How to Leverage Behavioral Science Insights for Direct Mail Success
The Future of Social Selling
1.
2. Sachin Rekhi
Head of Product Management
LinkedIn Sales Solutions
The Future of Social Selling
Steven Kaplan
Product Manager
LinkedIn Sales Solutions
3. %
Of B2B Buyers use social media to
make purchasing decisions
5. More likely to engage with sales
professionals via warm introduction
than cold outreach
6. What is Social Selling?
Establish a professional presence on LinkedIn
with a complete profile
Prospect efficiently with powerful search and
research capabilities
Discover and share valuable information to initiate
or maintain a relationship
Expand your network to reach prospects and those
who can introduce you to prospects
Build strong
relationships
Engage with
insights
Find the
right people
Create a
professional brand
7. Why Social Selling Matters
45%More opportunities
SSI leaders create 45% more
opportunities per quarter than SSI
laggards.
51%More likely to hit quota
SSI leaders are 51% more likely
to hit quota than SSI laggards.
9. 3X more likely to go
to club
Go to Club
Sales Professionals Who Are Social Selling
• Finished year in the Top 10
• Leaders Club for 6 months
“LinkedIn has changed my life. It’s enabled me to excel in a
world where I otherwise was a complete underdog. It’s
given me a voice, a reach, and a platform to tell the world
why I matter!”
SSI
87
11. Top Social Sellers Here Today
1. 87Sulemann Ahmed, Digital Advisor at Servo Annex
2. 84John H Bell, VP Enterprise Digital Marketing at Travelers
3. 71Stephen B. Dunbar III, J.D., Managing Partner at AXA Advisors
4. 68Tina Tse, Director of Marketing & Communications at MacKay Shields
5. 67Brendan Kenalty, AVP – Digital Properties at Manulife Financial
12. Connect the world’s buyers and
sellers to build relationships.
LinkedIn Sales Solutions Mission
13. Find the
right people
350M +
members, and 2 new
every second
2B +
Members updates
per week
Stay informed Build trust
Billions
Of professional
relationships
So, enough about LinkedIn. Why are we here today?
If you think about buyer and seller relationships…it used to be very 1:1, face to face relationships where sales reps were limited to the ‘who they knew’ and referrals from existing customers. With the advent of technology like the internet, buyers can find lots of information about what they need. Buyers are increasingly relying on the internet to do their own research. Technology also made it easier for sales professionals to bombard buyers (with emails, with phone calls). However….we’ve veered too far. Let me share with you a staggering fact…
50% of B2B decision-makers /influencers say they aren’t the right person to contact about new business when sales reps contact them. That’s 1 out of every 2 people.
I want to take a step back and start thinking about…how…the dynamic between sellers and buyers have somewhat changed. [key takeaway: we want to bring 1:1 relationships to scale]
Family-run company
As companies have become less intimate and less personal, companies realized that, in order to compete, they had to try to maintain the level of trust that a family-run company had with his or her customers. That led to massive investments in brands – Wal-Mart, Oracle. They have built brands so that you know they’re high quality, reliable, etc.
Every customer couldn’t know and trust the owner but every customer could know and trust the brand, the thinking went.
But in the new economy, constant connectivity, someone somewhere knows someone somewhere…and this leads…to personalized relationships…done at scale.
Recall that buyers have access to the same information that you do on the Internet to find information about products/services. They need you to help them solve business challenges and problems that arise. They need you to educate them on what’s new in the industry and what their competitors are doing.
With so many offers to choose from, we found that B2B buyers were 5X more likely to engage with sales professionals who were introduced to them through someone in their professional network.
It turns out that both social selling and Sales Navigator subscription has significant impact on pipeline and revenue growth.
If a sales professional boosts their SSI by 20%, they will see 6.8% pipeline growth and 20.4% revenue growth. This is massively more than if the same sales professional used LinkedIn.com.
Make Club
Caroline Hunssinger from Comcast
Carrie (Caroline)’s story is truly transformational. She joined Comcast in 2011 after turning 25 years old with minimal sales experience. Her peers all had vast internal and external networks, partners and old customers. It took her 8 months to make her first measly sales. 1.5 years into Comcast, she was on the performance improvement plan. Enter LinkedIn.
She began by creating her own brand. She jazzed up her LinkedIn profile, included a fun new picture, requested endorsements and recommendations and started flooding people whom she thought would make sense to connect with. She grew her LinkedIn network of connections in 1.5 years from about 500 people to about 3500 people and growing. She made it her personal mission to have people associate her name, face, and personal brand with Comcast, Fiber, and a fantastic customer experience. She posted relevant material, industry related articles/news, powerful/moving business and motivational quotes, and consistently “liked and shared” other people’s posts to help bring them exposure as well.
Within one month of using social selling, she got herself off the performance improvement plan- saved herself from being fired… BLEW OUT HER QUOTA 190% for the month… She went from being in the bottom 3 to finishing the year #8 in the top 10. She now gives month to month training seminars by the request of her Sales Director for new and or struggling reps in the subject of social selling.
