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1. BLUEPRINTS FOR
SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS
BLUEPRINTS FOR
SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS

2. Blueprints for SocialSelling Success | II
Our customer success organization at
LinkedIn works with sales teams from
companies in a range of industries around
the world that have chosen to enhance their
more traditional sales methods with social
selling best practices.
To help these sales teams kick-start their
social selling journey, we assist them in
creating a plan called a “Blueprint for
Success.” While the plan details differ based
on each sales team’s goals, three themes
remain constant:
• Awareness
• Education
• Reinforcement
Build on a solid foundation
Let’s think about these concepts in terms of
creating a blueprint for a house. Creating aware-
ness -- and with that, securing executive spon-
sorship -- is the foundation of building a healthy
and sustainable social selling program.
Next is education, which is like the walls and roof
of the house. With the right structure through
effective education and learning, your sales
professionals will embed social selling into their
daily sales workflow. Finally, reinforcement --
and with it, accountability -- can be considered
the insulation. Insulation is the reinforcement
that makes a house livable in the long run.
Transforming a sales team into a social selling
organization requires a thorough yet flexible
adoption plan. To that end, reinforcement is
critical for driving accountability.
When architects get the blueprint right, the
end result is that they achieve their vision of a
beautiful, custom-built home. The same is true
of a blueprint for your social selling program.
If we believe social is going to be part of a the core fabric
of business, how do we seize this opportunity?
BLUEPRINTS FOR SOCIAL
SELLING SUCCESS

3. Blueprints for Social Selling Success | III
Bring your social selling vision to life
Your blueprint can bring your vision to life.
When the blueprint is executed effectively,
you end up with the desired result. What is
the vision for your sales organization? What
does the ideal sales organization of the
future look like?
Here’s what we see when organizations fully
embrace social selling:
• The best and brightest talent wants to
work for you because they no longer have
to make cold calls.
• Instead of counting how many outbound
calls their reps made, your sales manag-
ers are focusing on how many valuable
relationships their reps have established.
• Rather than dread conversations with
your sales reps, your prospects and
customers look forward to chatting
with them because they offer valuable
insights.
Becoming a social selling organization is a
gradual transformation. Most teams begin
by integrating social selling best practices
into their current practices.
How long will it take to build your house? If
you have 10 sales people, you might be able
to implement social selling fundamentals in
a few weeks. Of course, it will take longer
if you have 15,000 reps. Regardless of
the size of your team, the same guiding
principles apply: you need to develop a plan
incorporating awareness, education and
reinforcement.
The main objective of your plan is to
empower people to adopt social selling.
Awareness, education and reinforcement
are the fundamentals, but none are a one-
time exercise. Get executive sponsors
involved early and often. Think about how
to educate your teams in a scalable and
effective way. And tap into your sales reps’
competitive nature and create a culture
of recognition to hold your sales teams
accountable for adopting and practicing
social selling behaviors.
Think about where your organization is
along the social selling journey. If you
haven’t visualized what you want your sales
team to look like, take some time to do
it. Then start developing the first version
of your blueprint or tweak your existing
plan to optimize your chance of success in
transforming your sales reps into world-class
social sellers.
Here’s how two sales leaders applied these
concepts to drive social selling awareness,
adoption, and results.
BLUEPRINTS FOR
SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS

