Kirsten Boileau, Director of Digital Innovations at SAP is leading the charge to take social selling to the next level for SAP sales professionals. SAP employs more than 30,000 salespeople globally. Through social selling training and enablement delivered at scale, the impact on the business has been very positive.
In this podcast episode, Kirsten discusses the role of social selling in SAP’s B2B sales environment. Tune in to hear a couple of inspiring success stories and to find out how Kirsten is focused on Training and Enablement to scale social selling at SAP.
On this episode you’ll discover:
- Kirsten started out her career with ten years in inside sales before starting with SAP in a business development role.
- After coming back from maternity leave, Kirsten took on a social media marketing project where she fell in love with social media.
- She leveraged her social media knowledge in her Business Development role which enabled her to hit 500% of her quota.
- Kirsten started in a social selling role as a part of global marketing July 1, 2014.
- With more than thirty thousand SAP sales people globally, she was put in charge of communications, training and enablement, operations, and reporting.
- As Director of Digital Innovations at SAP, her focus now is on training and enablement, with close collaboration between marketing and sales.
- The training at SAP consists of introductory sessions in an online format, as well as face-to-face workshops.
- Enablement is all about change management and SAP is currently focused on scaling their social selling program.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a tool. But, social selling is not a tool.
“Social selling training and enablement at scale is a collaboration between marketing and sales.” @kirstenboileau
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- SAP is focused on using LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Twitter to listen and engage with prospects and customers.
- SAP is working to influence the buyer’s journey, specifically the 70% of research done before contacting a sales person, by sharing, listening and engaging in online conversations.
- One account executive in Canada did everything right… had a good profile, listened, shared and identified key influencers to start a conversation with a C-Level executive. Through social listening, he discovered an L.O.B. application that the executive’s company had a budget for and was able to grow his deal by 50%.
- Brand new SAP sales representatives that were only one or two years out of college took part in a social blitz (rather than a calling blitz) and put almost one million Euros worth of business into the sales pipeline.
- Young talents or digital natives tend to have the lowest SSI (Social Selling Index) and the forty plus segment has the highest SSI.
Featured On This Episode:
- SAP’s website
- SAP on Facebook and Twitter
- Kirsten Boileau on Twitter and LinkedIn
- Learn more about our Social Business Workshop for Business Development
- Subscribe to our Newsletter
- Write a review of this podcast in iTunes
- Social Business Engine on Twitter: @sbengine
- Vengreso’s YouTube Channel | YouTube channel
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Find out more about social selling.
P.S. Our next podcast features Shawnee Brown, Associate Director, Global Social Media Strategy at Merck, The Merck Manuals.Subscribe to our podcast to stay current on new episodes delivered to your inbox every Friday!
