This is part 2 of my interview with Jill Rowley; you can read part 1 here.
On why social selling should be done: "57% of the buying process is done prior to the buyer engaging with sales. The buyers are out there having a learning party without the sales professional being invited and social selling is all about being more relevant to that buyer earlier on in that buyer's buying process.
And the way that social selling can be relevant is via content, and so content is really the currency of the modern sales professional; and this is content that helps frame the buyer's thinking around either problems or opportunities that the buyer may or may not even know she has."
"The second why is, social equals' revenue. Social is the channel in the evolution of communication from print, radio, TV, phone, e-mail; web. The next channel is social and in selling you need to be where your buyers are and your buyers, 82% of the world's online population can be reached via social networks, your buyers are on social, you need to be on social, that's right."
On tips to marketers about helping sales to social: The tips, "it starts with educating the sales organization on the change in the buying process. You really have to just educate them on the why, before you can tell them what it is or how they do it and so I do think that sales needs to learn more about the world of the modern buyer who is digitally driven, mobile, socially connected, empowered with unlimited access to information. So that's first and foremost.
I also think that marketing needs to really educate the sales organization on the typical buyer's journey, that buying process that the buyer goes through and even go as far as defining buyer personas.
So the reality is that the modern sales professional is starting to look a little bit more like a marketer than a pushy-pushy, selly-selly salesperson because the reality is that nobody ever wanted to be sold to, but today they have a choice, they don't have to be sold to.
And so the modern buyer expects insights and value and really a facilitation of their buying process versus a salesperson jamming their sales process down the buyer's throat."
On Jill's contribution to the social selling effort: "I brought a framework into Oracle, a social selling framework, so I knew exactly what I wanted to do and then after I designed the actual training curriculum and recorded the training program, I felt like we were at a point where then I could go and start to really spend more of my time with the marketing organization.
Because the reality is that the second pillar of the social selling training is content and so our sales professionals need good quality content that is edutaining, that is insightful, that is value add, that's thought leadership content and Oracle had some definite areas of opportunity to improve, being very politically correct right now, to improve ... our content strategy, the way that we developed content that we make the content not necessarily about how great we are, but the content about how we help our customers become great and how we help them be number one in their respective industries by solving real business challenges."
If you'd like to connect with Jill you can find her on Twitter as @Jill_Rowley or just Google "Jill Rowley".
(photo via Business Insider)