IBM had been using the
social media and networking platforms to drive sales for its products and
services. IBM believes the fact that in the current business world both current customers and prospective
customers are aggressively engaging on various social networking sites and the
company had developed a social strategy that is hugely successful. IBM social
media sales strategy started in the 2009 when the company initiated the “Listening
for Leads" program that uses Social Media to help identify opportunities
by sales representatives. Business to
Business sales teams use many internal websites that help them to know more
about the products and updates and also have a blog with RSS feeds connected to
LinkedIn and Twitter through which customers can follow them and maintain
relationship. Additionally inside sales teams were set up called “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. The leads then
transferred to a lead development representative, a telephone sales rep who has
been trained to have a conversation with the lead to qualify and validate the
opportunity and then pass it to the appropriate sales resource to follow up. A
variety of performance were used by IBM to measure success like retweets,
mentions, reach, revenue, and leads, analyze patterns and trends in the data
and with the help of marketing analytics understand how sales were improved. IBM
found that reps with strong customer relationships and social platform usage
had a 2-6% improvement in sales over their colleagues who were less effective.
With the success of
social selling in B2B sales teams IBM extended it to B2C and all sales teams
within the company and equipped them with necessary training so that join the ongoing social conversation and use it to
identify and progress new opportunities. IBM invested in social media training,
toolkits and personalized digital pages to help its inside salespeople generate
leads and manage account relationships. IBM successfully used this strategy in
pushing sales of Public Cloud commerce engine. Three months after launch, 19
per cent of all Public Cloud inside Sales Rep Page traffic could be attributed
to social media activity – and 11 per cent of these visitors clicked through to
commerce sites. Additional results for the first three months include: 55 per
cent increase in Twitter followers, more than 3500 tweets and retweets compared
to less than 500 at implementation, more than two thousand clicks driving
prospects and clients to rep pages and the SmartCloud Enterprise website. The
cost involved in driving this traffic was far less than the traffic generated
through the traditional media and advertisements and the conversion rate into
sales is also high. Inside sales teams also called as virtual sales teams or
remote sales teams within IBM consisted of employees with domain expertise and
specialists that can effectively engage with customers and help them resolve
their problems and queries. IBM inside sales teams have effectively supported
the field sales teams in closing more deals and generate millions of dollars of
revenues to the company. IBM internal social media profile includes 17,000
individual blogs, 1 million daily page views of internal wikis and
information-storing websites and more than 400,000 employee profiles on IBM’s
initial social networking initiative, IBM Connections which is playing a big
role in its social media sales strategy.
