Читать книгу Social Selling Mastery - Shanks Jamie - Страница 10

Social selling is simply a by-product of effective sales and marketing alignment at scale across your organization. We've met companies that have renamed their social selling initiatives “digital sales,” as they recognize that digital communication goes far beyond social platforms such as LinkedIn. These companies have created streamlined communication bridges between sales and marketing, which has increased the flow of new ideas for digital insights. At a tactical level, your company would have an Insights Committee, which is a group of sales professionals that meets regularly with the marketing department to develop new digital insights that fuel sales conversations. This consistently developed intellectual property (IP) is repeated by creating a process that we call the IP Transfer Loop. The IP Transfer Loop has a sales professional story-tell an idea based on buyers' challenges, then the marketing team turns this idea into a new digital insight for sales professionals to leverage with their buyers. As the sales team deploys these digital insights into the market, buyers provide more feedback in the form of objections, concerns, and questions. This cycle continues to repeat itself, with more sales feedback, while developing more and more granular insights that are highly valuable for the buyer.

Sales and marketing alignment also begins to formulate new ways to measure success. Great social selling teams recognize that a buyer's journey involves both the marketing and sales efforts; thus, everyone in marketing and sales becomes accountable to winning that new buyer. You'll recognize greater sales and marketing alignment when your marketing team is no longer focusing on website traffic or lead volumes as their ultimate key metric. Alignment occurs when your team begins to create metrics around the handshake between sales and marketing, which can mean sales-qualified leads or another metric at the opportunity level. Marketing will be accountable for delivering a percentage of sales-qualified leads to achieve a sales professional's quota attainment, while sales will be accountable for the timely pursuit and proper nurturing of these leads with social selling best practices. Everyone is ultimately responsible for new sales bookings. Tactically, a service-level agreement between sales and marketing takes form and becomes the blueprint for accountability among all team members.