Digital Sense

9Social Business Strategy for Sales

“79 percent of sales professionals that used social selling over the past year achieved quota vs 43 percent of those who did not.”

—Aberdeen Group¹

Much like other departments in a social business/organization, a social sales team starts with establishing forecast objectives that line up to the major business goals and the vision. Then you build your road map, acquire staff, train the staff, and then define a set of department KPIs directly related to the overarching business goals of the company established and cemented in your EMF Vision Layer.

Along with marketing, customer support, and HR, sales is one of the first departments to adopt social media within a social organization. Since your sales team is customer facing, as well as revenue generating, having a well-trained team with digital sense is crucial. Your sales team oftentimes represents the first humans in your company, aside from your content marketing team, to actually touch and communicate with a potential customer or buyer. Since you can't change a first impression, it's critical to ensure salespeople represent a consistent company brand, use proper etiquette, and understand how social media both feeds into and accelerates the sales pipeline. This is where the effort made in going through all layers of the EMF pays dividends over and over as both a form of governance and repository ...