Using Social Media for B2B Sales

Hi everybody, and welcome to today's Biznology Digital Marketing webinar. I'm Frank Reed. I'm one of the bloggers here at Biznology. I'm also the managing editor for Marketing Pilgrim blog, which is currently number 17 on the Ad Age Power 150. And I'm also the Director of Sales for the Edgeworth Group, which is an interactive marketing and web integration firm based in Irvine, California.

Hi, Frank.

Today, however, we'll be hearing from Mike Moran who is the founder of the BizKnowledge Blog. And he will be presenting Using Social Media for B2B Sales.

The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode.

Hi everybody. I'm a little confused. Did we just start? Is everybody hearing me for the first time? All right, well anyway, my name is Frank Reed. And before we get going here, I want to recognize the sponsors for today's Using Social Media for B2B Sales webinar which is being presented by Mike Moran who is the founder of the Biznology Blog. We have Brick Marketing which is a full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Marketing Pilgrim which I am the managing editor of, internet and social media marketing is his blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. Reputation.com, don't let the internet scare off potential customers. Improve what people see when they search for your business. And Ribbon Coffin Group, RKG is a digital marketing agency that combines superior marketing talent with sophisticated technology to increase clients' business through data-driven online marketing solutions. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use your GoToWebinar controls to ask a question. The orange arrow opens and closes your webinar controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of the webinar and pose them to Mike. So while we're waiting for the last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that BizTechnology Newsletter and Blog are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. So thanks again for all of you spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is. So let's introduce today's speaker. Mike Moran is the founder of the Biznology Blog, a well-known expert in all things digital marketing, and Chief Strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. Mike is also the co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc. and the sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. Mike is a veteran of IBM, managing groups at IBM.com for 8 years and retiring from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. So if you've ever struggled with how to use social media as a tool for your B2B sales, this is the webinar for you. So Mike, take it away.

