Social Selling Mastery. Shanks Jamie

      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.

      Level 5: Sales and Marketing Integration

      As a Level 5 organization, you firmly believe that integration between sales and marketing is the future of commercial interactions with your buyer. Team Revenue is what we call the interlaced marketing and sales departments. Your commercial team recognizes emphatically that everyone in digital marketing and sales is accountable for helping buyers throughout their journey. All team members have completely bought into Aristotle's definition of synergy; they acknowledge that no role is more important than another; and understand that there are no shortcuts to becoming a successful digital-sales organization. We recognize that while the business cards and LinkedIn profiles of sales and marketers will always show the external world their traditional roles and titles, internally it is clear that they are all members of one unit – Team Revenue. They are accountable to only one number – sales bookings!

      Throughout this book, we explore very tactical steps to help you reach beyond even Level 3 – Social Selling Mastery – so you can create greater collaboration between sales and marketing. I truly dream of a day when I see joint sales and marketing conferences, where both sales and marketing professionals are attending equally, collaborating and trading best practices as if they all share a common role. I also dream of the day when marketers have as much involvement in sales kick-off events (SKOs) by working hand in hand with sales to better address customer needs. Sales and marketing integration is coming, mark my words. Social Selling Mastery is going to be your company's biggest leap forward on the journey to integration.

      We at Sales for Life have trained more than 250 companies, ranging in size from 5 sales and marketing professionals to 25,000 spread across the globe. Personally, I've been in more than 1,000 boardrooms (virtually or live) to assess companies' elementary starts to Social Selling at Levels 0, 1, and 2.

      After reviewing the six stages to digital transformation, please don't get discouraged if your self-assessment places your organization far, far, far away from trying Level 3, Social Selling Mastery. This book is going to serve as your guide and road map.

      How Do I Use This Book?

      I have taken two very deliberate steps in creating this book for you:

      1. This book is very tactical.

      I want you and your organization to have the road map to social selling success. You're going to notice very quickly that we spend little time making the case for social selling in your organization. The why has been beaten to death; there are hundreds of articles online available for your review. My assumption is that you've purchased this book because your organization is stuck at Level 1 or Level 2 and you need the road map to Level 3, Social Selling Mastery. I promise you one thing: This book is very tactical and applies to both an individual, quota-carrying sales professional, all the way to a senior C-level executive rolling out a global training program. I will have accomplished my goal for this book if you feel it becomes your bible for social selling. You're getting a brain dump of four years of expertise with hundreds of customer engagements and an outline of best practices from Sales for Life. I legitimately want to change your life and the success trajectory of your organization.

      2. Social selling at Scale

      Scale – this is the missing ingredient of every book and training program claiming to be on social selling I've encountered. Their programs have done an admirable job of helping sales professionals kick-start their social selling activities. Unfortunately, they haven't approached social selling as a global initiative, littered with the complexities of multiple departmental stakeholders, training deliverables that reinforce behavioral change, and global KPI measurements that drive a real sales impact to your company's bottom line. Social selling execution based on the individual sales professional's activities is like sailing a ship without a course. Based on an independent study conducted by Feedback Systems with over 300 sales professionals with insight from Sales for Life, PeopleLinx, Sales Readiness Group, VorsightBP, and Sandler Training, we found that 69 percent of social sellers were self-taught, with no formal training, and they couldn't bottle their process.1 These pockets of successful social sellers could hardly articulate what made their process so special. The problem this poses for your organization is simple: Core performers (typically 50 to 70 percent of your sales force) are not executing the same playbook as your high performers. According to the Corporate Executive Board, “Boosting Core Performers' sales performance by 5 % will result in a 60 % higher increase in revenue, than firms that increase their High Performers' sales performance by 5 %.”2 This statement is obvious when you factor in the importance of scale. This is exactly why you need to look at social selling as part of a synergistic ecosystem. In keeping with this approach, all elements of this book are equally important; they are not just tips for sales professionals to execute in their own vacuum. This book has designed a daily sales cadence for every sales professional in your organization. There are also key steps for frontline sales managers, sales operations and sales enablement, and digital marketing. All of these business units must learn, execute, and measure in unison.

      Before you dig in, here's an important tip: Don't skip sections, even if they're not part of your current job description. While this book is organized by job-function sections, please read each section in detail. I wrote each section to speak directly to the leader of that applicable job function. If you're in a part that doesn't align to your current role, still read it. Read that part and its applicable chapters as if you were the leader. The only way you'll become the ultimate social seller is if you understand how the entire ecosystem works in unison. I'd like you to gain an appreciation for how each department is critical for social selling success.