In an interview for this month’s Chief Marketer cover story, IBM’s Douglas Hannan applauds the technology giant’s new B2B social selling strategy – created and implemented in partnership with Mason Zimbler.
While other brands fumble to make social prospecting work, our social team has been working closely with IBM North America to equip its 1,700 inside sales reps with social listening tools, network profiles, and a constantly refreshed pool of content.
The result: over 100,000 visits to their sales reps’ pages in the last six months. “We got lots more pairs of eyes reading our content with a very low-cost investment,” says Hannan. “This is definitely working; we’re rolling this out everywhere.”
EMEA is next on the list, with work already well underway. “After conducting a social listening audit for key territories,” says Senior Strategic Planner at Mason Zimbler, Alana Griffiths, “we are now ready to launch the IBM social selling platform in several languages including French and German. This research also informed our strategy, as awareness and adoption rates can differ wildly between territories.”
The work now being carried out across EMEA is, however, built on the same principles that made the North American campaign a resounding success. Predominately, the social selling platform’s ability to integrate with sales reps’ existing work practices.
Sparing them the time it takes to produce content, assets from IBM and third parties are aggregated into a central pool. Alongside this content library, reps are also equipped with ‘intelligent listening’ tools – providing everything they need to enter relevant conversations with appropriate, valuable content.
From here, individual profile pages on Twitter and LinkedIn provide them with a platform to cement their position as providers of valuable information and develop strong relationships with literally thousands of prospects.
As Hannan concludes, “It isn’t social media that creates ROI – it’s the sales team. But social causes engagement and boosts the number of engagements, helping reps extend their networks.”