Thanks a lot, Frank. So when you think about where we've been in B2B marketing and sales, typically they've been separate. So the marketing team has all sorts of things they're doing. It might have been direct mail, it might have been trade show booths like you see here, and then they collect leads and they hand those leads off to sales. So they pick up any business cards they can, contact information, there are all sorts of ways that they drive leads. As they do all of that, they hand it off to sales and basically those people are never heard from again from a marketing point of view. This is the way it's always worked, and it might even be the way your company is still organized. But when you start to think about how to use social media for B2B sales, the first thing that you find out is that social media doesn't split marketing from sales. It's modeled after direct marketing, and some of you may have a direct marketing background. If you do, that's great, because you have a huge advantage over everybody else. So you really need to start doing marketing based on response. So it's not just about collecting information and turning them into a lead and sending them off to sales, although that can be still an important part. But you need to know whether those leads closed. And in fact, you need to be able to use social media throughout the process, in the marketing process and in the sales process. So let's look at how it works. So the first thing you have to think about is that A conversion measures sales performance. So what that means is that just as in offline B2B marketing and B2B sales, you have prospects come in the loop and you have customers come out the other end. You are trying to measure how many people you actually close from a sales point of view. So we call that a conversion. It's an accounting term. It means a sales conversion, but we want to use it online to actually track everything that we do online and how people convert from being an online prospect to being someone who can go into the sales pipeline. So when we think about where we are, we want to think about what kinds of conversions we might be looking for. Now, some B2B sales actually happen in e-commerce modes. You might have a shopping cart. But there might be all sorts of other things you're trying to do. You might be trying to get them to call you on the phone. You might be trying to get them to contact you in email so that you get their email information and the sales team can follow up. When I was at IBM, one of the big ones was to download a white paper. Now I don't know why they never used any other color paper, but they didn't. Now the reason we wanted them to do that is because we put phone numbers in the white papers that were nowhere else. And when people downloaded the white paper, they read them, they called the number, they would then be put into the CRM system. So that we could track to see whether they had sales or not. So we had some situations where we knew, for example, that 4% of the people that downloaded this white paper were going to spend $50,000 worth of consulting because we tracked that through the CRM system. So the goal then becomes to do anything you can to get people to download that white paper. That's really what we needed to focus on was how could you get people to do the thing on the web you needed them to do. And social media can drive people to be exposed to your message. You can also use it as part of the sales team to persuade people to take that step. So how do we track online conversions? Well, you probably already have a system to do that. So you might have Google Analytics or maybe one of these other products. Any of these systems can do the same thing. They can track how many— what people look at pages on your site, how many visits and visitors that you get, where they come from, and as we talked talked about a moment ago, conversions. You might be asking yourself, well, yeah, well, that's great, but what does this have to do with social media? Well, it's really important that you use social media the same way you would use any other means of bringing people to your website. So when you do search marketing, you're looking at conversions. When you're doing email marketing, you're looking at conversions. Well, when you do social media marketing, you need to look at conversions as well. So how do you track offline conversions? And a lot of B2B sales are actually offline conversions. Now, so you can think about people who want to then use a contact form. They might call that special phone number we talked about. You might give them some kind of discount coupon that they can turn into a salesperson. There's all sorts of ways of getting people to switch channels, and you can understand where they came from. You know they came from the website, so the website can get credit for it. Now, the thing that you have to think through is how you put the incentives in place to do that. Now, car sales typically aren't B2B, but The reason I put this as an example here is because it's a very difficult kind of thing to have car dealers who don't work for the car manufacturers reporting sales back. And so the manufacturers will actually let them configure the car. Customers print it out. They take it to the car dealer. The car dealer checks off that they brought in that form. And if they actually sell a car to them, they can report that information back to the manufacturer. Whatever kind of business you have, you need to come up with a way of attributing the offline sales back to the website, and all the way back to social media. So think about where the contact information goes. So wherever you were collecting those leads from the trade show, you want to collect your online leads in the same place. So get it to the CRM system, get it to some other database, get it— if you're a small company, you're just using spreadsheets to keep track of prospects in the pipeline, that's fine too. And so what you need to do though is what— is you need to attribute where they come from. You have to figure out how they came from social media to the web to your eventual sale, because that's what's really going to help you to understand what social media marketing is worth. And it's going to help you learn how you're using social media effectively for B2B sales. So let's look at how the pieces fit together. So you start with social, it goes to the web, and then they become leads that are then closed by the sales force or they're closed some other way. Possibly online, possibly offline. But this is really what the basic steps are. And so you might say to yourself, well, OK, how do I actually track these things? We already talked about how going from the web to leads maybe is something that you need to figure out how to track the same way you track leads from a trade show. But how do you track things like social to the website? So because social is almost always trying to bring people to your website, because that's where you're going to have your deeper sales material, you need to figure out how you know that people came to your website from social. And it uses something called a tracking code. And the tracking code is a similar thing that you see them used in display advertising. Some people use them in email. And let me show you how it works. So most of the time it's pretty simple. If you have a social media venue where you can use HTML links, so something like a blog or a message board or social bookmarking, you can put that link right into the content. So you can use HTML tags. You can put an anchor tag right in there. And you can see that at the end of this URL, the ZKV2G, that is just an arbitrary set of characters that your web analytics person can give you that says this is a particular piece of content that we're going to track. Now if you have other things that you can't put that in as easily, maybe it's something like Twitter where you need to use a URL shortener, it's okay. You can take that original URL that we just used with the tracking code and put that into Bitly or some other URL shortener and then use that shortened URL in your tweet. YouTube doesn't have any place for you to put a link. So how would you do it there? Well, there is something called a call to action overlay. You see an example of it here where you can pay Google who owns YouTube some money for every time someone clicks through. So if they click through on that overlay, They will both come to your site, but they will also come to a particular URL that you have given in your call to action overlay. You can put in that URL in the link that tracking code. So you can then know that they came to your site from this video. So the tracking code gets passed to the site, and then the metric system picks up the code. So we talked before about the metric system. You might have Google Analytics. You might have something else. And then what can happen from then on is you can now ask your web analyst how many people came to the site using that tracking code which is from my YouTube video. How many of them actually proceeded through several different pages on the site? How many of them actually converted? And if you set things up properly, you can even find out how many of them actually bought offline. This can tell you the value of your social media. So now we know how to track. So we put a tracking code in social, we use the analytics system on the website, and then if we're going to offline sales, we're going to pass it as a lead and put that in the CRM system so that we really have the whole thing connected. Ankle bone connected to the shin bone, it's all working, and it looks very simple here, doesn't it? Because all you think about for social is the beginning of the sales funnel. You had all this awareness, you get the eyeballs in, you roll them out to the end, it goes through the website CRM system, very, very simple. Except that's not the way people really buy. So if you really look at what's going on, what's happening is that there are all sorts of places that people go. They don't just look at some social media, come to your website and buy something, or end up in the CRM system and get closed by the salesperson. It's much more complicated than that. They're actually coming back to the web and coming back to social media at all different parts of the sales process. So if you look at— sure, they're coming in at the beginning and looking and getting