Last week I moderated another webinar in the Social Media Today Best Thinkers webinar series, this time on the topic of Reengineering for the Age of Social Selling: Structuring the Modern Sales Team. This webinar included some really great speakers like: Jill Rowley who leads Oracle's Social Selling and Social Business initiatives, Sandy Carter who is the General Manager for IBM's Social Business Evangelism and Anneke Seley who is the Founder of Reality Works and co-author of Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology.
Jill Rowley, from Oracle, started us off by helping to define the differences between Social Selling and Traditional Selling. What really resonated with the audience was the fact that 78% of Sales Professionals using Social Media outsell their peers. Another big theme in Jill's presentation was only 33% of buyers trust messaging from companies where as 92% of buyer trust messaging from their peers. These stats made for some lively discussion for the QA session after the presentations.
Sandy Carter, from IBM, then took us through why Social Selling has become important to IBM. A stat that really jumped out to the audience was 57% of the buying decision is made before there is actual contact with a sales person. Then she spoke about her 5 guiding principle behind social selling: 1st celebrate your customers in all digital channels, 2nd engage and respond with speed, 3rd know who the influencers are, 4th know your prospect and how to engage with them and 5th build a rich social graph.
After the presentations were over we had a lively discussion about Social Selling and we took questions from the audience. If you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics such as: Can we really expect the whole sales team to become social? What kinds of training programs have your run to get skills up? Who owns this type of program sales or marketing?
If that piqued your interest and you want to hear the replay of this webinar, please check out this link. Otherwise please join us for the next webinar on Customer Service for the New Customer: Transitioning to a Real-Time Service Model starting at noon eastern on December 5th: register here.