Sales Intelligence Blog by Lattice Engines

SAN MATEO – November 9, 2011 – Lattice Engines, the leader in B2B sales intelligence software, announced today that Andrew Somosi, SVP of Marketing and Business Development for Lattice Engines, will be presenting at the Sales Strategies in a Social and Mobile World Conference on Tuesday, November 15th.

The session, “Social Selling: What’s Really in it for B2B Sales?” will highlight data-driven research on how buyers and sellers are engaging in social media and specific social selling tactics that can boost sales productivity.

“There’s been a lot of buzz and hype around social media for B2B sales. But, to date, there hasn’t been a crisp definition of what exactly ‘Social’ means for the day-to-day activities of sales professionals,” says Somosi. “We look forward to illustrating specific actions that companies can apply to integrate social data and interactions into a comprehensive data-driven approach for targeting and engaging with customers.”

Lattice Engines’ sales intelligence software, salesPRISM, helps B2B sales professionals become more productive. Thousands of reps at Fortune 5000 companies rely on salesPRISM to predict which of their accounts are most likely to purchase and determine which messaging will improve the odds of closing the deal.

salesPRISM combines a company’s internal view of its customers and prospects (e.g., purchase histories, product usage data, customer service records) with external information about these accounts and decision-makers (e.g., news sources, company websites, social media). Since salesPRISM is embedded directly within CRM systems, reps stay focused on the most qualified leads in the pipeline without changing their workflows.

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Today’s blog post was originally featured on socialmediab2b.com.

A social approach does not alter the fundamental ingredients for B2B selling success: building trust and cultivating relationships. However, it does enable new selling tactics along the sales process that align more naturally to the changing behaviors of customers and prospects in a networked world.

1. Create the Foundation for Social Selling
A prerequisite for social selling is identifying your target accounts and contacts. Do you know the full set of customers and prospects in your sales territory? Can you find those accounts in the CRM system? Do you have at least one relevant contact associated with each account? Even leading sales organizations leave money on the table because of an inconsistent and incomplete view of their sales universe. One B2B organization, which prided itself on sophisticated CRM and sales workflow processes, was able to increase its sales universe by 60% by identifying eligible accounts not entered into CRM, removing inactive and duplicate accounts, and ensuring that the right reps were assigned to the right accounts (e.g., Hunters assigned to Prospects).

2. Connect with Your Target Contacts on LinkedIn and Twitter
LinkedIn profiles are chock-full of rich context (e.g., schools attended, prior jobs, LinkedIn Groups) and predictive business triggers (e.g., event updates, conferences attended). What percent of your active contacts in CRM are you linked to? Start by connecting to your closest relationships first, adding a thoughtful and contact specific note in the invitation. Going forward, invite contacts to link after your first meaningful meeting or call. LinkedIn profiles offer a direct gateway to Twitter handles. This is a major benefit as Twitter handles are otherwise difficult to obtain and often do not clearly indicate a person’s full name (e.g., Lattice Engines CEO Shashi Upadhyay goes by @shashikup on Twitter).

3. Profile Your Contacts with Social Data
The key is to focus on the five most important profiling elements that matter most for your business (e.g., industry group participation, recent promotion) or selling style (e.g., buyer’s favorite sports team). This information should be captured in your CRM contact record. Create alerts to track profile changes and update your records on a monthly basis.

4. Account and Contact Targeting
Successful reps align their selling time to the account opportunities with the highest likelihood of conversion and/or highest likely deal value. Listening to posts (e.g., in LinkedIn groups) from employees at your target customers and prospects can surface customer needs and sales opportunities. Reps can do this on their own, but companies can help automate this process and help prioritize the most important insights.

In addition, B2B companies can apply technologies that synthesize activity on social media networks. For example, companies with stronger social media footprints (e.g., more connections, more postings) are typically more likely to be in growth mode and are often more open to technology-based solutions. Data culled from social networks should be an essential component of the full array of internal and external data sources that companies should analyze to help their reps align selling time to the top account opportunities. Laser-focused on the highest-priority accounts, reps now need to identify and connect with the right decision-makers and influencers.

Social networks, like LinkedIn, are rapidly becoming sales staples for generating new connections and warm referrals. Sales Intelligence solutions extend the power of social networks by enabling a sales team to pool together each rep’s connections into one collective network on an opt-in basis. Reps benefit by accessing more contacts at their target accounts, connected by their trusted colleagues.

5. Gaining Access to Purchase Decision-Makers
Once accounts are ranked, the toughest part is actually getting through to decision-makers. Your buyers are highly busy professionals, inundated by meetings, projects, email and endless to-do lists. On top of their work priorities, they are solicited daily by a myriad of vendors seeking a sliver of their precious time. So, when your contact finally picks up the phone, you have 30 seconds to pique her interest. A sure way to blow the call is to drone on about how great your company’s products are. What does work is immediately demonstrating a thorough understanding of the customer’s business goals and how you can help them achieve success. Set aside one hour weekly to review what your contacts are saying in their social updates, in their tweets and in groups.

6. Building Trust-Based Relationships with Each Customer Interaction
Social networks make it so much easier to stay top-of-mind in between formal phone calls and meetings. It’s as easy as sharing a weekly update on an important event in your industry or liking a post from one of your contacts. The subject matter should be educational and informative with no trace of a sales pitch. In addition, nothing accelerates sales cycles like demonstrating how similar companies have succeeded with your solution. The power of social selling stems from the ability to help reps demonstrate peer success. Sales intelligence software automatically identifies these peer reference cases. Reps benefit because they can apply proven tactics and collateral used by their colleagues to close similar deals and because they quickly and automatically share the most relevant and compelling success stories with their customers.

These six steps are an excerpt from the whitepaper Social Selling: What’s Really In It for B2B Sales. Download it to learn more about social selling.

What has your experience been using a social approach to B2B selling? Please share your thoughts below.

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In today’s social media driven world, 140 characters says a lot.  People have become accustomed to getting their news and insights in short, easy to comprehend tidbits. For example, I came across a creative blog entry which lists 50 tweet-able tips for graphic designers.  It served as my inspiration for the following list of tips for B2B sales professionals.  I hope it serves as the starting point for further contribution.  Without further ado, I present my nine “tweet-worthy” tips for smarter B2B selling:

B2B Buyers Have Higher Expectations

1. B2B buyers expect sales reps to know more about their business.  Let them know you understand their point of view. Context is key. #sales9

First Impressions Mean a Lot

2. When calling a prospect for the first time, contextual (relevant) messaging is 1.5x more effective at gaining access. #sales9

Netflix, Amazon and Google Can Predict What Customers Want Next – You Can Too

3. Major B2B brands are using predictive analytics to find the best opportunities and give customers a better experience. #sales9

Sales Intelligence Saves Time

4. Sales reps spend more than half their day NOT selling. Give your reps back some time and integrate sales intelligence into CRM.  #sales9

However…Fewer Meetings Can Mean More Sales

5. Research shows that more time spent in pre-sales planning may lead to fewer but much more productive customer meetings. #sales9

Data Quality Matters

6. 15% of contact information becomes inaccurate within one year.  Keep data valuable by keeping it updated and fresh.  #sales9

Data Does Not Equal Intelligence

7. Sales intelligence means data-driven decision support for which customers to call, what to message, etc. #sales9

Internal Data Matters

8. Would you read a book missing half the pages? A complete sales intelligence solution applies both internal and external data. #sales9

Social Selling is More than Just Engaging – It’s About Learning

9. Research shows that 49% of B2B customers are on Twitter – publishing company news. Make their business your business. #sales9

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Twitter is overrated. Since Edison Research and Arbitron published their latest research on online, offline and social media habits, there’s been a cascading echo of online voices claiming that Twitter is overhyped. The most provocative stats in the research focus on Media Platform Usage, which ranks Media & Device “Reach” (i.e., the percent of research respondents who use or own the media platform). Watching television – - aka breathing – - comes in at 98%. Facebook ranks #5 at 51%, meaning that half of the respondents claim to use the social network. Where’s Twitter? Look to the bottom of the list, past YouTube, past Pandora, past even MySpace. It comes in at only 8%.

Facebook and Twitter have developed a comparable caché and level of notoriety. The two brands seem to always get uttered together in any sentence about social media. So these usage stats would seem to dampen Twitter’s glow relative to Facebook.