a message possibly from social media, but they're also checking all through the process. They're going back and looking at reviews. They're getting recommendations from their friends on Facebook or on LinkedIn. They're also figuring out what other kinds of information has been written about your product or service. There's all sorts of things that are going on, and at the end, You want them to become buyers, but you also want them to become advocates for you. You want them to become contributors to your marketing by saying, I bought this product, here's my review of it, or I had a really good experience with the salesperson. You want all of those things to be happening because you want them to become the people who are now putting fodder out there for the next wave of people coming through the pipeline to really focus on. And that's really what we need to think about is where all the places are in the mix for social media as part of the sales cycle. So I'm having a little trouble with my computer. So maybe Eileen, if you could advance the slides, we can go on to the next one. The reason that social is confusing is because it isn't one thing. It's not just one area. It's more than that. What's going on is that there are campaigns, and there is also engagement. And so if we think about how this works, what we are really focused on is that there are campaigns that you might do, where you'll see ups and downs. So every time you invest in something, you'll see some kind of value come out. But then if you have a good campaign, you might get a big bump. If you have a not so good campaign, you might have a little bump. Now, if we go to the next slide, social media is more than just marketing. What's happening here is that as you focus on how to engage in these campaigns, what's happening is you're also creating a social base for yourself. If you have engagement, If for example your salespeople are on LinkedIn and they're talking to customers, then what's happening is that you're creating a social base for yourself so that every campaign starts to have more value than it did before. Next slide. So what we're really looking at here is that there's 2 forms of social media brand presence. One of them is campaigns, which as marketers we're all familiar with, but the other is engagement. And engagement is really what's important from a salesperson's point of view. So, the salesperson needs to create engagement. And so, it's all right for us to think about sales and marketing to be together, and it's okay for us to even think that both salespeople and marketing people are going to do campaigns, and they're both going to do engagement. But what I find in B2B is that typically the marketing team is better at campaigns, because they can plan them, they can think them through, they can really understand how that works. And then what happens is that the salespeople are actually better at engagement. They're better at responding to people. They're better at looking at what's happening and really coming up with answers to objections. Next slide. So the thing that makes it a little scary is that if you're a salesperson, you might not have as much experience in social media. And you really need to start slowly, because most salespeople I know are very confident people. They say, well, I know how to talk to people. Let me just jump in and do it. Well, go slow because one of the things that's bad is you don't want to jump into engagement in which you are out there selling really hard in social media. Instead, what you want to do is start by listening. Start by hearing what the conversation is, finding who people are that are talking about the subjects you are interested in. You might retweet someone, follow somebody. You can comment on a blog post. You can answer a question on a message board, but do it in a helpful way. Next slide. Then you can start sharing content with other people. So if you think about how this works, if you start seeing things that you think are very smart, very good ideas, then you can start grabbing that content and putting it out there. And you can retweet things. You can share a blog post that other people did. It's a safe way to start and it doesn't put you in a position where you have to create your own content which for some people can be very daunting. I mean, especially with salespeople, they often have a really good idea of how to talk off the top of their head, but they don't feel like they're the kind of person to put together a blog post. Now, some people are better at that than others, but the truth is that what you need to do is to warm up slowly, to really start to find your sea legs with this. Next slide. The other thing that can happen to a salesperson when they first jump into social media is you might not be following all the rules. And so it's really important for you not to go into social media and, for example, do things anonymously or to pretend that you are not the salesperson for the company and put in like a really nice review for your product. What you have to do is identify who you are, who you work for, and really identify any potential source of conflict. So if there's anything that you think that a potential customer would want to know in order to understand whether your advice is biased or not. And being a salesman for the company makes you a little bit biased. So any salesperson has to reveal those conflicts. And this isn't just good business. What it really is is the law in the United States, and it's becoming the law in other countries too. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission forces people to reveal conflicts anytime they are there. And so, I mean, for example, I will do a blog post and if I do one on social media listening, usually in the blog post somewhere I will put in full disclosure, I am the Chief Strategist at Converseon, which is a social media listening company. And so these are the kinds of things you have to put in. Next slide. So if we think about What we're really trying to do, we're trying to get opted in. So if you think about all the kinds of opt-ins that you can get, you think about getting followers on Twitter, Google+, Facebook friends and fans. In B2B, maybe one of the most important ones is LinkedIn connections. Now, but Twitter and Google+, especially if you're in the technology industry, could be important as well. You want people to subscribe to blogs. All those kinds of things are opt-ins, so think about the kind of helpful and informative Informative messaging that you need to do. You can't be doing sales pitches. What you have to be doing is saying, "Here's a new use for a product. Here's something that we just came out with." It has to be newsworthy. It has to be helpful. In some cases, you can get away with entertaining, but in B to B, I find helpful, informational—those kinds of approaches work a lot better. Next slide. So if we use LinkedIn as an example, because what I find is that Marketers and salespeople in B2B more and more are turning to LinkedIn as one of the primary ways for them to reach customers. So you can leverage any of your contacts as LinkedIn connections. You may already be doing this, but if you're not, you should be going through all of your customer contacts, your email database, email contacts, all those things, and reach out to people and connect with them on LinkedIn. Then you need to start deciding what you want to talk about. You can start a LinkedIn group about any topic. If you're a salesperson, you might want to talk about different things you come across with clients and problems they have that you're able to solve, or things that you're an expert in because you've been working in this industry for so many years. You might also want to interview people, bring in an engineer behind the product and ask a bunch of questions and post them out there for your customers. There are other things you can do on LinkedIn too to make it richer. If you do a presentation somewhere in public, you can post it on SlideShare. Some Some salespeople I find also use something called TripIt where it helps them organize their travel, but they can actually share on TripIt where they're going. Now some people think that there's kind of a privacy issue there and they don't want to do it, but there are other people I know that use this so that they can kind of announce to people where they're going to be, especially if you're like a national salesperson and you can maybe pick up extra meetings while you're in town. Next slide. You can also use social to directly lead to sales. I mean, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Dell Outlet, but it's a Twitter handle that actually sells things straight from Twitter. So you can click on these deals and go right to the website and buy things. And in fact, this is where Dell puts all of their surplus equipment. They don't have any other program for clearing out the warehouse than this. So they've got thousands of deals. Thousands and thousands of Twitter followers for people who are waiting for a deal. So if you make this interesting, if you make it relevant, helpful, all the kinds of things we've been talking about, you can use social media for sales. The other thing that some companies are doing, and there's a couple of Conversyion clients that do this, they are engaging for sales leads. So what they are doing is they are using social media listening, say on Twitter, And they're listening for conversations for people who are in the early stages of the buying process. And then you can then send it to a salesperson to engage with them. You can answer the questions. You can offer to talk to them or to take it offline for more information. You have to be very low-key about it. You have to be helpful rather than pushy. But there's some clients that we've worked with where they have used this kind of technique to put literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in place coming from Twitter, all B2B. Next slide. So that's it for today. I know Frank is going to ask you in a moment to give us some questions. I hope you've been using that little orange arrow to put in some questions, but I'm sure Frank has got a few that he can throw at me. Our next webinar comes up on October 16th where another of our bloggers, Rob Peterson, is going to talk about the secrets of social media ROI. So I hope you'll join us then too. So Frank, take it away with questions.

