A Socially Salable World

Social media has become the fastest-adapted new tool to hit professional B2B sales since…well, maybe since time began. If that sounds a bit overstated, of course there was the wheel.

Social media can be the best tool to find out how customers really think and what they really want. It can also be a low-pressure way to let customers know what your company does and how it can solve their problems. Marketers are using social media to track trends and pass leads to reps, while reps are using it to work with each other and connect with their customers.

B2B human resources, marketing, services, and sales are using social media now, notes Jenny Sussin, senior research analyst for Social CRM at Gartner. Marketing increasingly uses it for lead generation. Sales reps primarily use LinkedIn for getting the inside track when prospecting, and Facebook and Twitter are also tapped. Software can pull information from social media into customer files or CRM systems automatically.

Reps also use social media to collaborate with each other and work with customers. And social media is used for analytics, determining who posts frequently and how much money is saved by customers’ using social media, rather than calling for support.

Linked Together

Paul Barrett, director of digital marketing solutions at Aprimo, sees three levels of maturity in social media use. “A small group dips toes in the water, using contacts on LinkedIn and other social media,” he begins. A larger group uses such tools as LinkedIn and Chatter to stay in touch with and gather information on prospects. The third group is leading edge – reps who use social media for sales.

Aprimo handles marketing campaigns in large volumes, reducing the cost of aggressively using social media. That’s essential, because a company with 1,000 employees has an average of 178 people on social media, with an average of 40 on Twitter and 30 on Facebook.

“A lot of people think social media is free,” Barrett notes, “but real marketing campaigns cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. We minimize costs as volume grows, and we tie marketing to sales to drive lead generation, the cutting edge.”

Aprimo monitors social media so marketers can see patterns through the clutter. Customers and markets are also monitored, and smart salespeople use this to their advantage. The big challenge is finding relevant comments in real time with automated alerts.

Rules of the Road

There are, however, cultural and legal hurdles to overcome when utilizing social media. Many firms have rules and reviews that reps must know before they participate in social media. Aprimo accelerates the reviews and approvals necessary to get responses out fast.

“Salesforce.com was born in the cloud and reborn in social media,” summarizes Scott Holden, senior director for product marketing at Sales Cloud. “It’s about transforming companies into social enterprises.”

To help reps, salesforce.com has adapted innovations from consumer sites: feeds, filters, profiles, groups, picture sharing, and recommendations. Its Radian6 tracks social activity, and Data.com pulls the latest information from across the Web.

Salesforce.com’s Chatter has 100,000 users, including NBC Universal, where reps for 20 different TV channels collaborate fast and effectively. Chatter allows anyone in an enterprise to share tips, experience, competitive intelligence, and best practices, and it provides users with automatic feeds when people or subjects they follow change. “If anything happens on a deal, reps and managers automatically know,” Holden explains. “The manager does not have to wait until the weekly meeting to ask what’s up.”

Mzinga offers a Software-as-a-Service  platform for internal and external social learning. It helps clients educate their employees, collaborate with partners, and support customers, and in turn, customers can support each other, explains Mike Merriman, Mzinga’s director of strategic services. Mzinga integrates with client Websites and links to such sites as Twitter and Facebook, and it has picked up B2B clients, such as Canon, for high-end digital imaging sales and a nationwide storage network that enables customers to collaborate with one another.

People Will Talk

“If you do not use social media, you are missing out,” Merriman argues. “Your customers are talking about you, whether you listen or not. Seventy percent of Internet buyers make a decision before they go on your Website. Social media allows you to engage before that decision [is made].”

GoldMine creator Jon Ferrara launched Nimble in late 2011 to help reps and other customer-facing employees “swim in the social-media river.” Nimble had 25,000 users at 3,000 companies by January 2012.

“All business is social,” Ferrara stresses. “Salespeople used to get to know clients by going to their offices and looking at walls. Now they do it electronically.”

But often, this is done on different browsers and tabs. So Nimble collects all data from social media and contact managers and deposits it into one place. Nimble integrates information from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other social media with data in company address books and calendars for all members of the team – reps, marketers, and customer service personnel. It makes no sense to collaborate with customers unless company staff collaborates with one another.

“The way to sell is to touch, listen to, and engage customers,” Ferrara emphasizes. “Now we do it online.” And reps can use the same knowledge and approaches used in personal conversations to participate in social media. Ferrara continues, “Customers want to buy from the experts. Everyone in your company is an expert on something.”

Nimble tracks customer conversations on social media and allows reps to click and post comments on the same social-media sites. It ensures that everyone on the team knows the contacts made, what has been done, and what remains to do. That is powerful.

