The Power of a Socially Enabled Sales Force

Most companies today have some presence on social media.

It is a reasonably safe assumption that your company has a LinkedIn company page and a Twitter presence.  For arguments sake, let’s say that your company has 500 employees and 100 of those people are in your sales organization. 

• You have a great marketing department that creates great content and they manage your social channels as well as traditional marketing (ads, banners, displays, etc.).
• Your company has 2,000 followers on Twitter and 500 followers on LinkedIn.
• Your marketing department puts out content on Twitter 3 times per week and twice a week on LinkedIn.

Quick math gives us total potential views of social content at 7,000, just  a drop in the bucket of your total potential reach across your social networks.

Enter the Sales Department

One of the frustrations of many marketing departments is that sales professionals don’t leverage all the great content that is created for a couple of reasons:

1. They have no platform to share the content on other than maybe email (which is 1-1 mostly).
2. They aren’t comfortable with or maybe even dislike social media.
3. They don’t know where to locate the content or are not willing to do the work of sifting through the content to see what makes sense for them and then distribute it.

Will your total reach change if you are able to overcome these obstacles?

Let’s say you have 100 sales professionals in your organization. Let’s also assume their average number of connections on LinkedIn is 250 and their average number of Twitter followers is 200.

If we can get the sales force to post as frequently as the organization was posting, we’re looking at the following amplification of the brand’s message:

And the other great thing…the 7,000 potential views that marketing was generating on the company assets doesn’t go away due to this activity!

The Solution

Give marketing the ability to provide quick access to great content for the sales team. To truly have a socially enabled sales force, here is what you want to think about:

• The ability to categorize content by both category and job role.
• The ability for administrators to approve, comment, edit, etc.
• Training and support – teach the sales people how to setup quality profiles and use content correctly.

Make it quick and easy for the sales team to find content that makes sense for them and then schedule it out so they are not constantly hanging out in the different social media time sucks. This is about thought leadership and being viewed as a trusted resource as a result of great social media activity.

If you are part of a relatively small company this process can probably be managed using email and some cloud storage. If you are part of a larger enterprise company, you will need a tool specifically designed to make this process quick and easy at scale.

rFactr SocialPort is designed specifically for this model. This post originally http://blog.rfactr.com/http://blog.rfactr.com/.  rFactr's social sales program provides sales organizations with an easy way to activate their team on social channels, enabling them to connect with prospects and begin the sales process earlier in the sales cycle. Learn more...