The devil’s in the details — or in marketing’s case, the devil’s in the data. Almost every B2B marketer has a data problem, whether it’s getting the right data on target accounts ensuring data is accurate and up to date or aligning sales and marketing around the same data, the list is endless. And thanks to GDPR, the pressure is on to get your data strategies cleaned up and compliant.
Chorus.ai, a conversation intelligence platform, launched Coaching Initiatives and Scorecards tools designed to help sales enablement leaders provide high-impact coaching to sales professionals in less time.
In the early stages of launching my company Grapevine6, we met with all kinds of businesses to find a fit for our social engagement tool. One of those early conversations summed up the negative perception of social selling. The director of an inside sales team asked, “Why am I paying our reps to spend half their time on LinkedIn when they’re just building their résuméto get another job?”
Management should have known better. Salespeople are driven to generate revenue and don’t spend half their day doing something that doesn’t drive sales. Social isn’t just for wasting time or finding a job. It’s a powerful resource for advancing the buying cycle and is especially effective for considered purchases where trust is key. It’s a Rolodex that’s never out of date, a network you can be in front of 24/7 and a treasure trove of background information on every contact you want to reach.
It seems obvious now, but it took a few early adopters to prove the business case. Global technology giant SAP jumped in early and had so much success that it scaled up to a global social selling program. Building over 1 billion Euros in pipeline across 15,000 salespeople around the world, SAP proved that social selling was a game changer.
Sales wasn’t alone in using social media. Early on, marketing recognized the stickiness of social, which created a huge opportunity to drive brand awareness and more importantly, build credibility. The Edelman Trust Barometer consistently showed that companies had a trust problem. Consumers trusted their friends, not brands. Social marketing was a way to tap into that social proof.
The technology supporting the first wave of social marketing specifically served brands. Highly complex tools sifted through the firehose of social content to identify brand mentions and orchestrate multi-touch campaigns. While effective, these technologies demanded dedicated expert resources to operate, which restricted access to mid-to-large enterprises. There was a gap in the market to make social and content marketing more accessible to individuals and small businesses.
The one-size-fits-all approach to content was particularly frustrating for the sales team. Sales was the most interested in engaging customers on social to build relationships with buyers, but posting the same brand content as everyone else was turning customers off. They needed relevant third-party content that was authentic, helpful and could build a personal brand that buyers could connect with and trust. Employee advocacy tools elevated the company brand, but a new wave of tools was needed to that elevate the salesperson’s brand.
The key to creating an authentic brand on social is personalization, but marketing could never manually curate personalized content for an entire salesforce of thousands. AI changes the game by enabling differentiation at scale. The next wave of social selling tools is here and has content and AI at its core. Tools like Grapevine6 use AI to read through the thousands of articles published yesterday to find the 10 that are most relevant to each salesperson’s brand.
AI also enables scaling regulatory and risk management in social selling. Digital risk tools from Proofpoint, SafeGuard Cyber, ZeroFox and ThetaLake can inspect content, including video and images, for dozens of different types of risk that impact corporate brands. They can also secure social accounts from security risks, like hackers.
As both the market and tools mature, companies that sell on relationships must be actively engaged in social selling. The practice has moved past the early adopter stage and is becoming table stakes for a modern digital salesforce. Today, with the right tools, salespeople in any industry can be empowered to develop an authentic personal voice on social and leverage the full potential of these channels without posing a regulatory or reputational risk to their employers.
Mike Orr is the Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer at Grapevine6, where he is responsible for product delivery. Before joining the Grapevine6 team, Mike spent several years in management consulting, working with some of Canada's marquee brands. He led a skunkworks and project management team at one of Canada's leading digital advertising agencies on projects that won global awards and recognition.
Mediafly’s sales enablement app combines content management, interactive presentation tools, sales readiness technology and analytics with the goal of improving sales effectiveness and closing more deals. Its cutting-edge technology and advisory services aim to guide companies through their sales enablement journey over time.
Mediafly’s offerings include:
The solution is intended for midsize to enterprise sales and marketing teams in a variety of verticals like CPG, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, technology and more.
Mediafly is positioned to integrate with a variety of CRMs and ERP systems, including Salesforce, SAP and Microsoft Dynamics. Additional integrations can be found here.
Mediafly is a SaaS solution that is priced per user. Pricing tiers are contingent on the size of the user base and whether the solution provided is out of the box or includes customizations. Advisory Services are priced per workshop.
Current clients include GE Healthcare, IBM, ADP and more.
Mediafly’s solution is designed to make it easy for reps to succeed in every sales interaction by moving away from a traditional sales pitch to a purposeful and engaging discussion focused on the challenges of the buyer.
Mediafly
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Highspot, a sales enablement platform, raised $60 million in Series D funding. The round was led by ICONIQ Capital, with additional participation from Sapphire Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, OpenView, Salesforce Ventures and Shasta Ventures.
Sigstr, an email signature marketing solutions provider, unveiled a deeper integration with SalesLoft, a sales engagement platform, designed to bring ABM capabilities into SalesLoft email cadences. The integration aims to help sales teams better promote their content and events to target accounts, accelerate the buyer’s journey and better align sales and marketing teams.
Grapevine6
is an enterprise social and digital sales engagement platform. It is designed to provide sales teams with personalized content to engage buyers throughout the customer lifecycle.
LinkedIn unveiled a new homepage for Sales Navigator that is designed around alerts and aims to help sales teams quickly identify relevant prospects and prioritize next steps. The company also released a deeper integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help improve sales efficiency.
Sales enablement is only the first step towards sales success. B2B companies must also ensure that their sales teams are using and fully engaged with the content and tools provided to them. In an interview with Demand Gen Report, David Hood, President and CEO of VanillaSoft, a sales software and engagement platform provider, shared his thoughts on the sales engagement space, as well as how companies can promote change management from within.