Oracle Social Media Sales Strategy – Encouraging Sales team to actively engage on Social Networks

Business to Business marketing is effectively being done by companies using the social media platforms and social networking sites.  Social Networking world is chaotic and often lot of unrelated and unwanted content is flowing around and it is very difficult for the companies to monitor the social networking sites constantly and also need to employ resources who not only monitor but also respond on the various social networking sites. Companies have to respond to the customers instantly as the dissatisfied customers may launch a social media campaign and attack that will severely affect the brand reputation and the sales of the company. Oracle Inc. uses the social media and networking sites for increasing the sales of the company. Oracle Sales strategy integrated the social media as one of the key components and the company built a wide presence on all of the major social media networks and most of the conversations and engagements are related to company’s products and services. Oracle went a step further and encouraged its sales representatives to use Twitter to engage with prospects in meaningful, helpful dialogue during the sales process, which is quite a new initiative for a B2B company. Traditional B2B marketing strategies included monotonous cycle of emails, webinar invites, check-ins, blog content, technology updates and hoping the customers will engage. Oracle employees were trained on how to properly use social media which transformed Oracle into a social media savvy company with about five percent of the company’s 23,000 sales reps using Twitter. Oracle training program included large scale training sessions, as well as small support-style workshops and Jill Rowley also produced and starred in an internal 10-episode webinar series that focuses on social selling. 

Oracle Social Selling evangelist Jill Rowley argues that Sales professionals need to understand that buying process and buyers in today’s world are very different from earlier as they are digitally-driven, mobile, socially-connected, empowered with unlimited access to real-time information about business problems, products, companies, competitors — about all sorts of things. Social networks are where the modern sales professional can do research, networking, relationship-building, and can use these channels to earn trust.  And earn trust by sharing content that is useful, that is education and training, insightful, and informative and of value to the buyer, regardless if the buyer buys the salesperson’s product or not. Along with Oracle content mostly related to company’s products and services Oracle also encourages its employees to use a 4-1-1 Rule: sharing four pieces of relevant third-party content for every one piece of Oracle-branded content, plus an offering of lighthearted fare like a cat video or motivational quote. Lot of information is available on social networking sites like LinkedIn, Slide share, Facebook, Twitter, etc. which sales professionals can use for their advantage. Oracle is looking at social media and networking sites as one of the critical component of its sales strategy along with traditional sales and marketing strategies and since social media is also having a significant effect on the way businesses run their operations also means that company has also look at the social selling a disruptive go to market strategy and look to benefit from it and make a competitive advantage. 

Social Media Sales Strategy @ IBM Listening for Leads & inside sales teams

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.