiatives. If your Sales ops team doesn't completely understand the intricacies of social selling, can they lead the charge? Can they work with Procurement to select the right tools that will help your sales teams execute on the social selling strategy in an efficient manner? Maybe not in the beginning, but they should be trained to.

Social Selling Alignment

Sales Enablement means different things to different organizations depending on their size and maturity level, but generally, this is a program where Sales & Marketing are tightly aligned in bringing your product to market. Your sales enablement team is most likely chartered with ramping up new hires, increasing productivity and providing tools & processes to name just a few. When ramping up sales new hires with an on-boarding program during their first 90 days with the company, there is a perfect opportunity to build social selling methodologies into the curriculum. It may make sense to have your Social Media Manager do this training, but I think it would greatly benefit your sales training program manager to learn the ins and outs themselves.

So now we have Sales, Marketing and Sales Operations in the mix. Who should own the program? ALL OF THESE. Create a team that meets regularly to discuss your social selling program implementation, define metrics to measure success and create reporting dashboards to share with key executives. If you have a change management plan or team in place, I'd recommend inviting someone from this team to the table because this could be a significant shift in mindset for a lot of people in your organization.

What should your social selling program consist of?

Besides the things mentioned above, here's how you might go about defining your program. You can start with integration into the new hires training and then develop it out to include team members who have a longer tenure with the company. Or you can roll it out as a program to all reps, although this might be a little daunting for the team to prepare everything pre-launch. (I'm of the "dive in, the water is fine" mindset, but your team may not be comfortable with that, so plan according.)

You'll want to Prepare your sales reps for success. Find or develop a few short videos to introduce the concept to the rep. (Short meaning under 3 minutes.)

If you have the resources to create your own I would take that approach to personalize the message for your team. But don't a lack of resources get in your way. LinkedIn Sales Solutions YouTube channel has a number of great intro videos to choose from. Our team uses LinkedIn Sales Navigator, so my favorite prepare video is their "Start your day" video. It delivers a quick message how how social selling can be integrated into their daily activities.

Provide your team with other resources to Learn more about social selling. Over time, I have created an internal resource library consisting of recordings of past training sessions and short tips & tricks videos. You don't have to have everything in place pre-launch. Perhaps have 3-4 in place to get your library started. This is delivered to new hires as part of your on-boarding process and a great resource to back to for refresher training on-demand.

The reps need to learn some of the basics here. Setting up and optimizing their social profiles for whichever platforms you're going to focus on. A natural progression in the B2B space is to begin with LinkedIn and LinkedIn Groups. Twitter is a little harder to grasp for a lot of people but is a great tool for content curation, competitive intelligence and listening to what their prospects are talking about before reaching out. The third tool, Facebook, is going to be a little harder for them to understand for prospecting, so ease into that after they have mastered the first two platforms.

Next the sales rep will need to Apply what they've learned. To facilitate easier application of the training, I like to provide each rep with a number of image options for their profile backgrounds, as well as examples of rich media they can use in their LinkedIn Summary on four or five topics trending across the industry. They can pick and choose from those or are free to select their own.

Next is for them to Perfect what they've learned and applied. This is a critical phase and where most of your content will be developed. I offer 30-minute one-to-one consultations to our team. We take a look at how well they have set up their profiles, based on the training, and I offer suggestions of where to tweak. This is done using screen sharing with them logged into their account so that they can make immediate adjustments.

Finally, there is a Verify stage you can implement. This can be as simple as a spreadsheet where you check off each person who has completed the on-boarding to the social selling program. You can use this as a part of your metrics discussed at your team meetings, to create dashboards charting activation, and reporting to managers or senior executives on the progress of the program.

A key metric I rely on as a quick-check compass, if you will, is the sales reps individual SSI (social selling index) score. A key metric I rely on as a quick-check compass, if you will, is the sales reps individual SSI (social selling index) score. I give them a target goal, which should be achievable if they're working the program as taught. You should view it monthly to see how they're doing. This can assist you in identifying training gaps in your program.

So, does this implementation method work? It's working for us. In fact, in December 2015, ANSYS, Inc. was named in LinkedIn's The Best of Business Top 10 powerhouse brands list.

If you'd like to learn more about our results, we were also featured in the newly released LinkedIn Social Selling Index Kit.