Revolutionizing Social Selling the IBM Way

In the months since our first blog post on IBM’s social selling strategy, there has been overwhelming interest in the process they use to support reps, while maintaining brand standards.

For IBM the process was important; the growth in social among their customers and the shift in related buying behaviors necessitated the change. We recently had the pleasure of welcoming Doug Hannan and Ed Linde II from IBM to discuss in more detail their social engagement strategy.

IBM uses a deliberate process to establish reps as knowledgeable members of their community, linked to thought-leaders, delivering relevant content to their network that transcends their particular offering. Reps are encouraged to educate themselves about industry issues and trends, the competition, customers’ business issues, and share that information with prospects and customers where they learn. That learning largely comes from connecting, listening, and facilitating—in short, becoming a member of the customer’s community. This, in turn, increases levels of trust and credibility crucial to engaging with customers today.

How it works:

A web merchandiser, working with a marketing manager creates a social message calendar. Reps subscribe to an RSS feed that pushes messages to the reps’ inbox when published. The reps then choose the specific message that goes into a Twitter feeds or LinkedIn status updates.

Reps can simply cut and paste, but most choose to personalize the message. Over time some reps become more involved in the process, following SMEs within IBM and externally to create their own content. In all cases the intent is to help customers learn, regardless of the source, not buy.

IBM has been careful to integrate this process into reps’ existing workflow, recognizing that reps are more likely to engage, and to overcome early resistance. “We made social a part of sales enablement, just like they get a sales kit they get social messages, so they can pick and choose.” (Doug Hannan)

Marketing does a lot of the front-end work of both what and where to post. Using developed listening principles, teams supply reps with information to understand trends, keywords, issues, and give reps names of people to follow. Each rep is also provided a personal page that can leverage marketing-supplied messages and also post personal messages relevant to the customers they follow. Each page also has feeds from other social media sites so posting is coherent across channels.

IBM avoids the issue of spam through discrete customer audiences and careful choice of 3rd party content. Each seller is encouraged to develop their personal brand under the IBM umbrella and join and follow networking groups of interest, so they can respond intelligently to customer concerns.

That said, there is a difference in use across sales roles. Inside sales reps have a higher dependence on LinkedIn, professional networks and Twitter, while brand specialists tend to use collaboration tools and personal pages. For all sellers, it is important to have a positive presence online to engage with customers researching the individuals with whom they interact.

In each instance it is stressed that understanding the sales process and customer interactions is important to align the tools reps require with their roles and responsibilities. “The thing you need to be careful about is not trying to build a ‘field of dreams’, where you build it and they will come. It is important to put the right set of capabilities in their hands that they will actually use.” (Ed Linde II)

IBM uses a variety of metrics to measure performance success; retweets, mentions, reach, revenue, and leads. They focus on patterns and trends in the data and use marketing analytics to understand which sales are likely to proceed quickly. The data has shown that using digital tools effectively has an impact. Specifically, reps that have both strong networks and use digital tools effectively have a 2-6% improvement in sales over their peers who were less effective.

SEC Members, listen to the webinar replay for a full discussion on IBM’s social selling strategy. Also, access the case online and review our most recent study.