Jay Baer posted a thoughtful piece on this issue, comparing the different use cases for Facebook and Twitter, particularly in B2B vs. B2C contexts. I particularly liked the following analogy: “Facebook is now de facto. It is vanilla ice cream. Twitter is like IPA beer. Nobody just ‘likes’ IPA. If you like it, you love it. Beer geeks crave IPA the way marketing geeks crave Twitter.”

Since the Edison/Arbitron research was based on consumers (a B2C lens), we decided to investigate the real impact of Twitter in B2B, particularly for sales professionals. Could sales reps use Twitter for sales intelligence? Should they use Twitter to accelerate sales growth? If the answer is yes, what exactly should they do?

Even without looking at hard numbers, Twitter has some inherent strengths for a salesperson looking to learn more about her customers and prospects and the relevant decision-makers and influencers:

1. Companies and individuals can set up Twitter handles. So, in theory, there is an opportunity to do homework on both the account and the contact.
2. Posting on Twitter is easy and informal. This means that companies (or individuals) are more likely to post more often (vs. the corporate website) and are more likely to post juicy tidbits that may not be important enough or respectable enough for formal, website consumption.
3. Twitter is an open network. I can follow your posts even if you don’t follow mine. This is a big advantage relative to Facebook and LinkedIn.  Mentions (i.e., @username) even allow me to engage with a company or decision-maker in a non-intrusive manner.

With these points in-mind, let’s proceed to our own research:

Question 1: Are companies on Twitter?

Given the 8% usage stats above, this is a legitimate question. To answer this question for B2B, we took a random sample of companies with 100-250 employees. This is the middle market: it’s not IBM; it’s not the corner deli. We found that 49% of these companies had a Twitter handle, significantly above the 8% figure in the consumer research. If you are a salesperson covering mid-size companies, half your targets have a presence on Twitter.

Question 2: Do companies on Twitter use Twitter?

It’s one thing to create a Twitter handle (at least 5 minutes of effort). It’s another thing to keep Tweeting on an ongoing basis. Does the novelty wear off? We found that 85% of the companies on Twitter were using Twitter, and had not abandoned it after their initial trial period. That didn’t mean that the companies were Tweeting on a daily basis. The median company with a Twitter handle Tweeted just 1.7x per week. That’s not a massive quantity of Tweetage, but it eclipses the frequency of News updates on the typical corporate website.

Question 3: Are the tweets relevant for a B2B sales person?

To test this hypothesis, we evaluated the last 200 tweets for each company in the sample. We looked for a set of keywords that might interest a salesperson (e.g., award, winner, finalist, launch, joined) and would help them communicate to decision makers with the right context.  For example, it would be helpful to know that Company XYZ just won a prestigious “award” or that Frank Smith just “joined” XYZ as the new CFO. Surprisingly, all the companies had at least one of the 19 words show up at least once!  In fact, 29% of the companies used one of the keywords at least 25x in their Tweets. We then did a manual review of the tweets and found that they were indeed relevant and useful over 70% of the time (i.e., the keywords were used in a different or personal context for the remaining 30%).  Here’s a list of some nuggets of sales intelligence we came through:

• Awards won
• Exhibitions at conferences
• New senior hires
• Product launches
• New customer wins
• Customer recommendations

How Can Sales People Use Twitter For Sales Intelligence and Sales Growth

Based even on our limited research, there is compelling evidence that Twitter should be a component of a B2B sales person’s tool kit. Here are some easy steps you can take to boost sales growth using Twitter:

1. Create a Twitter account.
2. Identify the Twitter handles of your customers and prospects. The easiest methods are to look for the Twitter symbol on the website or to run the following search: Company Name on Twitter.
3. Create a Twitter List of your target handles. This will enable you to isolate the tweets from your targets (vs. those form your family and friends).
4. Use various Twitter search tools (e.g., search.twitter.com) and simple Twitter API calls (e.g., using Heroku) to collect batch tweets from your handles, export the results to Excel/Word to find specific keywords (e.g., award).

Are you using Twitter for B2B sales? We’d love to hear from you. Happy Tweeting.

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