In the business to business (B2B) space the buying and selling relationship has changed.

When was the last time you sat down with your clients and socialized?

The disconnect has been accelerated by access to information via the Internet.  We trust our referral network and contacts in our social ecosystems more than the sales professionals who represent the products and services we buy. Those of us in the sales engineering role, as I was, have had to change our process. Developing social business relationships through social media as well as traditional channels can accelerate the process and we need to consider SocialCRM solutions to help sales professional manage this.

Lets consider Harley Davidson.

Thirty years ago, when I first came to Wisconsin as a young sales engineer for a bearing company, I called on Harley Davidson.  I enjoyed being a resource of information for the Engineering department, negotiated a variety of contracts with purchasing, worked with the manufacturing team on problems with products, and tested new designs with the R&D team. I spent at least 4-8 hours each week working and socializing with a variety of employees.

This time allowed me to get to know them.  I could appreciate the internal dynamics of the people, politics and business.  It also made it fun and successful for both sides. The evangelism  from everyone – engineers to the machine operators – in their support of the product was electric. And no doubt about it, they were fun to be with on a personal level as well.

In fact it was due to that very personal relationship, that I was able to help solve a problem.  A product defect literally shut down the production line at the Capitol Drive plant in Milwaukee.  I was 9 months pregnant(and my due date) but still managed to deal with a problem on the manufacturing floor.  I helped test product to OK  enough to keep them going for the next two days. You don’t do that for just anyone!

Social Selling

Today, the buying-selling cycle is vastly different. Access to information allows the “company” to do their own research for information and sourcing from companies far and wide. Referrals and recommendations come from contacts on the Internet are trusted more than the sales engineers (like me) that visit them in person. I am using social media as a “social business relationship” development and networking tool.  Used strategically, with a plan and business goal in mind, both outside and inside sales professionals can make their time more effective as well.

I am not alone. A recent survey by OneSource shows that sales professional indicate that a mix of social media and traditional information are the most effective in qualifying and prioritizing leads.

Listen, analyze and engage

In today’s companies there are 5-8 people involved in every purchase.  You may not meet them all during your sales visit or ever. Nonetheless, the ability to understand the business, social and political connections within an organization is important. Managing your connections on social sites with a business focus is admittedly difficult from a time management standpoint. There are new tools that are being developed to help.

Just like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems manage business relationships, SocialCRM solutions  manage the relationships outside the firewall in the social space. It could be as simple as a spread sheet or as complicated as a traditional CRM like SalesForce.com. I have been using Xeesm for the past year and recently started using the Xeesm Edge (SocialCRM) solution. Xeesm is one of the leading tools that provides ability to manage the social side of the equation in terms of listening and engagement.  I also  just recently started to evaluate Gist from a due diligence perspective. Watch for a future post on the comparison.

How do you start social engagement?

We need to consider social engagement one person at a time. If I were to apply Xeesm today in a social business relationship with Harley Davidson, my efforts might look something like this this.  Build a Flight (basically a group in Xeesm), add the names of possible contacts within Harley Davidson I find in my social spaces.  This is where I will manage and track my touch points and contacts as I move from stranger, to connection, to opportunity, to proposal and ultimately to a sale.  Over a two week period of time, my  activities might look like this

Day 1 – review all social sites that Harley Davidson as a company is present in. Review all employees I can find in social spaces who are currently employed. Evaluate my connection depth.
Day 2 – Listen/Read several posts by individual people and on corporate blog
Day 3 – Chime in the conversation
Day 4 – Comment on relevant blogs, forums, groups
Day 5 – Ask or answer a group questions
Day 6 – Make a introduction to someone
Day 7 – Suggest an interesting site or post
Day 8 – Invite key contact to my own group
Day 9 – Have a conversation over the phone
Day 10- Bring others to the conversation

The important thing to remember is to care but not sell.  Be social first and the selling comes at the end.

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I am continuing to chronicle my various efforts to use Xeesm and its business applications to replace my last ‘tool’ which was ACT!.  I am a Xeesm Business Partner for the Upper Midwest.

My previous post covered data uploads and some of the mistakes that I made, before I finally had my big initial data upload complete.  There are some additional nuances that I learned after that last post.

Clarifications on Tip 1: Export your contacts into a spread sheet prior to uploading into Xeesm.

