Hype vs. Hope: For Salespeople, Is Social Media Living up to Its Promise?

Social media has permeated our personal lives so thoroughly that we hardly notice when a new technology tool chips away a little more of our privacy. But in sales and marketing, we embrace social media as transformational. We’re primed for game changers, and we don’t need to look far for good old fashioned hype in these articles about how social media will transform sales:

For Sales Guys, Social Media is the New Cocktail Party
Five Ways to Increase Sales Through Social Media
How to Tap into the Social Media Phenomenon for Greater Sales and Profits
Social Selling—Building a Web2.0 Sales Force

. . . But is social media living up to its promise?

Double-edged sword

It depends. One statement by Kevin Waldvogel, Account Executive at Image Systems sums up the ambivalence of eight senior salespeople I interviewed for this article: “Social media is great to help people and get your name out there, but not the greatest place to make instant business. It reminds us to listen to people who are in need of help and think about helping them because you never know when you might be in that situation. It’s kind of a double-edged sword.”

One edge symbolizes that social media provides valuable improvements to sales processes, and the other that social media won’t help if it’s not intelligently embedded with more mature, proven sales techniques.

From Waldvogel’s comment, one senses that if the plugs were suddenly pulled on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, life would go on—at least for this group. Social media touches their jobs, but outside of collaborative CRM, I couldn’t find one case of a corporate mandate to use it.

Clearly if there were a mandate, it would have to consider the boundary of social media, a question Jeff Baker, Major Account Manager for Hewlet-Packard asked. “It’s important to expand the list, to expand the footprint” of social media. According to Baker, it’s everything from the directories in today’s cell phones, which can be shared, to electronic community directories. Joe Panella, Sales Manager at Alpha Systems, corroborated Baker’s idea. He has scoped the recipient line of more than one neighborhood community email to find domain names of companies he targets for his company’s suite of data collection products and services. When he finds one, he sometimes contacts the individual. But from there, his sales processes are little changed from the early ’90’s when he joined his company.

Mike Chiappetta, Unified Computing Systems Specialist at Cisco, voiced a similar view. “Selling hasn’t changed in fifty years. LinkedIn makes for great icebreaker discussion, but you don’t know your prospect’s agenda or business problems, so you gather nothing that will help you in a B2B sales process. There are no shortcuts for doing real homework.”

Real homework requires learning strategic and operational pain points that ignite sales processes—information which social networking sites don’t offer. And while the sites offer community, there’s no insight about the activities between community members. According to Chiappetta, “if I spend time on my client’s corporate website or Yahoo Finance, I’ll get more information to help me build trust than I ever can on LinkedIn.”

Social media’s greatest impact results from how it enables internal sales collaboration.

These seemingly prosaic uses of social media are emblematic of the resourcefulness of people who sell for a living. They don’t necessarily rely on sophisticated social networking software to capture, share, and use information about the organizations and people who are potentially valuable to them. They exploit little ways to improve on what they already do. I asked about the most visible social-media created change in their jobs. The prevailing answer? Email—not voice—now transmits an overwhelming majority of prospect sales communication. According to Panella, “I rarely get a phone message, but I touch 200 emails a day.”

Still, I probed for a big social media success story. Panella told me of a large order he sold when he serendipitously discovered a friend’s posting on Facebook. Baker described how he facilitated a sale for HP hardware in Eastern Europe by connecting a graduate school colleague to an Outlook contact who specializes in IT financing in that region. But despite these positive outcomes, neither Panella nor Baker is convinced that the same tools could dependably enable them to repeat those successes in the future.

Internal collaboration

For the salespeople I interviewed, social media’s greatest impact results from how it enables internal sales collaboration. Cathy Cromley, Sales Director at market research firm IDC Government Insights, uses Yammer, which her company implemented to enable employees to share knowledge internally. In an organization with over 1,000 analysts, Cathy would find it overwhelming to identify expertise on high-level topics such as cloud computing or green that she researches for her prospects and clients. But with Yammer, she can find referenceable projects, connections to subject matter experts, and blogs internal to IDC.

Eric Freeburg, Senior High Touch Account Manager with Motorola Enterprise Mobility Business leads teams of up to 70 people on sales engagements for large accounts such as Kellogg, Whirlpool, GM, Ford, Chrysler, and La-Z-Boy. For Freeburg, internal collaboration is mission critical. If he spends time on social networks, it’s managing his team through Motorola’s CRM software, Salesforce.com. “Who has time for LinkedIn?” he asks.

External sales processes

When it comes to client contact, the veteran salespeople I spoke with use social networking tools conservatively, and in different ways. Baker of HP, manages one customer, AOL. “I know everyone I need to connect with at AOL. I don’t do prospecting the way others do.”

Trudy McCrea, CEO of IT Services firm Achieve-IT, LLC in Northern Virginia, avidly uses social media tools, but not to close business. Through Outlook, she maintains a list of target accounts, and uses LinkedIn for an advanced search to uncover who isn’t in her database. She searches for specific information about the kind of people who work for a company, their education, previous company affiliation, and other background to develop a second tier of contacts. From there she might make a cold call by phone or send an inMail. She also uses LinkedIn’s Groups function extensively. McCrea understands the role luck plays in developing new business, saying “I make many unplanned discoveries.”

