How do you implement social selling in a very traditional B2B organisation? What social networks should you use? How can you visualise your product offering?
To get some answers, I spoke to Mike Davies, UK Head of Business Development at Santander UK Corporate & Commercial. Have a listen to the interview below (or via iTunes, Soundcloud), or keep reading for a summary of our conversation.
Our tip of the week is the new Reddit app, get it for iOS and Android. This week's big shout goes out to new listener Michelle Dziuban of Cision in Chicago.
How did you implement social selling at Santander?
"We've used LinkedIn for a long time in Santander - I think we were one of the earliest banks to use Sales Navigator. We used the platform in a very methodical way - identify people in the organisation with a front line sales section and look at the tools that we could use, or tools that we could deploy, to support them in building their portfolios of customers. So once we got that functional piece out of the way, we looked across the market to identify the right sort of support and the right sort of tools for our sales guys. And LinkedIn obviously fits very well because it's a social platform and it allows us to put people in touch with the right prospects at the right time."
What tools to you use to visualize your product offering?
"We use a lot of video, YouTube. There's a channel that a lot of the content on YouTube is fed in to LinkedIn as shared. We also have a LinkedIn page where we share a lot of our video, and what we're trying to build is a lot of case study content, as opposed to just marketing messages. Because what we've found is, in the social selling context, the ability to highlight a real business and a real situation where we were able to provide a solution is far better than a generic marketing message in that social media context."
What other apps and tools to you use for social selling?
"We have an in-house CRM system which is bespoke to Santander. There's no app for that, but we do use a lot of information sources, again to help with our social media interaction - so things like Avention and Artesian where we can pick up news feeds, which is particularly good for building prospect pools of businesses that we're interested in working with. We like to track them from an official information angle, so accounts with Companies House and so on, but also picking up news and social media stories because, again, just from case studies, now what we're finding is the more a business will put information out through social media, the more receptive they are to an approach via social platforms. So we're using a lot of other tools to track that sort of content."
Do you look at the Social Selling Index?
"We do. It's a really useful measure because all of the constituent parts that form the SSI also contribute to good business development so we do use that. And the quest for bragging rights in Santander SSI can be quite fierce."
(NOTE: You can check your Social Selling Index score here: linkedin.com/sales/ssi.)
What'll happen next in social selling?
"I think the one thing I predict is that we'll stop thinking of social selling as something distinct from sales, marketing or business development. It will, and should, become business as usual."
Follow Mike on Twitter @MikeDaviesd67.