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A new post from Rachel Clapp Miller at Force Management posted on HubSpot titled ‘How to Get Your Sales Team to Show Value in Social Media‘ is a good quick read as you think about enabling your own sales teams with social selling skills.

According to the post, a survey from IDC shows 75% percent of B2B buyers use social media to make purchasing decisions. And that number jumps to 84% when you factor in C-level and/or VP Executives. It’s a no brainer, making your sales and customer facing teams social is important and Rachel’s 5 tips are spot on:

1. Use what’s available
2. Set Goals
3. Add sharing into the current sales process
4. Consider Technology
5. Share success

I love this combination of technology, enablement and setting formal goals for your teams and have seen it work well for sales teams of all different sizes. Here is how we enable our own FirstRain team to become social sellers:

Using our own platform, FirstRain provides each one of our customer facing rep with prompts, covering their customers, target markets and industry trends. With one click access from all our apps, they can quick share externally to Twitter and LinkedIn and to internal social networks (we use Chatter, but enable our customers on Chatter, Yammer and IBM Connections). 

In addition, our marketing team on a weekly basis picks out 10 pieces of content for our field team to quickly share on Twitter and LinkedIn. Our team creates these weekly emails, using targeted FirstRain views we have created and selecting content that we may see our own network sharing. Topics range from Sales Enablement trends, Platform engagement, Internet of Things and things like security concerns that our customers care about. Some are directly addressed by the products we provide, but some are top of mind topics that everyone should care about. The format is as easy as our product app sharing, one click to twitter or Linkedin- leading to many thanks and sharing from our teams!

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