leadgeneration - Bertrand Duperrin on Diigo

Oct

15

2010

Case Study: How IBM Uncovers “Millions of Dollars” Worth of Sales Leads with Social Media

"How successful can a B2B business be using social media? Fairly successful, at least in the case of IBM. We recently chatted with Ed Linde II, whose team is responsible for building Web assets to support the IBM.com sales channel and organic Web visitors, about IBM’s social media efforts and successes. He spoke about their Listening for Leads program, which he says has “uncovered millions of dollars worth of sales leads” so far, and is expected grow even more"

www.emarketer.com/...worth-sales-leads-social-media

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IBM socialmedia listening sales marketing B2B casestudies leadgeneration measurement

In B2B we have a number of Websites that we built for our sales reps where we’ve enabled the reps to have a blog with RSS feeds that are connected to LinkedIn and Twitter. Their customers can follow them where they have an individual relationship.
Some of our reps have Facebook pages also. We also have a program called Listening for Leads, where we have people we call “seekers” who on a voluntary basis go to particular social media sites where they listen to conversations and determine whether there’s a potential sales opportunity.
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- And our individual reps use Twitter to keep their customers updated about interesting news, events and things of that nature. Each rep has their own Twitter account.
- The thing you have to be careful with in social media is you can’t take your expert, for example, the guru of cloud computing, and expect him or her to also try to be a salesperson.
- Smart marketers use the expert to establish credibility, to get the conversation going and so forth. And then maybe you can have the expert point people back to the Website where you can do the promotional stuff and the selling activity
- We measure against number of sales leads identified. And we rate the lead value from those leads. Then the win revenue and win rate. So there are four key metrics—number of leads created, lead value, win revenue and win rate.

Jun

18

2010

A Different Look at Community Management

"Folks are sometimes surprised to learn about how large our team is, or how it’s structured, mostly because they’re thinking of community management as it’s always been. But we’ve got it threaded into our organization a little differently, based on what we think community management should be about in today’s business. Let’s take a look at some of the touchpoints.
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www.radian6.com/...t-look-at-community-management

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communitymanagement engagement process leadgeneration communication collaboration internalcommunication content measurement reporting

Here, it’s about being invested in and part of the community that you’re seeking to connect to in more ways than just being the online host or hostess for your brand.
Make no mistake, community management is part of the lead cultivation process
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- In our business, community is what we call a bridge role. We bridge communication from the community into our organization: sharing product feedback with our product team, trends and industry insights with our executive team, helping get sales and support inquiries to the right place for response from those teams, offering input about needs and overall social media challenges that our customer markets are wrestling with.
- We share that information internally with our teams and management so they can get a snapshot of how the community team is contributing to the bigger picture, and where we can change, adjust, or do things better to have even more impact.
- To us, this role is a hybrid discipline – a mix of sales and customer service and communication – and is really silo agnostic, functioning as a hub for many different disciplines inside the compa
- Our vision of community professionals is that of spokespeople, communicators, networkers, brand ambassadors, and representatives of their community all wrapped into one

May

16

2010

Managing the Sales Process when the Buyer is in Charge

"Here are several tips for building and managing a buyer-centric sales process."

www.business-strategy-innovation.com/...ss-when-the-buyer-is-in-charge

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sales2.0 sales marketing leadgeneration

Teach your prospects. Give them something unexpected. Help them do their jobs, or lead their lives, easier, better, faster. Become a trusted source of information not about what you’re selling, but the outcome it enables and represents
The right buyers want what you’re selling. They want to remain in control. They will make decisions based on their own criteria, not yours
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- You need to become an active part of the community in which your buyers exist, and you need to do it by participating as a peer, not as a seller.
- If you make the sale, provide a product or service worth talking about, enable your customers to become sellers on your behalf.

Oct

23

2009

Social CRM Strategies for Sales

"VP of Sales: “I don’t have enough leads!”

VP of Marketing: “You’re not following up on the leads I gave you!”

Much of this discord seems to relate to the definition of a “lead”. (And no, I’m not going to dive into the even more contentious definitional world of terminology over what we call these things we give to sales). That’s up to each organization to decide – but unless sales and marketing are on the same page, there’s going to be trouble.

Clearly, the sales team is expecting the “lead” to have reached a level of discernible buying interest. We’ve seen that tools like lead nurturing communities with lead scoring can help identify the buying interest before the sales team contacts the lead. I will suggest that in addition to having discernable buying interest, there is another operational difference that comes into play when the lead moves from marketing to sales: the lead is ready to receive more personalized information about the product or services being sold."

corpblog.helpstream.com/...-crm-strategies-for-sales.html

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lead leadgeneration sales socialcrm communities RFP businessprocess

Providing a social business process that facilitates the questioning and sharing of answers is an excellent function for Social CRM, BTW. All of the strategies that relate to Social CRM for customer service come into play for this application. After all, you’re trying to efficiently share the expertise of your best subject matter experts – just as in customer service.
Imagine a living social “RFP answering” community. What if you took every question that came with an RFP and put it into your online community as a question (along with the answer) and the ability for others to ask more deeply about the question, or even to answer and discuss?
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- Clearly some RFP questions would not be appropriate for this kind of treatment.
- Another concept we’ve used to good effect in our communities is that of the VIP Room. We create them for all our customers as repositories for the work products of professional services engagements and training

Sep

22

2009

The Social CRM Virtuous Cycle

In this installment of our Social CRM Blog Series, we’ll be turning from “Why” you should be looking at Social CRM to “How” you should think about it for your own organization. For that purpose, Helpstream developed a concept to help visualize this process—we call the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle:

corpblog.helpstream.com/...social-crm-virtuous-cycle.html

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socialcrm customers customerservice sales marketing leadgeneration awareness

Listening is an essential skill for every business function, and Social CRM gives you an unprecedented opportunity to hear what’s being said—both within your own customer community and throughout the broader Web through social monitoring tools
Getting the word out is always high on the marketing agenda—Social CRM is a helpful vehicle for doing this. Word-of-mouth begins with your customers. It is important to make sure your marketing is delivering the right words to the right mouths;
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- Find a role for other Influencers and interested parties to play in your community. Invite them to join your conversations. Make sure you have discussions and content available that will appeal to those audiences. A proper social platform will give you all the tools you need to create a personalized experience that differs for customers, prospects, influencers and even competitors and naysayers—now you can minimize the downside and maximize the upsides
- Once you’ve got leads visiting your community, it’s time to look for opportunities to close. A properly configured Social CRM system and platform will have afforded you the ability to nurture the leads until they’re ready to be sold to.
- Aside from awareness, sales benefits from the three “R”s that communities can readily offer: references, referrals and repeat business.

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Case Study: How IBM Uncovers “Millions of Dollars” Worth of Sales Leads with Social Media

A Different Look at Community Management

Managing the Sales Process when the Buyer is in Charge

Social CRM Strategies for Sales

The Social CRM Virtuous Cycle

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