Social CRM For Dummies

Chapter 8

Aligning Sales in Social CRM

In This Chapter

• Understanding the sales CRM ecosystem
• Harnessing a collaborative sales model
• Reviewing the changing B2B sales model
• Gathering valuable sales intelligence
• Communicating with the buying brain
• Becoming the sales expert
• Establishing a productive routine
• Selecting the iPad as a productivity tool
• Using social media lead generation tactics to sell

When implementing social CRM, your company needs to help salespeople adapt to the social media style of customer engagement. This requires salespeople to manage significant change. However, salespeople can transition to social CRM more smoothly by adopting the following attributes:

• Collaborative in the way they approach the sales process: Salespeople need to collaborate both within the company and with customers. With social CRM, data about customers isn't nestled only within the sales team, so departments need to share information and work together more. Similarly, sales doesn't own the key data about a product anymore. Customers are finding the data themselves and looking to sales for support in resolving specific questions or issues. In other words, customers are looking for more collaboration, too. You explore the importance of collaboration in the section “Valuing the collaborative Sales Model.”
• Open to forming close relationships with customers: Social CRM expands sales representatives' access to the customer. To get the most value from this type of access, sales listens to what ...