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What are some best practices/tips on how to apply social selling in a B2B environment?
Do you have examples of companies/sales teams that leveraged social media in their sales approach? How did you start with adding social to the sales skill set? What are the DOs and DON'TS? Did you align sales and marketing in this process?
Best Answer
Unlike a B2C where the end-product is well-known, B2B has a long gestation cycle, hence in my view social selling is just an entry-point. A typical enterprise app or a mfg product, can't be sold through a social platform, given the complications involved & end-user behaviour patterns before choosing these toys.
Social selling in a B2B can be the first entry-point of interest, which marketing can pass it to sales department, to take the engagement further.
Srikanth - you are right when you say B2B is not applicable to sell through a social platform. However social selling is a very powerful technique to amplify the sales process. http://socialmedia-academy.com/index.php/resources/social-selling/
B2B environments can at least leverage social media even if it's not for direct sells but for engagement and branding. Refer to this http://bit.ly/zU2Rbu resource that would help understand how to reach business customer more succintly as well as to track key performance indicators.
I found this article to be a great example on how we can use social media in today's B2B sales process. I hope you find it helpful or at least a starting point for your conversation.
http://www.kenkrogue.com/social-networking/31-linkedin-tips-how-to-use-linked...
Laura here is an older white paper about social selling. It is due for an update as we have much more experience with it now - but the principle of Social Selling did not change. http://socialmedia-academy.com/index.php/resources/social-selling/
It is rather specific for B2B sales processes but can to a certain degree also be applied in a B2C environment.
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Related Activity
We put together a guide to social selling recently, and have posted it on SlideShare. Free download, have at it:
http://www.slideshare.net/heinzmarketing/secrets-to-successful-social-selling