FOCUS BRIEF
One question I often get from readers and audiences at conferences is whether Facebook has utility for B2B. It’s a good question, so I thought I’d address it at greater length in a blog post.
The answer is yes. First, B2B sales are all about relationships. Higher price points and longer implementation cycles mean greater buying decision risk, so buyers often rely on trust rather than price. Trust hinges on relationships. Facebook is the ultimate relationship manager. Second, when B2B decision-makers are on Facebook, they are logged in as individual consumers. We have an opportunity to personalize our messages and target these individuals equally for enterprise software as we do for diapers.
In particular, many of the sales reps I interviewed use Facebook and LinkedIn together to better navigate buyer organizations, build one-on-one relationships with decision-makers, keep deals alive when a longer sales cycle is required, and prospect beyond direct connections to friend-of-friend networks. Information that people share about themselves on a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, such as someone’s alma mater, hometown, and status update, can behelpful in qualifying leads and used to build interpersonal rapport, for example bonding over having mutual friends or having attended the same college. This was the thinking behind the Faceconnector application I developed two years ago, which integrates Facebook profile and friend information into Salesforce CRM and was the first business application on the Facebook platform.
Facebook as personal CRM. Facebook is a contact database with photos, profiles, updates, and birthday reminders to help us stay in touch with more people. The cost of staying in touch has gone down, so we are able and willing to stay in touch with a greater number of people. Our networks are expanding especially on the fringe with weak-tie relationships. Interestingly, business research shows that social capital and consequently business capital are maximized on the fringe. We aren’t usually hiring and closing deals with our parents and best friends – it is with our friend-of-friend networks where the greatest opportunities and gain are to be had.
The following is a brief excerpt from my new book, The Facebook Era, about how B2B professionals can utilize social networking tools for prospecting and navigating customer organizations.
Purchase decisions are made by individual people, not entire companies. Transactions succeed or fail because of a few key such individuals—your customer champion, executive decision maker, customer reference, sales rep, product expert. By strengthening the bond and improving information flow among your internal deal team as well as with key customer stakeholders, social networking sites can help your company create a more productive organizational selling machine.
For example, B2B information technology company Aster Data Systems successfully sourced its initial wave of customers using social networking sites. As a small startup, Aster lacked brand recognition, and did not have the budget for large marketing or advertising campaigns. To source early customers, Aster instead tapped into the company’s collective social network on LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook. Senior management asked all employees, not just sales reps, to tap their networks for potential prospects who had keywords like“data warehousing” in their title or functional expertise. In just a few months, the resourcefulness of this strategy has already begun to pay off. LinkedIn and other social networking sites are used to identify who among those contacts connected to Aster employees might be interested in the database product. Then a sales cycle is initiated through a combination of LinkedIn and traditional communication modes. Thanks to the power of the social graph, Aster has successful signed on more than a dozen customers.
In addition to helping facilitate one-on-one relationship building, data from social networking sites at a high level can also be used for B2B deal strategy—i.e., how to approach a deal, which individuals at the buyer can be connected with, and who has influence in the deal. Sales methodologies like TAS, Miller Heiman, and Solution Selling emphasize the importance of navigating customer organizations and identifying key decision makers. There is powerful data contained in the online social graph to help aid this exercise.
Online social networking sites reveal a wealth of information about people’s title and role, status in the company, working relationship with other contacts, and decision making status. One high tech account executive who has successfully sold into many IT departments told me that whenever he gets a new contact, he immediately goes to LinkedIn to understand how the individual fits into the bigger picture. There are a few subtle but critical pieces of information for which he is always on the lookout that greatly affect his strategy on a particular deal:
o Political strength and tenure
o Likelihood of being a champion or roadblock
o Organizational structure
Clara Shih helped kick off the "social CRM" movement in 2007 with her Faceconnector application, which integrates Facebook and Salesforce CRM and was the first business application on Facebook. Clara's new bestseller, "The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff" is about Facebook and Twitter for business. It has been featured in The New York Times, AdAge, Fast Company, CRM Magazine, and others, and is being used as a textbook at Harvard Business School and other academic institutions around the world.
Clara comes from a background of online advertising at Google and CRM at Salesforce.com, where she was most recently a marketing and alliances executive. She is currently founder and CEO of Hearsay Labs, which provides social media tools enabling marketers to manage customer engagements across Facebook, Twitter, and other websites.
Clara has undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science from Stanford and a master's in business and internet from Oxford. She is a frequently invited keynote speaker on social media marketing at global conferences including Web 2.0 Expo, Enterprise 2.0, CRM Evolution, and Social Ad Summit. Clara blogs at http://thefacebookera.com and Twitters as @clarashih.
BEST OF FOCUS RESEARCH
Check out the research that readers are downloading most often.
2010 Enterprise Phone Systems Comparison Guide
Updated for 2010! Take the guesswork out of selecting an enterprise-class phone system with our comprehensive Comparison Guide.
