This week, I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of: The Social Sales Cycle: Real-Time Customer Engagement. This webinar was sponsored by Act-On Software and featured; Renee Ducre (@rducre) Global Marketing Director for IBM's Social Business, Dan Gingiss (@dgingiss) Head of Digital Customer Experience at Discover Card and Joe Martin (@joeDmarti) Manager of the Digital Index at Adobe. We discussed how to understand the impact social media has on sales and the full sales cycle.
Here are 3 of the key takeaways:
- Buyers go through 90 percent of the buying process before they even talk to a vendor - which has consistently been going up over the last few years as buyer research for products and services the same way they do at home - over the internet.
- Social Selling - is an opportunity for sales and marketing to work together and maximize the potential ROI that can be gained from social media presence. Those sales people who use social selling have a higher close rate and larger pipeline than their peers who do not employ social selling.
- Don't overlook paid media - Organic impressions in Facebook are down 50% but the number of organic posts is rising. So don't forget to have a paid component to your social strategy.
To get a copy of the slides or listen to the replay please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the following Storify: https://storify.com/socialmedia2day/smtlive-the-social-sales-cycle-real-time-customer
The next webinar is on Transforming Data Noise Into Data Intelligence be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars.