Skip to content
  • View menu
  • View sidebar

Edler Consulting

Helping businesses grow

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

Search

Text Widget

Editor puts bold and beautiful publishing right at your fingertips with comfortable, legible typography, large featured images and a featured content area. Perfect for the personal blogger and/or photo collector.

Category / ABM

February 6, 2019February 19, 2019 by Zoe Edler

Social selling and the progression of leads

  • ABM, account based marketing, content marketing, professional services key account management, Sales and BD teams, sales leadership, social selling, Uncategorized
  • ABM, account based marketing, B2B, client journey, commercial impact, differentiated, go to market, Go to market strategy, relationship building, revenue generative campaigns, sales
  • Leave a comment

Social selling is a hot topic for anyone trying to build their personal brand and trying to grow deeper yet more trusted relationships with clients and influencers, but it has to link to lead qualification and pipeline discipline.

I’ve recently started doing it myself and it really felt like I was stepping off a cliff edge. I have honestly gotten over the apprehensiveness and thoroughly enjoyed establishing and extending my viewpoints, finding the topics I’m passionate about, meeting new and interesting people and winning work off it too.

The thing I love about social selling is that anyone can utilise it.

Marketing, sales, product and delivery can all engage in their own conversations with different people who work for clients and prospects. This is about a collective understanding, brand building, relationship development opportunity.

The one major difference to networking and social selling is that everyone should use CRM (client relationship management software), discuss it in ABM (account based marketing) client planning sessions and consider how it contributes to the overall sales strategy.

What I’m particularly interested in with social selling, is how it helps with the progression of leads through the buyer journey, and contributes towards achieving pipeline traction.

Client-centric thinking via debate

There are plenty of commonly shared stats on selling currently…

Stat: there are 6.4 stakeholders involved in buying decisions.

Stat: buyers are already 60%-70% through their purchase journey before they reach out to a supplier.

How many stakeholders for any prospect or key client are you connected to on social media, that you can have a decent conversation with? And how coordinated are you with the other experts in your organisation who can have complimentary stakeholder and influencer conversations with the people you cannot?

When using any medium by which you have a conversation with a client or prospect, consider what’s working for them as they progress from awareness to decision (in the buyer journey). Emotion in decision-making is just as important as logic. But how do you get to really know people, deeply and from every angle? What makes them tick or frustrates them?

Obviously face to face will never be replaced, but it can be complimented with social selling. In its simplest form, if you have a physical conversation or see what someone is interested in online, then write a blog post that gives your unique and differentiated insight on the topic and connected topics.

If you’ve done your homework with marketing, you will have typical buyer personas built, so you can tailor writing to logical and emotional aspects. This can impact the tone of voice and writing style you adopt. It can also impact the stories you tell and the experts you link-in for perspective and insight.

Share your thoughts through the different content channels and see what people interact with. If there’s no interaction, consider sharing the post with them directly and invite debate from them. Your client team and ABM team can help advise on the best content strategy and leverage, even deploying IP address tracking to see what your client or prospect is searching on, which helps if they are on social media but not particularly active.

The beauty is that it doesn’t just have to be on topics that relate to what you sell. You can also share info on additional things you know they are passionate about, even better if you are too. Classic relationship building stuff, it’s just online to compliment your in-person activities.

If you have a number of people with whom you are debating the same topic, consider offering to connect them as interested parties. You could include some existing clients whom you’ve helped deal with the topic already (and are non competitive to whom you’re targeting) who might be willing to share their experiences.

Introductions and networking are hugely valued. I’m making a point of growing my social presence. It takes time and a bit of trial and error, but I’m starting to meet people and I really value their insight. We share and debate topics, introduce one another to other like-minded people.

I’ve learnt that for anyone that connects with what I post, to engage in a brief conversation with them – what interested them about the topic? Do they have any different observations on it? Who have they learned interesting things from? Share who they find stimulating – podcasts, blogs, etc. Obviously bombarding people with a million questions won’t go down well, but a single question might.

By creating awareness and educating on the common misconceptions and alternative way of thinking, you can hopefully reach the core decision makers you’re targeting. But not all of online conversation opportunities will be with decision makers at the type of companies you’re targeting, so filter them for what’s most relevant or at the very least engage in a bit of learning and debate for context and insight.