All right, thanks Mike. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how using social media for B2B sales, but you didn't answer every question. That happens all the time of course. I've got a lot of good ones from our audience. They are ready to go for you. I'd like to remind the audience that it's not too late to ask a question by typing into the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. Before we get to the first question though, we need to thank our sponsors once again. We really appreciate it. Brick Marketing, a full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. Reputation.com, don't let the internet scare off potential customers. Improve what people see when they search for your business. And Rimm Kaufman Group, RKG is a digital marketing agency that combines superior marketing talent with sophisticated technology to increase clients' business through data-driven online marketing solutions. So now on to some questions here that we do have. The first one, let's see here. The first one I want to put out to you, Mike, is are there any parameters for how often you should be reaching out on social? Can you be out there too much?

You can do anything too much. If you think about it, ask yourself if there's a limit to how many times you follow up with a phone call or email with a prospect. There is. For some people, as you get to know them, You can say, well, you know, I know I can call him once a week because he actually thanks me for staying on top of it because he forgets. But in social, you have to kind of take an average. So what you would do is the way to find out in a lot of cases is you can look at people who are dropping you. So for example, on Twitter, there's actually a very interesting site called Quitter, Q-W-I-T-T-E-R. That tells you how many people are actually unfollowing you. And you can find out the same thing for a Facebook fan page or LinkedIn company page. You can find out who is unsubscribing you from your blog. So if you notice that people are diving out once you are posting something, there are 2 possibilities. Either they don't like what you are posting or you are posting too frequently. Those are the 2 major reasons that people drop you. From their opt-in. So you can take a look at that and kind of gauge whether you might be doing it too much. But there is no real rule for it. I mean, the truth is that if you have really, really interesting stuff, there are people who blog multiple times a day. There are people who tweet dozens and dozens of times a day. And people don't drop them. In fact, sometimes they are extremely popular. So you really have to gauge how much you have to say and how it will hold people's interest. And that will tell you how often you can do it.