“Say you have a prospect who said he would not be ready to buy for six months,” Ferrara explains. “Then you see on social media that the prospect has opened a new office. It’s time to call. That may drive a buying decision.”

Referrals and More

Eighty percent of B2B decision makers make appointments based on referrals, says Nicolas Woirhaye, CEO of Paris-based IKO System. IKO helps get those referrals and is built around the entire sale process: prospecting, following leads and clients, understanding channel partners, and defending against competitors.

IKO synchronizes with existing contacts in LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media and CRM. It can be embedded in CRM and integrates with Salesforce, Sugar, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, and 10 other CRM systems. It maps and follows all the relationships among your contacts, leads, accounts, and competitors, and it keeps track of all relationships among these contacts down to levels two and three, which would be impossible to do manually.

In addition, IKO alerts users to sales triggers. For example, if a competitor establishes a new relationship with one of your major accounts, an alert tells you that you may have to take action to defend your business.

Woirhaye describes IKO as “partly a ‘super LinkedIn,’ but it goes deeper. Lots of professionals use LinkedIn, but for only level-one connections. Working with level-three connections gets really complicated. The application also helps you tell what the valuable connections are.” And IKO helps salespeople work in teams, handing off leads to others with better connections to possible decision makers.

IKO is designed for B2B sales and is used by high-tech firms, a giant real-estate firm, Gartner, and firms in other sectors. Currently, it is incorporating contacts and connections from new sources such as Twitter and news feeds. Woirhaye says US firms have been the early adopters of social-media tools, and IKO wants to extend these techniques more broadly in “old Europe,” where cold calls are still too common.

ProResource helps small and some midsize businesses with sales and marketing. “Lead generation and marketing are undergoing drastic transformation,” says CEO Judy Schramm. “Buyers want to control the buying process, and we have to accommodate that. We wanted to find a way to leverage the vast data in social media to do it.”

Schramm chose IKO software to avoid disruptive contacts, making connection gentler and low key. “It lets you get into your system contacts from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Salesforce and then flag your customers, prospects, partners, or competitors. Then IKO maps relationships down to the second and third tiers.”

While the typical salesperson has 150 to 250 contacts in LinkedIn, there may be hundreds of thousands at these deeper levels. Schramm says IKO reaches down to these deeper levels, finds businesses that are likely prospects, suggests them to you, and finds the best way to reach their decision makers.

“Then you can reach them online, through social media or email, and make a connection,” Schramm says. “I find it powerful because it gives you mind share in a very low-key way, and you are not pushing your message out there.”

Another advantage is that IKO works across the sales cycle. Generally, buyers must have a problem, know they need a solution, benefit from your solution, and be ready to pay for it. “You can get to people very early when they are just noticing they have a problem, or you can get them at the end when they are evaluating solutions,” Schramm notes.

Schramm also uses IKO for smaller businesses that must get prospects familiar and comfortable with them before they can make a proposal: “We start out with a very low-key nurturing approach so that we can stay in touch with them until they are ready to buy. Then we have mind share.”

Bank on This

United Kingdom-based Artesian Solutions has attracted 20,000 B2B users in five years, with most big British banks and many famous pharmaceutical, high-tech, and communications companies as clients. Says CEO Andrew Yates, “We help build and deepen relationships with customers and find the information that closes deals faster.”

Clients specify entities (leads, prospects, customers, partners, or competitors) and topics or sales triggers of interest. Artesian finds relevant mentions in millions of social-media sources and more than 50,000 traditional media sources globally. “We also tell you who you know in the organization and enable you to connect the dots in real time,” Yates says.

Artesian social-media tracking is customized for both the client company and individual users. Yates says Artesian’s unique technology boosts relevant items from a typical 40 to 80 percent of flagged mentions, making the tool very useful for reps.

Artesian also lets reps easily participate in social media by broadcast, retweets, or blogs. Yates says company rules and a conservative culture may limit active participation in social media by sales reps, but understanding the social conversation quickly and efficiently is always crucial. “Social media news is news for about eight hours, so you have hours, not days, to react,” Yates says. Marketers may look for just patterns and trends, but reps need all the detailed information on particular companies and topics as fast as they can get it.

Artesian puts this information on mobile devices or CRM systems. It also integrates with collaborative tools such as Chatter and Yammer. The company has been favorably noticed by Gartner Group and Deloitte and as a Microsoft partner. It is growing 220 percent annually. Artesian plans to open an office in the United States in 2012.