Everybody can use social selling to personally get deeper into topics. Debate around the key emotional and logical aspects of any topic, in the eyes of all the different buyers you have. ‘Walking a mile in their shoes’ is helpful if you haven’t done their job before. Understanding the common topics of interest at the different stages of the buyer journey will allow you to prioritise across your pipeline.

While social selling can be a first point of touch, what works today in sales can last for 6 months, even in waves of success. For example podcasts and videos shared online are enjoying a reemergence, but they are nothing new – why is it good? Because clients can hear your voice and see how you think on the fly. You are truly visible and people can see if they would like working with you before they’ve even met you.

I’m just starting to become obsessed with podcasts, they are my own personal radio station. I’m not yet brave enough to record my own show, but who knows what the future will hold. Be aware however that a terrible podcast or video will certainly put people off too!

Taking leads and qualifying the @&%$ out of them

Obviously key growth clients take priority with social selling, but not everyone has the luxury to purely focus on this and needs a healthy mix of prospects as well.

There’s some key tips to understanding the purchase cycle of what you sell and filter the leads accordingly, when you know enough about them. Always follow up on what you start and that could mean 5-10 messages via different channels which get to where you want to be – obviously that much contact in one day would be unwelcome, but a thoughtful approach might go down well.

There are usually many unqualified and incomplete leads in any pipeline that need serious attention. So try to challenge and inspire a prospect soon enough in the sales cycle, something constructive and insightful that makes them engage, rather than put them off. Any sales team needs to close a smaller percentage of higher quality leads faster, and lose the distraction of poorly qualified leads festering in the pipeline. Less is more.

Also, as you look to the pipeline and KPIs you aren’t just looking for historical triggers, like win rate, you’re looking for future indicators, like customer facing time. You can also look at how much social selling, along with how many calls and meetings people do, would be good as an overall target. The trend line should be increasing. You’re looking for leading indicators as to how the sales person is going to be performing a few months from now. This all links to the pipeline likelihood of conversion and is forward focused, not purely looking at the bottom end of the funnel.

Social selling can help develop any pipeline and has the potential to replace blanket demand generation (like bulk email campaigns), but only if we all take personal responsibility to invest the time in treating our most important clients and prospects as individuals.

So go for it, I really cannot express how rewarding and enjoyable social selling is. It should be a key component of everyone’s relationship and profile building strategy.

——————————————————————

Follow my blog on edlerconsulting.com

January 7, 2019January 15, 2019 by Zoe Edler

Tips and traps of moving marketing from demand generation to ABM

  • ABM, account based marketing, content marketing, Marketing ROI, professional services key account management, Uncategorized
  • ABM, account based marketing, B2B, BD, business development, challenging for innovation, commercial campaigns, commercial impact, differentiated, global key account programmes, go to market, Go to market strategy, key account programmes, marketing, revenue development, revenue generative campaigns, revenue growth, sales, target sales, value focussed, winning work
  • Leave a comment
Embed from Getty Images

There’s always a lag between professional services (PS) and the technology sector, which in this case for ABM (account based marketing), it’s close to 20 years.

The case for ABM is proven, there are plenty of case studies and award winners online that show the investment, strategy and sales ROI for ABM. Increased close rate, winning larger opportunities, shorter sales cycle, deeper client loyalty and advocacy, are but a few examples.

One statistic that peaked my interest was that of the companies investing in ABM, 84% are getting a higher sales return in investment (ROI) than from any other marketing activity.

Historically how hard has it been for marketing ROI to lead to sales? Very, even impossible.

Yet, still, it’s a pretty new topic for PS firms. I haven’t worked in a PS firm, yet, that’s managed to fully migrate from demand generation marketing to advanced ABM, so have been digging around.

So why is now the time for ABM?

PS firms are now much bigger and complex. Marketing budgets are smaller and resource needs to focus on the biggest growth bets, instead of trying to be all things to all people.

Digital advancement and PS realisation that a technology enabled strategy is the way forward.

Firms have been burnt by the traditional demand generation marketing, as it simply drowns prospects and clients alike in ‘noise’. Irrelevant content, that just gets pumped out without any real awareness of data driven interests at the individual level. The spray and pray philosophy certainly reigned dominant, especially as marketing just needed to crack on and produce brand profile.

Unfortunately the side effect is that this switched people off at the outset, especially when compared to how ABM 1-to-1 and 1-to-few strategies work. How many target groups have not even opened, let alone unsubscribed from what marketing pumps out? A lot.

More on this in a minute.