Cisco vs. ShoreTel: Who Really Delivers Value for Large Enterprise Companies?
Get the side-by-side comparison of industry’s leading Enterprise PBX solutions and vendors. Our Focus product specialists evaluated big players, like Cisco Systems and ShoreTel, across various feature categories.
2010 Enterprise Phone Systems Buyer’s Guide
Our updated Buyer’s Guide will help you fully understand both your business phone system needs as well as the purchase process.
10 Comments
Add a comment
Clara, this is a great Brief. Clearly LinkedIn is already a great tool for B2B sales and marketing. I think FB has similar potential but we will only realize that potential when we've developed a mindset where we expect to use FB for business activity. Right now, Facebook is a vehicle for fairly whimsical social activities. Not many people expect to conduct business there.
Having said that, I attended a board meeting recently where we took a poll of everyone in the room, asking who had FB profiles. Everyone in the room did and this was not your college demographic. These were senior executives from the investor community and senior level technology executives. A lot has changed in a few short years!
(5) (0)
Flag FlaggedClara,
As a sales person, I've sometimes found people resistant to use Facebook for business relationships. It would help if Facebook would one day allow users to somehow segement business and personal reslationships. Have your contacts found Facebook users resistant to using it for business?
(2) (0)
Flag FlaggedExcellent post, Clara - I'm a big fan of yours, as you know!! ;)
Having more business folks see the value in using all that Facebook offers - from personal profiles to fan pages and social ads - is a passion of mine. Facebook really is the next generation internet!! I've used my personal profile since summer of 2007 for strategic, high-level networking and maintaining key relationships. Nothing comes close as a social CRM.
(1) (0)
Flag FlaggedTerrific insights, Clara! You provide clear direction about the "why" and I'm happy to have ammunition when my B2B clients and authors ask me if Facebook is worth the energy.
In addition to the relationships you talk about, it's possible to actually use Facebook as a tool to build a successful, high-level business--it's what I've done and I thank Facebook and other social media tools every day for it.
Thanks also for including an excerpt from your book--I will seek it out so I can read other gems.
(1) (0)
Flag FlaggedThank you for the wonderful comments.
We have come a long way in terms of using Facebook for business relationships, but DMorris is right that especially for certain demographics and industries, it is still early. And certainly no one ever wants to feel like they are constantly being sold to and pitched. We need to make sure all of our interactions on social networking sites whether for business or pleasure feels genuine and authentic.
(0) (0)
Flag FlaggedI agree with Herkus. Great post but one downfall currently with Facebook is that its primary use at this moment is still focused in the social realm. While some businesses may see some success using it, most Facebookers are still using the site to connect socially with friends, family and lost contacts. I'm anxiously awaiting the new developments to see how they are going to integrate more business friendly aspects.
My only questions though is - do we really want businesses over taking our social networks like Facebook? Do we really want our community of friends and family to also include being bombarded by business ads? (More than it already is)
(0) (0)
Flag FlaggedOne of the biggest problems in the hundreds of discussions about "social media for BtoB" is that they very frequently lump LinkedIn with Facebook and Twitter, which is seriously misleading. So please, let's not perpetuate this myth...
The fact is, LinkedIn is aimed 100% at business. And Facebook and Twitter aren't.
I work exclusively in the high-tech BtoB world, and somewhere around 99% of the technology professionals I know appreciate the business value in LinkedIn — but they consider Facebook and Twitter purely social and personal and, businesswise, mostly "a waste of time." Literally.
Even if some of them have a Facebook page, it's primarily for family and friends, and they are usually extremely careful about whom they friend with. Wander through the posts on this topic on LinkedIn and you'll see just how strong these views are.
Al Shultz
http://www.alshultz.com/
(0) (0)
Flag FlaggedClara,
Nice job. Thanks for your time & thoughts.
Logan Pierson
www.RagsToWealth.net
(0) (0)
Flag FlaggedThanks for the insights. We normally don't advise our medium size clients to utilize Facebook as part of their social media marketing campaigns but I will keep your article in mind for future business presentations.
Amarind
Alfalfa Media - San Francisco SEO Company
(0) (0)
Flag FlaggedFunny enough, with all this "conversation" about social media use by B2B most large environments block these systems -- while others discourage their use. I've even seen LinkedIn blocked in Fortune 1000 firms where their company was using it heavily for recruiting.
Most top level decision makers don't even manage their own profiles if they have one -- it's like sorting your own mail, or cleaning your e-mail box, you get someone on staff to take care of it while you do real work. "Friends and Family" association to platforms is very important.
Also, it depends on your customer. Most technical services, even information technology services clients are busy working -- so someone you might actively engage in social media is either looking for another job, or screwing around. The only way to know is to test Facebook against areas that already drive proven results -- say 5% of effort.
Best,
Justin Hitt
Strategic Relations Consultant
http://JustinHitt.com/
(0) (0)
Flag FlaggedAdd a comment