4. Blueprints for Social Selling Success | IV
My first piece of advice when transforming your
sales organization is to find your evangelizers.
While we didn’t have a full-blown social selling
initiative, we purchased LinkedIn Sales Navigator
to help a subset of reps identify influencers in
their deals and find NetSuite champions who had
moved to new companies. And because these
reps were happy with Sales Navigator, we then
had evangelizers planted across all of our offices.
Based on this success, we quickly rolled out to our
other sales teams.
My second piece of advice is to dedicate
resources. Traditional sales tools that allow you to
build a list of companies are tough to keep front
of mind with sales reps. We saw Sales Navigator
as a tool that would influence and change the way
we do business because it allows reps to be more
productive and opens up new selling avenues.
But to use Sales Navigator effectively, reps need
to understand how to optimize their LinkedIn
profiles, how to ask for introductions, how to
search, and how to find multiple people in an
organization. To succeed, you need to designate
at least one person who has bandwidth to roll
out Sales Navigator and spread awareness of the
product.
My third piece of advice is to continually
communicate and provide visibility into what
is happening with Sales Navigator. We invited
LinkedIn to participate each year in our sales
kickoff, which has helped us tremendously
in driving awareness. We also regularly work
LinkedIn tips and tricks or contests into our
monthly global sales call. And we keep LinkedIn
and our other tools front of mind during our
sales planning or when we change sales policy.
When it comes to providing visibility, we generate
customized monthly reports for our vertical
leads and front line sales managers, showing
their individual reps’ usage of LinkedIn. With
this information, our sales managers can have
productive conversations with their reps around
pipeline and prospecting.
Finally, my last piece of advice is to secure
executive sponsorship. One way we built
executive sponsorship was by running a contest.
We had done a fair amount of education on how
to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. But adoption was
spotty when it came to how many companies and
contacts the sales team had saved. I proposed a
contest where reps would have a short window
of time to save their accounts to LinkedIn.
The winners would be drawn from those who
successfully added all of their accounts and would
get a personalized recommendation on their
LinkedIn profile from our president. The president
helped me recruit the top worldwide sales VPs
to participate, giving us 18 sales leaders focused
on this initiative. In the end, over 85% of our reps
fully participated and the other 15% participated
on some level. That gave us thousands more
companies and contacts to track than we had just
two weeks before, and has driven 2015 pipeline
and revenues.
ASK THE EXPERT:
AVP, Sales Productivity, NetSuite
BLUEPRINTS FOR
SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS
JOAN FITZPATRICK
Note: This story was based on Joan's presentation at LinkedIn Sales Connect

5. Blueprints for Social Selling Success | V
2012-2013 was a precarious time for the
Sacramento Kings. With the threat of the team
moving to Seattle, many fans disengaged and
many of our sales reps took positions with
other teams.
Our entry to social selling was the result of new
ownership taking over in the spring of 2013.
The new owners were Silicon Valley folks who
believed sales 3.0 tools would solve several
issues:
• Better target our fans and reconnect
with the market
• Get more done with fewer people
• Rebuild our staff, offer new tools to existing
staff, and help our reps scale faster
So we embarked on Sales 3.0, which revolved
around three pillars:
• Social selling
• Accelerated technology
• Collaboration
And LinkedIn Sales Navigator was perfect for
getting us there.
Across our social selling program, we focused on
creating a culture of recognition and celebration
around talent. First, we emphasized how we
were investing in talent—both current and future
employees. We promised our reps they would no
longer make cold calls if they used Sales Navigator.
It was a big boost to retention and recruiting.
We also shared wins and built a team selling
environment. In our daily huddles, we highlighted
social selling wins. When reps made deals through
LinkedIn, we’d ask them to describe their process:
how they found the right people, what search filter
they used, and what email they sent. The idea is to
help your teammates win because you never know
when they might be talking to someone who can
help you with a sale.
We used gamification as a reinforcement
mechanism. We tracked Sales Navigator stats in
Salesforce and monitored InMail activity. And we
created leaderboards and correlated Social Selling
Index (SSI) to top performers -- and integrated SSI
with Salesforce. Managers can access dashboards
and reports in Salesforce to see ROI and sales reps
can use these to demonstrate their wins.
When you celebrate, recognize and gamify
the right behaviors, you see a dramatic culture
shift. And for us, that has translated into a top-
performing sales organization. Over the last few
years, we’ve seen a 17% jump in attendance, the
highest in the league. And we are now number
one in new season tickets sold.
Social selling and Sales Navigator have changed
the way we sell. Along the way, it’s important that
executive leadership and owners recognize and
celebrate those engaged in the right behaviors
-- and do so daily. Remember, it takes 30-60 days
for something to become a habit. You can’t just
drop in a new tool and expect people to use it.
Telling stories, holding huddles, creating public
leaderboards, and integrating with existing tools
will speed adoption and get your organization on
a new track.
BLUEPRINTS FOR
SOCIAL SELLING SUCCESS
ASK THE EXPERT:
Vice President, Ticket Sales & Service, Sacramento Kings
PHIL HORN
Note: This story was based on Phil's presentation at LinkedIn Sales Connect