Okay, great. I've got another one for you. This is regarding LinkedIn because we are talking B2B and LinkedIn is really kind of geared more toward a B2B audience. Our question is, because there are a lot of LinkedIn groups, how do you make your LinkedIn group stand out?

Well, I mean, if there are already LinkedIn groups that cover the exact topic that you would want to cover, you don't need to create your own one. Just join that one and start participating. So I wouldn't worry too much about making your LinkedIn group stand out. I mean, if you have a topic that you don't think is being covered well and you start it and you're right about it, that people are interested in it, then you can promote that group the same way you'd promote any other area of social media. So you use all of your platforms and the marketing team can help you with this. So you tweet your blog posts, you blog about your YouTube videos. Go round and round platform to platform to promote things. But don't worry so much about whether you can create a group that'll stand out. For a lot of B2B, you need to create a group because people aren't talking about that deep a subject yet. But if you find that there's lots of LinkedIn groups out there and they're talking about the subjects you want, just join them and participate. Because what you really want is for you personally and your company to become known as an expert. And it doesn't have to be through your own LinkedIn group. It could be through any LinkedIn group. It could be through any kind of social media venue. And so you're really trying to show as a B2B company that you are an expert in solving problems. So showing that expertise no matter where it is will work for you if you follow the rules we talked about earlier of identifying yourself, saying who you work for, saying where you're from. Then all of the things you do will bring credibility onto the company that you represent.

Okay, great. One last one. With regard to creating content, you did mention earlier that for some people it is kind of a daunting task. Is there any type of books that you recommend that everybody try to create? Not so much about them passing someone else's around, but something that should be a written book that should come from them that you would recommend everybody give at least a shot?

Yeah, I think that what you really should focus on are what are the differentiations for your products or services. So what are the places where your stuff really does make a difference? What are the situations in which you are legitimately the right product for people to choose? And then write about those problems. So if for example, I remember years ago when I was at IBM, we had something called blade servers that were very low power. And so what they did was they didn't blow off as much heat. And so companies that had overheating computer rooms really needed to use something like this, because otherwise they were going to be spending loads of money on aircon— on more air conditioning, or they would actually have to get a bigger room, which cost more rent space. And so there were all sorts of ways to solve the problem of too much heat in the computer room. But A really nice one would be to replace the computers with ones that don't throw off so much heat, because that was probably the lowest cost way to fix that. And so because that was a differentiation for that kind of server, then what we did is we wrote about the problem of overheating computer rooms. And we wrote about all the different ways that you could solve that problem, including you could get lower power servers. And so what you want to do is really take a focus that says this is— the same kind of thing I would see in a magazine article. It's something that's objective. It's unbiased. It's very, very helpful and informative. That content will be passed around. That content will be influential. That content will mark your company as an expert in problems. And then people will come to you to solve them.

OK, great. We want to be respectful of everybody's time. We do this each month with our Biznology webinars. So we're going to wrap up. Right now. And thanks to Mike for his great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. We do really appreciate it. If any of you had questions that we didn't have the time to answer, you can email your question to Eileen. That's eileen@mikemoranegroup.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Mike for an answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar so you can listen again and share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar which is Secrets of Social Media ROI Revealed by 166 Case Studies. So 166 case studies in a half hour, how can you beat that? What value? So that's with Rob Peterson. That's scheduled for 11:00 AM US time on October 16th, US Eastern time, excuse me, on October 16th. So thank you very much everybody. We hope you have a great day and we look forward to seeing you again on the 16th of October for our next Biznology webinar. Take care.