Every day your sales teams engage with customers and prospects on the phone or at on-site meetings. They listen to customers talk about their challenges, work to build mutual trust, and help outline solutions to fit your customers’ needs. There’s an enormous social aspect to these live interactions. You could call it social selling.
But there’s another form of social selling that involves the use of social technologies. You don’t need to be convinced about the explosive growth in the use of social media—more than 400 million tweets a day, 900 million Facebook users and growing—and what started out as consumer social apps have become essential B2B marketing and selling platforms.
Many companies, as well as individual sales executives, write blogs, publish tweets, update Facebook pages, communicate through LinkedIn with prospects, and more. In short, they are becoming Social Enterprises. And Social Enterprises tend to be more in touch with their target audiences, experience broader brand recognition in the market, and know how to use social strategies to enhance their sales process and shorten the sales cycle.
Where is your company on the Social Enterprise maturity scale? A wallflower standing on the sidelines, perhaps just learning the steps, or already dancing a tango? Maybe you didn’t know there was a Social Enterprise maturity scale, and that every company—you, your partners, your competitors—has a place on that scale.
Not to sound the alarm, but companies that don’t embrace social technologies to support their traditional interactions with customers are likely to fall behind. And that’s key right there: social technologies aren’t taking the place of traditional social selling skills. Instead, social technologies are enhancing traditional selling in ways never before seen—by helping companies get their ears closer to what their customers are saying, and using insights gained to better their interactions with customers.
Wherever you are on the Social Enterprise maturity scale, it’s always the right time to embrace a proven social enterprise methodology, add discipline and focus to your use of social platforms, and discover how social technologies can deliver a positive return on investment.
