Adding Social Media into the B2B sales toolkit is relatively new. Here are several examples of how early pioneers are using Social Technologies to improve their business results. I've identified several key messages for sales people, business owners and sales directors from these examples to help you focus on strategies and techniques that are more likely to deliver sales results, and help you make positive progress.

1. Social Media Case Studies
highlighting major B2B trends
Key lessons from the
B2B Social Media pioneers
Part 2 of „Social Media – is it a Game-Changer for B2B Sales?
Mark Stonham
Twitter @MarkJStonham #LinkedWin

3. Internal Collaboration







IBM: let employees set up their own blog and Twitter
accounts to service customers
There was no IBM corporate blog or Twitter account
There were 17,000 internal blogs,
100,000 employees using internal blogs
Up to 500,000 participants in crowd-sourcing “jams.”
Results showed: Crowd-sourcing identified 10 best
incubator businesses, which IBM funded for $100 million.
These generated $100 billion in total revenue for a 10-to1 ROI with a 44.1% gross profit margin

4. Internal Collaboration in Corporates

EMC:

ORACLE: Layered social networks on top of current
B2B social media effort that achieved business
transformation by creating a global company-wide social
community, EMC ONE. This connected and increased
collaboration resulting in double-digit revenue growth in more
than 60 countries
communication channels and trained 25,000 partners, while
reducing costs, boosting satisfaction and increasing PR.

Salesforce.com: Company Communities will be similar
to Communities, except intended for internal use. The social
collaborative and intranet space is booming, with targeted
products from Microsoft 's Yammer, Jive Software, Socialtext,
Igloo and others, like Microsoft SharePoint or IBM Connections.

5. pilot social selling program

7 Public Cloud inside sales representatives

Personalized Web, Twitter and LinkedIn pages

Content Library and short messages

LinkedIn connections from 535 to 3,500 in 6 months

Reach of messaging up from 54,000 to 1.3 million

It triggered 10 orders on the first day a 60-day free trial.

6. 




INDIUM:
A company that
manufactures special
alloys isn‟t sexy;
neither is convincing
14 of its engineers to
start blogs.
It increased leads,
prospects, conversions
and sales by double
digits
Plus it gave customers
the opportunity to
know the company‟s
employees personally.
Exhibition costs down
75%

7. Wild Apricot – 15% uplift in conversions





They tested:
1) a recent user
survey,
2) a link to an online
software directory
and
3) a link to the
LinkedIn product
reviews, along
with LinkedIn‟s logo.
Showcasing LinkedIn
recommendations on
our home page raised
conversions by 15%.

8. 


Started 1998 – now $40m 200+ employees.
Give away free and valuable marketing advice
Offer affordable direct-mail printing for small businesses






Create Compelling Content
Establish your Face and Voice
Build contacts and message them
Join LinkedIn Groups and contribute
Cold message contacts
600 leads, $72,000 business just from LinkedIn.

9. Mark Stonham

£50k opportunities over a 3 month period via LinkedIn







Social Selling bid into major European company
Interim Sales Manager role in Gloucester
LinkedIn Training to Dublin based Call-centre company
Connection with Senior Sales decision-makers
Partnerships – IT and e-learning
Introducers – to help spread the word
Website traffic – monitored via Google Analytics

13. Approaches & Benefits

Decide on Goals and Objectives

Pick a high impact business area

Leverage Customer Success

Learn from a peer group role model

Start small – pilot – test and measure

14. To learn more about
how you can use LinkedIn to
generate leads and opportunities …




Contact Mark Stonham
Email mark@wurlwind.co.uk
Follow @markjstonham
Connect on LinkedIn

Contact Wurlwind

Wurlwind Website




Find and Follow us:
Wurlwind on LinkedIn
@wurlwind_li
@wurlwind_scrm
#LinkedWin