From what I can see, there are three aspects to carefully consider before embarking on a complex migration from demand generation marketing to ABM.

1) ABM has a complex technology stack and needs expert help to kick it off.

Marketing Technology (MarTech) means moving the stack away from traditional demand generation to ABM. This is more important than you can imagine. It can be confusing for marketing departments to utilise, especially if they are relatively technology illiterate.

You also need good quality data in the technology – ideally internal and external to make it reveal true insight. And your IT, legal and risk teams all need to get comfortable with managing GDPR alongside opening up the MarTech stack and connecting it as an ecosystem.

Then you need a MarTech experienced team or person who can ensure appropriate selection, implementation and usage of the ABM MarTech stack. This needs to be connected to the wider firm technology platforms and have an architecture strategy in place (not a piecemeal approach to buying bits and bobs sporadically).

Another vital component is to hire an ABM expert or bring in an ABM agency that knows it inside out, where to start, how to filter what does and doesn’t work, and how to position and roll it out to a firm for the first time.

This all needs financial investment, miss any of the above out and you will suffer in the long run.

2) Be aware of what is needed to scale internally from demand generation to ABM.

It means the people, process and systems need a new organisational design for teams (not just marketing departments). It also needs buy-in from the leadership and all departments to get everybody aware and on side for ABM.

This includes a clear idea of what marketing no longer supports and how centralised the marketing function needs to be in order to scale through the:

  • 1-to-1 – the push strategy for immediate key growth clients or specific opportunities that need a highly tailored approach. It’s based on their stage of the buying cycle, individual interests and specific relationships. But this is also where the sales team needs to not fixate on singling out individuals to pursue sales opportunities, it’s about using design thinking to bring stakeholders together, to help them see a different way of achieving growth or mitigating issues, by collaborating and reaching consensus on the way forward.
  • 1-to-few – the pull strategy for priority client clusters and hot sector verticals that are closely related. You are aware more generally of their needs by buyer persona but it’s maturing. It encompasses digital, in-person and efficient grouping of activity. You can certainly convert new business here, but you might not be as targeted or fully aware of their issues, they might come to you a bit more with a specific need that you react to. Or you might push out themes into these clusters and refine your approach as you go.
  • 1-to-many – growth clients of the future where you’re nurturing new markets, verticals, product segments and customer types to gain a deeper understanding of how people consume information and on which topics. This is the typical place for marketing to focus with digital activities, but it should now be augmented to funnel deeper understanding into the other two approaches. This is cost effective brand building.

Everybody loves a pilot, right? Prioritise a small number of current growth client accounts and put them into a pilot programme, you 100% shouldn’t add prospects when you start out. Take a long term view and adjust strategies for each priority where needed.

Also decide if you have capacity to cover all 3 approaches up front, as biting off more than you can chew is likely, so baby steps. You could start at one-to-many and use it to build buyer personas, understand buying cycles, see hot topics, establish a content strategy. But that delays your core growth client initiatives so you could decide to start at the 1-to-1 (just be sure that your account team are 100% on board and willing to invest the time as the testing ground).

3) Take ABM implementation one step at a time and don’t ignore what worked in your previous demand marketing strategies.

Plan out the degree of change management and required path for change that’s needed to make ABM work. Decipher what the marketing priorities are across the firm so you can improve, reduce or cut what’s not working – start things that are not perfect but close enough with a degree of certainty to work – an innovate and fail fast approach. Proven and problem free is not a factor when trying something new.

Connectivity, education and tight involvement with sales teams should be at the core of ABM. The most strategic growth accounts typically have key account managers, an account planning process and established ecosystem – so ABM has to be aligned and operate in a cohesive environment.

Do more traditional marketing tactics still have a role within ABM? The short answer is yes.

One thing resonated in some of the things I’ve come across – don’t ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’ and go 100% digital. Progressing big ticket opportunities through the customer journey often takes high impact in-person activities for a lead to progress from awareness to engagement.

Also, if you consider a really traditional tactic like advertising, it can still have a place but more as a ‘halo effect’ activity alongside your digital and in-person elements. For example, if you’re at an industry conference where you’re targeting specific ABM clients, conference advertising could ‘drown out’ competitor brand presence and help increase meeting take-up.

Why? Because your ‘mind-share’ dominates.

—————

Follow my blog on edlerconsulting.com

51.500152 -0.126236
Blog at WordPress.com.