The New Social Sales Dashboard – How the Best are Measuring Social Sales

3
1757

Share on LinkedIn

The conversation around the efficacy of using social vs. traditional methods to sell is maturing as sales leaders recognize that cold calling is dead while social media offers some of the best tools available to discover and connect with today’s buyers.

The benefits of social selling are compelling. Social selling expert Jim Keenan reports 72.6 percent of people using social media as part of the sales process outperform their peers and exceed quota 23 percent more often. Regardless, adoption of social selling strategies and tools among frontline salespeople is lagging.

A case in point: at KiteDesk, we are wrapping up a nationwide Voice of the Customer survey that measures the pervasiveness of social selling practices. The early results show that while 94% of respondents are on LinkedIn and 67% reportedly use Twitter, only 26% are using social channels for listening and 37% to engage with prospects. In other words, only early adopters are using social media to connect intelligently with potential customers.

That said, I’m optimistic that with the right tools, training and senior-level support, the industry will quickly move from early adopters to the early majority phase.

Innovation Adoption Cycle

A quick Google Trends search shows that interest in social sales is significant, and it continues to trend upwards:
google trends

But interest is just one indicator. There are three barriers to industry-wide social sales adoption. The first is a lack of education: only the minority understand how to get a positive return on the time invested in social media. Second, there are few easy-to-use tools for intelligent prospecting, listening and buyer engagement. And, finally, there’s limited support among c-suite executives, many of whom aren’t social themselves.

So what are best-in-class social sales organizations like Ford Motor Company, GE Capital, Trendr and XO Communications doing differently? First and foremost, they equip their teams with the tools and social media know-how to makes social selling effective. They evangelize success stories across the organization. And they track the reach, efficacy and business impacts that social selling delivers.

Reach is simply a measure of the size of your entire company’s network, where those connections exist and its growth trajectory. See for example KiteDesk’s soon-to-be-released sales connections leader board, which measures the relationship capital of the entire company.

Score Board

I firmly believe that business relationship capital should be viewed, managed, protected and reported in the same manner as any other business asset. The most valuable reach metrics to track include:

1. Total company connections
2. Total direct connections
3. Connections by source (LinkedIn, Gmail, CRM, etc.)
4. Projected growth of connections based on previous growth rates
5. The reach of your content shared and consumed across your company’s connections
6. Reach by targeted customer profile, customer account, geography and industry
7. (Eventually) The value of this reach, based on the influence these connections have on closing sales.

To track the efficacy of KiteDesk’s social marketing and sales efforts, I use:

1. Sprout Social, to measure influence on twitter (eg the total number of followers, @mentions in the last two weeks and number of new followers in the last two weeks), social engagement (an algorithm measuring the number of @replies or @mentions in response to the tweets we send) and share of voice.
2. Salesforce, where we house data about our sales funnel and the sales process.
3. Social Bro, to project the growth of our social connections, analyze the best days and times to engage our audience and identify industry thought leaders so we can connect and build relationships with them.

That said, if you create only one social selling dashboard, business impact should be it. Some of the best Key Performance Indicators to track include:

1. Sales cycle impact.
2. Account penetration. How many people are engaged in the process, their titles and their role in the decision making process.
3. Revenue or profit per sale. Trusted relationships should be valued higher. Be sure to monitor this metric to be sure sales reps are not negotiating away the relationship capital you have built.
4. Close ratio. LinkedIn’s Koka Sexton reports a 2x-4x lift on conversion rates using social.
5. Quota obtained by sales teams and individual reps.
6. And finally – team morale. If your team is more productive AND happier, that is a positive sign that your shift to social sales succeeding.

Aberdeen Group benchmarked some of these numbers in their report titled, “Social Selling: Leveraging the Power of User Generated Content to Optimize Sales Results.”

I recommend comparing their numbers against yours to see where you track.

If you have some examples of dashboards you are using to measure the impact of social selling, I’d love to see them. If you comfortable sharing them, I’d love to help others learn from your example.

Sean Burke
Sean is a seasoned sales and marketing executive who's quickly gaining recognition as a social sales pioneer. His belief that companies should be able to measure and cultivate the reach, efficacy and impact of all social connections has caught the attention of Forbes as well as dozens of Fortune 1000 sales organizations. Sean is also a serial entrepreneur and founding member of 9 technology companies.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Great perspective Sean. The key here might not actually be isolating social in a dashboard, but rather fixing the broader issue of multi-attribution weighting and tracking on efficacy and impact on deal velocity and conversion. In B2B and particularly with complex sales, it’s still really difficult to tell which of our tactics had the most impact on moving a prospect forward.

    Was it the email they just received? The webinar they attended last month? The frequent tweets of curated content?

    Ultimately it’s a soup of all of these, but I bet social has a bigger material impact than we realize today, especially relative to effort & cost. Once we solve that attribution tracking problem, I think we’ll be able to see social in a whole new light, and it’ll be far easier for more B2B companies to put the attention behind it.

  2. Matt, I’m so glad you brought up the concept of a unified buyer’s journey dashboard. Over the past few months I’ve built a view of this in my minds eye. It would be a timeline of events that show the buyer’s journey with acceleration points and deceleration points. Below it would be another graph showing the accumulated customer acquisition costs and variances from the norm. Large Enterprises have the resources to invest in building these type of measurements. SMB’s, however, are going to have to wait until integrations across MAS, CRM and Social are available at reasonable price points.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here