• Create CSV file
• Decide ahead of time the category for the contact and create a column for that designation
• Consider contact level (prospect, client, partner, affiliate etc) also add a column
• Create your empty flights ahead of time and grab the identifying FLIGHTID and also add that in a column

• Xeesm filters out the duplicates and non-email address/name combination (does it in the background) – After you upload your file, it show in the dispatcher if the email address is missing or not valid.
• No need for clean up the spread sheet prior to the upload

Clarification Tip 2: Uploaded into Dispatcher

Sample worksheet for prepared for data upload

• You can edit in the dispatcher the email address and update it
• Or just leave it in for cleaning up later
• Duplicates will not be processed, user will only get 1 invitation
• You can edit the notification message or not send it at all.

Last but not least

Clarification Tip3: Once in the dispatcher there are some symbols that are not explained well.

• ? – Contact is in Xeesm but not activated his account yet
• Check box – contact is using and active in  XeeSM
• Blank – contact is not in the database yet, a totally new user.

What was your social engagement this week? Could you have been more productive using a tool like Xeesm?

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I am sharing my experiences with the SocialCRM tool Xeesm over the course of the next few months. I have made a strategic decision to use a Social CRM tool instead of a contact management tool like ACT! (which I actually deleted from my computer).  Perhaps my experience as a BETA tester and a new Business Partner with the Xeesm product will be helpful to other innovative sales professional looking for tools that help with their social business relationships.

This week has been full of success and failures with data entry.  In my over zealous attempts to get all my contacts as quickly into Xeesm, I relearned several lessons my mother taught me that clearly apply to getting started with Xeesm Edge.

Patience is a virtue

Although I could enter contacts one at a time into Xeesm, doing that for over 6,000 contacts seemed monumental. I wanted to use the upload feature so I didn’t have to do as much work.  In my efforts to quickly get  all of my contacts in as quickly as possible, I exported my Gmail contacts and uploaded them into the import tool.

First I was impatient and hit the button twice for submit.  Instead of uploading 6,000 contacts, I duplicated them and had 12,000. Unlike Google Gmail contacts or Outlook, there is no “you have duplicates” so you have to delete things.  Or start over.

My data was not entirely accurate before I started.  I should have at least sorted for those with email addresses and only uploaded those. The data, once you get it into the Contact Manager, is somewhat cumbersome.  It would be much easier to manipulate, delete, correct, etc. in a spreadsheet than online.

Tip 1: Export your contacts into a spread sheet prior to uploading into Xeesm. Only upload those contacts associated with an email address, eliminate duplicates, and edit out extraneous titles and certification abbreviations attached to the contact name.

Something worth doing is worth doing right.

If you have the business version of Xeesm you have the ability to setup Categories and Flights (Groups) of contacts prior to uploading. This is something worth doing before you just upload contacts. Doing a little strategic thinking about how to group contacts, partners, prospects, and clients will be important to spend less time identifying them once in Xeesm.

The categories I set up were: professional association contacts (broken down by group name), clients, partners, teams, manufacturing prospects, professional service firm prospects, Wisconsin prospects, national prospects, Social Media Academy Alumni, Integrated Alliances Certified Trainers, and Xeesm Business Partners.  The flights I created were more granular and focused on my short and midterm business efforts.

Tip 2: By having the categories and flights created, I can now add a column in the spread sheet prior to uploading the contacts.  Now they will go directly into the flight and the category that is appropriate. Definitely a time saver.

Have you created your Xeesm yet? If you are one of my contacts on LinkedIn, search and find your profile, claim it, and add your social links.

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If you are in sales, you of all people know how challenging it is to build the right relationship with those who are buying anything these days. On top of that the reality is that 5-8 people are actually involved in the decision process at the buying end.

On the sales end, generating high-quality leads is the largest challenge in the B2B space according to recent research by Marketing Sherpa. Selecting the right tool to help you move forward in social business relationship engagement is our challenge as business development professionals. That tool is Social CRM.

Buyers have been transformed

According to the 2009 B2B Buyer Transformation Study by Onesource:

• 60% of business-to-business (B2B) salespeople say cycles for closing sales are extending,
• 43% of B2B buyers follow online social media discussions to learn about products,
• 25% of  buyers say social media influenced their selection of a solutions provider, and
• 22% of buyers connected directly with a solutions provider via social networks.