Unfortunately, social media websites have driven many influencers away.

Motorola’s Freeburg works with between 50 and 300 active customer contacts at a time, but uses one resource—Salesforce.com—for the daily information he requires. He uses LinkedIn mainly to post his professional credentials so he can “present myself without bragging.” IDC’s Cromley thinks of online social networks as a dynamic Outlook application that doesn’t require time or resources to maintain. She uses LinkedIn and other tools “mostly to keep up with where people are.”

Protocol and impediments

This conservative use of social media might result from the fact that adoption of social media tools faces large hurdles—an often-obscured reality. According to Panella, “some employers don’t allow their employees to use (social media) for company purposes. They place restrictions around it.”

Such impediments aren’t fully recognized. In a March 31, 2009 webinar “Hear it Now! Social Selling: Live Q&A on Selling with Web 2.0,” Christopher Carfi of Cerado, Inc. said that it’s important to engage with an influencer in their place first, and that if they have a public persona to use the mechanisms provided. Unfortunately, social media websites have driven many influencers away. McCrea, who regards client privacy of paramount importance, works with a high-level contact at Google who had a public persona, but changed because the visibility brought unwanted solicitations. According to McCrea, “LinkedIn doesn’t shield customers. (My contact) got unwanted email and now uses Facebook. Now, people keep less data on LinkedIn to keep from being found.”

Several salespeople shared that simple business etiquette guided their decisions about how to adopt social media. Cromley believes that using social networks as a prospecting tool is “not appropriate,” adding “I’m offended by someone trying to tap my network simply to hawk their wares.” While she uses LinkedIn to look up information about prospects, she cautions that salespeople “should be careful not to look like you’ve stalked the person.”

And then there’s The Law. A senior business development professional who sells technology solutions to the legal industry said that attorneys must address confidentiality, security, and privacy issues of Electronically Stored Information (ESI), and the public nature of the Internet adds to the complexity of legal issues. Many sources of ESI are discoverable in legal matters —something to think about before you set up your next social media campaign. My contact cited the case in which Whole Foods CEO John Mackey posted blogs for over eight years on Yahoo online stock forums by using a pseudonym. The SEC opened an informal inquiry to see if any insider information was released. Although the SEC ultimately concluded that Mackey hadn’t broken any laws and that no action needed to be taken, ethical issues linger.

Social products and services

If better social media mousetraps exist, salespeople will buy them, and Twitter has made the shopping list of at least two.

If social media hasn’t forced major process changes among the group I interviewed, it has dramatically changed the products they sell. Motorola, long a dominant player in mobile technology and retailing “has always been a strong supporter of social networking and is developing solutions for its clients,” according to Freeburg. IDC has conducted numerous studies of government’s use of social media and has released a case study about how the DC Government used YouTube for procurement, entitled Social Networking and Takin’ Care of Business Every Way. In the legal industry, FTI Consulting broke ground in legal discovery with Attenex, a software application that provides visualization of social networks by tracking email traffic and document trails. In a global economy, this resource provides crucial support to corporations that might need to document connections for a seamy side of social networks—bribery activity.

If better social media mousetraps exist, salespeople will buy them, and Twitter has made the shopping list of at least two. Ironically, the staid legal industry occupies the vanguard of industry adopters. That’s because “congress is adopting Twitter, so attorneys are as well,” according to my legal industry contact. Cromley also considers Twitter a potentially valuable tool. The analysts at IDC use it extensively in the financial services vertical, and the company will expand its use to all six verticals in which it competes.

The road ahead

If the individual insights of these salespeople prove anything, it’s that social media’s promise depends on the ingenuity of the people using it. But there’s another takeaway. Even in the face of market upheaval, and a great shift in information power from vendor to consumer, legacy selling processes are surprisingly durable. We’re a long way from the seismic changes in selling others have predicted.

So where are we on the Social Media Maturity Curve? No one can say with certainty. Some have suggested that we’re at a social-media saturation point. In her recent column, Let Them Eat Tweets—Why Twitter is a Trap (The Medium, New York Times, April 19, 2009), Virginia Heffernan wrote “Twitter may now be like a jam packed, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another’s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists (who coined “ambient awareness”) to describe this sense of physical proximity, but (it) has become stifling to those in the middle of it.”

If that’s the case, in an uncertain economy, should companies take a conservative approach and delay implementing new selling strategies by waiting for the Next Great Thing after social media? No. When deployed intelligently, social media can provide remarkably valuable outcomes. Here are a few points to remember:

• Social media should transform [i]processes,[/i] but not etiquette.
  Technology-enabled sales tactics will backfire unless acceptable business protocol is considered in the customer experience.
• Social media enables business strategy. It’s a set of tools, not an endpoint.
• In the short-term, deploy social media tools selectively. Identify the most persistent selling problems you or your sales team faces, and embed social-media tools where appropriate. Unless there’s a compelling reason, don’t rip and replace.