4 steps to productivity through social selling

As a sales leader at Microsoft, I frequently get asked about my insights on the sales process, what’s worked in my organization, and how I coach my sales teams. Today, I thought I’d start with two topics that often come up in conversations with my salesforce—social selling and sales productivity.

Our customers and prospects have vast choices of where to spend their money. Buyers are better informed and often research solution options, ask questions, and review feedback from peers before they engage in any conversation with a seller. So, what does that mean for us as sales leaders and sellers? For starters, it means we need to effectively identify the right targets. Then we need to understand the totality of their value drivers to engage them with a personalized approach.

Identify the right targets

Our time is precious, and we don’t get it back. The most important thing for sellers and sales leaders is time. It’s important to focus and be very targeted in your activities. Most ineffective sellers are sellers who don’t understand where the opportunities really are, and which opportunities are most likely to close.

Using analytics, social media, and marketing data, we can glean rich insights through our marketing campaigns or service campaigns. It's critical that sellers understand their target and can address that target, as opposed to having a very wide area that they're addressing—and therefore burning time. Technologies give us those insights so we can recognize what’s a right target and what’s not.

Get to know your prospects

Developing relationships as part of the sales process is critical to our success as salespeople. Sales is not just about the salesperson anymore; it's about the salesperson’s network. It’s important that we leverage our own networks, as well as those of our management and our peers.

Cold calls represent a small fraction of opportunities that land with an appointment. A networked customer and a networked seller have an exponentially higher degree of closing a deal much more quickly than a non-networked customer and a non-networked seller. With one degree of separation, through a social network or contact of a friend or a friend, many of those contacts result in an appointment.

It’s clear that networking helps eliminate some of the more wasteful parts of traditional selling practices such as cold calling. The data is telling. Use your network, use social! Use LinkedIn (aka Sales Navigator) and other digital sources such as Twitter, company websites, 10-K reports if the company is public, etc., to identify who your prospects are, what motivates them, who their connections are, where they used to work, and their interests.

Go in and immediately establish credibility by knowing who they are. When you fully understand who the individuals are, you can speak in their language. You now have a relevant point of view that differentiates you from someone else calling on that prospect. It pays to be social. It’s the little things that can impress customers and leave a lasting impression. Personalized engagement is one of them. As a side benefit, you save time, too.

Understand their world

Get a deeper understanding of your customer’s priorities, and that means really knowing who your customer is. Always arm yourself with a sound understanding of what that customer (both company and individual) is doing today. This can be the case with inside sales or direct sales. Note that I didn’t say that industry. It’s about the customer. Customers go through shifts in priorities from focusing on cost cutting, or top-line growth, or working through a merger integration, or searching for efficiencies, etc. You must affiliate yourself with what it is and the depth of what it is that they’re focused on.

Personalize your approach

Map & Gap. Do a map and gap analysis on your targets. If you’re going to approach a customer or prospect in any category, whether you’re selling widgets or software, you must map where your products are aligned and who is using them, and most importantly who is holding the budget to buy them.

In my industry, we sell Operations (or ERP) and Customer Engagement (CRM and Service), so let’s use field service as an example. If you’re going in and driving a field service scenario, understand how that fits into their strategy. Also understand via social networks, as I mentioned, who the key players are in the company who own that agenda—and then learn everything about them. The gap simply means if you don’t know who the people are, go find out, and then map them. Have a crystal-clear idea of who your decision-makers are for each opportunity and tailor your approach to those individuals. Once you know who these people are, have a plan on how to engage them and who, perhaps, on your executive team could connect with them to build senior executive relationships.

Take time to identify your specific targets, get to know them, understand what’s going on in their world, and personalize your approach. True engagement happens between people, and to be an effective seller it needs to be about engagement first. Theodore Roosevelt had it right. Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

If you’d like to learn about Microsoft’s approach to selling, visit Microsoft Relationship Sales—combining LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 for Sales. Another great resource is our recent Modern Selling Revolves Around the Customer: Forrester Research webinar recording.