The sales process has changed

I hear sales executives say all the time that social media doesn’t benefit the bottom line. But I know better. Need more data?

A recent social media engagement report on top brands by EngagementDB.com bears this out. The report highlights the engagement these top 100 brands had with social media.  I thought it interesting to note that Siemens and Caterpillar, two large industrial manufacturers placed 48th and 57th respectively.  Manufacturing, while not at the bottom of engagement with social media, is generally thought to be lagging in adoption.  I also noted that CocaCola was sitting carefully between them at the 51st index spot.

“While much has been written questioning the value of social media, this
landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.”

Ben Elowitz, CEO, Wetpaint & Charlene Li, Partner, Altimeter Group

Take an objective view of social media

Here are some of the sales objectives social media can help you achieve:

• Gaining competitive intelligence
• Identifying new sales opportunities
• Shortening buying cycles
• Improving sales success rates
• Increasing productivity of sales staff

If only there were a tool to tap into the power of social media…

Say goodbye to CRM and hello to Social CRM

A few months ago ACT!, my contact relationship management (CRM) tool, began having stability problems. I backed up all of my contact information and uploaded it to Gmail and Google docs for cloud storage. Then I took a serious look at the Xeesm tool (Xeequa is the Software development company) that I had been using for social link management.  and its new Xeesm – Edge social relationship management application. (Xeesm Edge  was officially released in April.)
Wendy Soucie Consulting LLC is a small company, so for me the lack of a traditional CRM isn’t a problem; however, for a larger company, I wouldn’t dump a CRM that you’re heavily invested in. Rather work with an application that can tie in the social component― one that provides the social interaction component outside of your firewall.

Using Xeesm-Edge

April has been a month of building targeted groups for a business development effort within what Xeesm calls flights .  I eagerly joined up with Xeequa as a business partner to provide training on the Xeesm Tool and to help promote the new product. [Disclosure of business relationship]. I have had to adapt my sales process to changes that buyers are making. As the ultimate connecting channel, social media creates its own “World of Mouth” with user-generated content, blogs, and “ask-a-friend” purchase strategies.
I already have two potential clients.  For both, I used social media first (LinkedIn connections), face to face meetings, presentations, and followup within social media to maintain the conversation while it progressed to the proposal phase. They are both in my Xeesm Flight!
So over the next weeks I will share my progress in using the Social CRM application, Xeesm-Edge.

Xeequa is an extremely social company and has―so far― really worked with the BETA group to address our suggestions and criticisms of the new product. I hope that doesn’t change. But, if it does, expect that I will write about it here in my blog.

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Your sales process is old and it sucks

Axel Schultze is a thought leader on social selling and community. Just read this recent post on social selling on his Xeesm blog:

Xeesm Sales Process in 2010

The sales process you follow was developed 20 years ago and it matched with the buying behavior from back then – but no longer today.

* Lead qualification is nonsense because there are not enough leads.

* Cold calling is less and less effective as nobody returns the call.

* You no longer see inquiries because prospects google their stuff.

* Email lands in spam filters and advertising is ignored

* Reference selling is old because clients find the real users of a product themselves in groups, online communities or blogs like this.

* Consultative selling is limited as you are no longer the most trusted person – nor is media or the “independent” analyst

* When a client comes to you – they know what they want and what price they are willing to pay.

via XeeSM.

No more cold calls

I am currently using the Xeesm Pro version to change up my selling and connection process for 2010.  I have first hand experience with traditional selling channels.  Whether original equipment manufacturer, distributor, rep, professional services, technical  consulting, or technical products, over the past 30 years I have sold the product or service, experienced the channel on both ends and then handled the marketing strategy as well.

I have clearly felt the change in the selling process and wondered how to counter the trend of lead generation going down – even as the marketing efforts have gone up.  It  was critical to be comfortable with traditional networking and understanding how to participate and engage with people in the important groups, not just join to get names.  Even in that scenario trade and association members are aware of this tendency, which has driven them to caution every speaker at a meeting not to do any “selling in the presentation.”

The new social  sales process recognizes the change in how the consumer/buyer educates himself before they make the first call. You must provide more value and knowledge to the relationship first.  I have seen how this process can be managed with Xeesm.com.

So over the next few months, I will report on my progress and share with you my experience on social selling with applied social media.

What action will you be taking to change up your selling process?

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