Is Your Reps’ Personal Brand Visible Online?

Like it or not, social media is here to stay. And I’m not talking about Facebook. The fact is customers go to a number of places online to learn from and interact with peers and industry experts—discussion forums for industry or trade groups, or online communities in LinkedIn, for example.

This reality leads every company to ultimately ask themselves a hard question: just how much should we enable our reps to interact with customers online?  Should we really enable them to build their own personal brand?

The answer, in short, is that you have to. It’s the only way you’ll succeed if you want to win the information battle. Allow me to explain…

Ten years ago, if you wanted to learn something new, you went to a conference or an industry/trade show. Nowadays, if you want to learn something, you turn on your iPad, grab your smart phone, or turn on your computer, and ask your social network or search for relevant blog posts or discussion groups. If you find something interesting and want to know more about an author, you look them up on LinkedIn and find a mutual connection. A couple email exchanges later, and that “expert” whom you’ve never met has now opted in to your personal network. 

To complicate things, we’ve shifted from a world of information scarcity, to a world of information excess. Given the massive amount of information available today, learning in the social world is less about what to read and more about what not to read. As a result, virtually all of us have developed filtering techniques to screen out the noise, and identify only the most valuable information.

And in the social world, more than anything else, that filter is a recommendation from a person we trust—someone who’s demonstrated good judgment in the past in passing along information.

In the social world, organizations are almost inevitably and automatically filtered out, as they’re perceived to have an agenda. A person, on the other hand, with a demonstrated track record of directing me to valuable information worth my time, is someone I’m more likely to listen to.

Learning in a social world is about people learning from people. Where learning used to be sporadic and impersonal, today learning is ongoing and highly personal.

So, in this world, Marketing is going to have to place social interactions in the hands of actual people, i.e., individual sales reps. And Sales, consequently is going to have to train those reps to use information wisely, to build a community of trust in which they’re seen as an effective judge of everyone’s time, passing on only the kind of information customers are likely to find worthy of their attention. To create, develop, and grow a personal brand that is consistent with the brand of the company.

Now there is a right way and a wrong way to enable your reps to do this. It turns out, there is a LOT of support, guidance, and direction that a company must provide to a sales force. IBM would tell you that you have to go as far as to tell your reps where and with whom to engage, how to engage, and even what to say.

Some industries will be handcuffed by regulations, especially healthcare and financial services. But since we first unveiled the finding, we’ve even found financial services institutions that allow their reps to interact with customers where they learn online (of course within the bounds of what is legally permissible).

But even in non-regulated industries, we see a very broad spectrum of reactions. Some organizations are far down the path of helping reps build their personal brands; other companies view that as tremendously risky. Most companies are somewhere in between—they acknowledge that the world is moving online, and there’s a safe ground where their reps can succeed with a little bit of guidance. But the only way to do so is to enable sales reps to be people interacting with other people.

What does your company think about interacting with customers where they learn online?  Do you enable reps to interact with customers online?  If not, how is your company currently thinking about it?

SEC Members, read the full findings of the study and listen to the webinar replay. Also, see how Eloqua positions reps as influencers within their customers’ social network and IBM arms reps with “social soundbites” that help sales reps engage customers’ social networks.