In this episode, Michael Idinopulos, CMO of PeopleLinx joins us for a repeat visit. We discussed the findings in their e-book published in late 2014 titled The Social Selling Maturity Model (SSMM). We discussed the current state of social selling and how their research confirms the journey involves a maturation process for selling organizations.
Here's what we'll cover:
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On This Episode You’ll Discover:
- Only 31% of B2B sales professionals report using social as part of their selling process.
- Social selling requires behavior change because it’s a process.
- The 5 stages of The Social Selling Maturity Model:
- Random Acts of Social
- No coordination of messaging, best practices, it’s every man/woman on their own
- 60% of B2B sales professionals are at this stage!
- Policy
- Policy is instituted mostly out of fear of bad outcomes from social selling
- Training
- Classroom or virtual training to cover the 101 curricula of social selling
- Training starts to impact behavior change and participation rates in social selling
- Integration
- Integration of social selling into the sales process, CRM and metrics
- Optimization
- An evolution from measuring activities to analyzing and predicting future activities based on empirical data that gets captured during the sales process
- An organization that is optimized for social selling success versus individual salespeople who may be optimized
- The antithesis of Random Acts of Selling
- Stage 1 to stage 5 is likely an 18-month journey for most sales organizations
- Behavior change is what creates measurable business results as evidenced by the example Michael shared on the podcast
- “Michael’s One Thing”: “Enjoy your work. Be human, be giving, show your passion, don’t take yourself too seriously even though you take your work very seriously.”
Featured On This Episode:
- Research Report / E-Book: The Social Selling Maturity Model
- PeopleLinx website
- PeopleLinx on Twitter: @PeopleLinx
- Michael Idinopulos on Twitter: @MichaelIdo
- Bernie Borges on Twitter: @bernieborges
- Social Business Engine on Twitter: @sbengine
- Vengreso YouTube Channel | YouTube channel
I invite you to listen to the entire podcast episode above at your desk or on a mobile device via iTunes or Stitcher. This episode was sponsored by Social Media Strategies Summit.
