In our recent webinar, sponsored by Act-On, Greg Cohen, Senior Manager for Social Media and Influence at UCB, Renee Ducre, Global Consumer, Digital Marketing Executive of IBM, and Gal Josefsberg, VP Product Manager and Marketing, defined social selling and how it differs from traditional sales.
This slide, from Ducre, which quotes Douglas Hanna of IBM, was the starting point:
Other great definitions included a way of looking at sales that was less transactional than in the past, and where, as Cohen pointed out, trust had to be established long before there was a request for action.
Content sharing, all panelists agreed, is key particularly with the ubiquity of good content available and with so many of our prospects already active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Engaging the prospect first on these sites, and recognizing that the prospect is, as Ducre pointed out, still an individual, is key to the success of social selling.
The panelists also discussed the need for more technology to integrate the social selling process into traditional CRM and across platforms. There's so much more great stuff in this webinar, and I invite you to listen to the archive here (you may need to sign in if you haven't already). You can also take a look at our Storify of the webinar below: