the influencer’s guide to 2 social sellings... · supercharge its lead generation efforts across...

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Maria

Sven

Sales Team

Connection—Lead Specs

The Influencer’s Guide to Social SellingHow to use account-based marketing to build trust and ensure loyalty

Beyond social selling

Today, the overwhelming majority of B2B buyers—77%—don’t talk to a salesperson until after they conduct their own research.As the customer journey continues to evolve, adopting a social selling strategy and leveraging the right tools and technology unlock new and unique opportunities to spark the right conversations with potential buyers via their preferred communication channels. That’s what you learned in Part One of this e-book series.

Now that you’re armed with best practices for creating your brand and generating social influence, you’re well on your way to buildingtrust and ensuring loyalty among your customers. This guide will demonstrate how applying many of these same social selling principles can help you reimagine your B2B marketing efforts.

In this e-book, you’ll discover how to:

• Formulate an effective Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy.

• Implement best practices for building trust and loyalty among current and potential customers.

• Use the latest tools and technology to target your marketing efforts.

Continue reading to learn more.

2 The Influencer’s Guide to Social Selling

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Social selling and account-based marketing—better together

Chapter 2: Best practices for building trust and loyalty

Chapter 3: Leveraging the latest technology

Conclusion: Engage

Chapter 1:

Social selling and account-based marketing—better together

Align sales and marketing strategies for more effective lead generation.

The digital landscape isn’t just transforming customer-seller interactions, it’s also flipping the traditional marketing funnel upside down and changing how business is won. The old “spray and pray” method of distributing generic messages en masse and hoping something sticks is not helping marketers solve their lead generation issues. To extend their networks beyond existing lists and drive revenue, marketers must be more intentional in how they identify and target new accounts.

Think about what social sellers are accomplishing in terms of personalizing content and building relationships with key contacts. What if there was a way to incorporate these principles into your marketing efforts and promote collaboration between sales and marketing departments to identify and target accounts more effectively?

Enter Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

63% Nearly two-thirds (63%) of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge

80% and 80% report their current lead generation efforts are only slightly or somewhat effective.1,2


Chapter 1:

Social selling and account-based marketing— better together

ABM is a strategy that uses many elements of social selling to help marketers deliver targeted and relevant campaigns to specific companies and accounts. Just as social selling enables sales teams to make seamless and organic connections with individual buyers, ABM allows marketers to identify and foster a narrower funnel of highly qualified leads.4

Although social selling and ABM are two separate strategies on paper, aligning these efforts and promoting collaboration between departments can help businesses more effectively use technology to curate and deliver relevant content to the right targets, via the right channels, at the right time. Unfortunately, according to the State of Inbound 2017 report, only 22% of leaders say their organization’s sales and marketing relationship is tightly aligned.5

In the next chapter, we’ll explore best practices and tips to help you align your sales and marketing strategies and excel at your ABM efforts.


Only 22% of leaders say their organization’s sales and marketing relationship is tightly aligned.5

Chapter 2:

Best practices for building trust and loyalty


Promote a new level of sales and marketing collaboration with these best practices. Too many companies view sales and marketing as separate entities, but their goals are very similar. To truly excel at ABM, marketers must understand and borrow some social selling best practices—especially when it comes to building trust and loyalty through highly-targeted content.6

With this in mind, let’s revisit some of the stages of social selling from the first e-book from an ABM lens and look at the best practices making social sellers so successful:

Maria

Sven

Sales Team


DISCOVER AND RESEARCH Before you can thoughtfully engage with key prospects, you need to first identify who they are. What makes social selling so successful is its ability to find the right people by monitoring their digital footprint and becoming familiar with their personas. Aligning social selling tactics with your ABM strategy can help you narrow your list of leads to potential high value accounts at new and existing companies— and use research from both areas to gather information that can shape your marketing efforts.7

FIRST IMPRESSIONS MATTER Advances in technology aside, sales has always been about providing value to potential buyers and building lasting relationships. What makes social sellers so successful is their ability to engage prospects in a relevant and intentional way. Whether it’s social selling or ABM, the key to success is understanding your prospective buyers and accounts, and meeting them where they are. Truly understanding their needs and expectations are the first steps towards building trust and loyalty.


Instead of trying to locate a specific high-value account by launching a broad campaign and hoping something sticks, ABM allows you to tailor campaigns based on specific attributes and criteria.

The Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), the organization that coined the term Account-Based Marketing, defines it as “treating individual accounts as a market in their own right.”8 Evaluating each account’s issues and needs allows you to be more targeted with your marketing campaigns.

Chapter 2:


USE THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY AND TOOLS What enables social sellers to gain this thorough understanding of potential customers and manage relationships at scale? The answer is incorporating the right technology into their sales strategies.

As marketers look to implement, or optimize, their ABM strategies, tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, TeamLink, and InMail can help build more authentic relationships with targeted accounts. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss these technologies in greater detail.


Using technology to pinpoint how your target accounts are structured and identify who the key players on each account are allows you to efficiently and effectively get the right marketing messaging to the right people.10

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According to the State of Sales 2016 report, more than 70% of the most successful sales professionals use social selling and CRM tools—including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook—to build relationships and drive revenue.9

70%

Chapter 2:


CHOOSE YOUR WORDS CAREFULLY In the first e-book, we showed how a social seller can use a combination of research and technology to identify a point of contact and make a seamless connection. In social selling, leveraging mutual connections and an understanding of an individual’s digital persona makes sparking the right conversation easier than ever before. The same principles apply to ABM. A thorough understanding of company structure and critical players on potential accounts can help marketers create and deliver relevant content that resonates with your target.11


Blasting a generic marketing message across all channels is no longer an effective marketing strategy. With ABM, you can target your marketing messages based on the specific attributes of each account you’re targeting—increasing the chances of your message resonating with that account.

All companies practicing ABM claim alignment with sales; with 34% of companies saying their ABM and social selling strategies are “tightly” aligned.12

34%

Chapter 2:


Chapter 3:

Leveraging the latest technology


Social selling technology can drive effective ABM. Aligning social selling and ABM strategies can help your departments and teams work smarter, not harder—individually and with each other. And leveraging the right technology can help your enterprise supercharge its lead generation efforts across the board.

The Microsoft Social Selling Program, for example, is helping sales leaders and teams make more new connections with key decision-makers through a combination of training and technology.

A critical component of the Microsoft Social Selling Program is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a premium service designed to help social sellers find the right buyers, get real-time insights into their needs and values, and begin building trust before initial conversations even start. Advanced search features make it easy for social sellers to create and save lists of leads. TeamLink provides sellers with access to their teams’ LinkedIn networks to find common connections with key contacts and make introductions more organic. After connections are made, sellers can use InMail to send direct messages to potential prospects inside and outside of their networks.

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Chapter 3:

Leveraging the latest technology

While the Microsoft Social Selling Program and LinkedIn Sales Navigator were designed to transform how buyers and sellers connect, many of the same tools and features social sellers use to build stronger relationships with prospects and customers can be used by marketers to make ABM more effective.

For example, marketers can use the same advanced search filters and functions to narrow their list of target accounts and companies based on criteria they control—like industry and region—to identify the right high-quality leads. Just as social sellers use this service to stay up to date on individual contacts, marketers can use it to get accurate information on the state of potential accounts, including insights into the key players on these accounts. After narrowing the account list to the ideal set of candidates and doing the necessary research, TeamLink and InMail can help marketers tailor content and campaigns that build trust and loyalty.


If you’re trying to be introduced to a prospect and decide to reach out to a mutual connection via TeamLink, you will want to remember some key tips:

1. State your intent clearly in the subject.

2. Give a good reason for wanting the introduction.

3. Make sure to give your colleague the option to say no.

4. Include your LinkedIn public profile URL at the end of your message.

If you decide you want to directly reach the prospect yourself via InMail, it’s important to remember to:

Write a compelling subject line

Be brief

Select recipients thoughtfully

Make it about them

Start a conversation

Personalize your messages

State a clear call-to-action

Focus on quality versus quantity

Conclusion:

Engage


As technology changes how customers experience brands, products, and services, and the digital landscape exposes limitations of the traditional marketing funnel, modern enterprises must reevaluate their approach to generating leads and building relationships. Aligning social selling principles with your ABM strategies and leveraging the latest technology can help you foster a collaborative approach to lead generation that makes building relationships—and managing these relationships at scale—much easier.

Whether you’re trying to reach a particular individual, or target an entire account, finding common ground and driving meaningful interactions with relevant content are keys to sales and marketing success.

Start building trust and ensuring loyalty among the right targets and accounts today.

©2017 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. This document is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed in this document, including URL and other Internet website references, may change without notice.

This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product. You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes.

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1. http://www.stateofinbound.com/?__hstc=20629287.c76648f2c2296cdb2a5e83eb33a3ad75.1464896585911.1498663660836.1498666529294.45&__hssc=20629287.3.1498666529294&__hsfp=63787530 2. https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics 3. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/account-based-marketing-vs-social-selling-match-made-heaven-eatwell 4. http://www.cio.com/article/3097196/cmo-role/5-things-need-to-know-about-account-based-marketing.html 5. http://www.stateofinbound.com/?__hstc=20629287.c76648f2c2296cdb2a5e83eb33a3ad75.1464896585911.1498663660836.1498666529294.45&__hssc=20629287.3.1498666529294&__

hsfp=63787530 6. http://www.toprankblog.com/2016/05/account-based-marketing/ 7. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/account-based-marketing-guide 8. http://blog.topohq.com/account-based-marketing-11-tactics-to-drive-your-abm-process/ 9. https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/social-selling/state-of-sales10. https://www.marketo.com/account-based-marketing/ 11. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/account-based-marketing-guide 12. https://www.siriusdecisions.com

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