Many organizations trying to initiate social selling initiatives face several challenges—sales people don’t consistently implement social selling techniques, have difficulty understanding how to get started, and so on.
I just finished a five-continent project engagement with Microsoft at each of its Digital Sales Centers around the world. Within these centers, there are thousands of inside sellers with sales functions such as demand response (commonly known as SDR/BDR), account executives, customer success, and solutions consultants/sales engineers. The scope of the project was immense, and we gave ourselves a very short runway to scale a digital selling foundations certification to all these sellers. We took our experiences from deploying similar engagements at Oracle, CA Technologies, SAS Institute, and Thomson Reuters, and found ways to polish the experience.
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As the demand for personalized products increases, efforts to deliver a well-tailored experience on the first take have quickly become an industry standard.
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Like we breathe, social media and digital technologies surround us, invisible but essential.
Technology has drastically changed the way we think about communication. Instant connections across great distances and entirely digital social networks are foundational to what work means for the mobile global workforce.
This morning, I was jogging around Sydney Harbour, listening to an Audible book, Built from Scratch, the book of the creation and growth of Home Depot. Arthur Blank (now owner of the Atlanta Falcons NFL team), was then a co-owner of Home Depot. In the book, he recounts that the single most important thing he did to accelerate his career was to surround himself with people who knew answers he didn’t. He would force his way into groups and situations to meet business leaders and formulate mentorships to help his development.
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Companies still struggle with formalizing their approach to social selling. The sales process itself doesn’t change with the addition of social selling, but using it as a data mining tool has the power to speed the customer’s journey through the traditional sales funnel, allowing salespeople who use social selling outperform those who do not.
The social sharing landscape provides the perfect opportunity for sales people to tune into their customers and potential customers’ needs, wants, goals and frustrations.
Innovations come in clusters. The mobile revolution couldn’t take off until it was supported by a vibrant app ecosystem, more powerful processors in phones and reliable cellular service virtually everywhere.
With so much literature and data supporting the need for digital transformation, it might seem like all modern companies are making the leap. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only 3 percent of CEOs say they’ve successfully completed digital transformations. Why? They might be standing in their own way.
This week I was in New Delhi, India working with the sales leadership team at Microsoft’s inside sales digital center. The team was eager to learn new skills, and frankly surprised me with all the sales methodologies, books, podcasts, etc. that they consume on the regular basis. But what caught my attention most was their upfront transparent view on sales training, and its ability to enhance sellers’ careers (knowing full well that some sellers then become a flight risk).