Social Selling Mastery

Chapter 5Organizational Tools and Metrics for Social Selling Success

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

—Philip Pullman

Measure Behavioral Change

Sales operations (and marketing operations, if your company has them) are the lynchpin to developing your social selling key performance indicator (KPI) metrics and milestones, and aligning these to corporate goals. You will centralize the numbers to create one source of truth. I cannot stress enough that improper metrics is where social selling programs crash and burn the fastest. If you don't have the appropriate KPIs in place, any hopes of a global rollout have been stifled even before the pilot has begun. The reason for this failure is that, without proper centralized metrics in place, the three amigos department leaders begin creating their own metrics in a vacuum, based on what each considers important. In even worse cases, I've seen many departmental leaders decide to roll out a social selling program, without ever informing the other departments that the program even exists. How can you have expected to succeed without a unified program? Your goals may have little consequence to the overall corporate goals and initiatives. Ultimately, and I've watched this misalignment unravel against my constant advice, the failed program ends in a company blame game.

1. If sales leadership is not aligned, there will be little accountability for sales professionals to drive social selling actions ...