Maximizing ROI: Uncovering the costs and returns of social selling in B2B

In today's competitive business landscape, understanding the costs and returns of social selling is paramount for organizations seeking to drive revenue growth and establish a solid online presence. By exploring the financial implications and potential gains of social selling, we aim to provide you with valuable insights and practical strategies to make informed decisions and optimize your B2B social selling efforts. 

Join us as we uncover, together with our expert guest Milan Ruzicka, the true impact of social selling on your bottom line and discover how to achieve maximum return on investment in this dynamic digital landscape.

Milan is the co-founder, CEO global, and CEO Europe of the social selling company ReadyForSocial. His mission is to create the best possible analytics for his clients, making him the perfect expert on our topic. In this article, Milan takes us through the essential costs of social selling and explains the unique ROI social selling offers.

What does social selling cost? 

Our expert advises that the first step in calculating the cost of social selling is to define your program's objectives. Companies vary in their goals, with some aiming for enhanced employee advocacy, where positive sentiments about the workplace are shared. On the other end of the spectrum, some companies have meticulously designed account-based sales and marketing strategies, seeking to integrate social selling seamlessly into their broader marketing initiatives. These distinct objectives require different social selling strategies, resulting in varied investment needs.

Even for companies falling somewhere in between, several additional factors come into play. Firstly, it is crucial to train salespeople on the significance of social media and how to represent the company and themselves effectively. Furthermore, social sellers must consistently provide engaging and relevant content to share. To establish thought leadership, dedicated time must be invested in research and staying abreast of industry trends. Secondly, it is vital to assess the effectiveness of your social selling program. Merely broadcasting content without measuring, reporting, and analyzing its impact is suboptimal. Therefore, combining analytics and sales support becomes imperative, often requiring a suitable platform. Fortunately, the market offers a plethora of platforms to choose from.

With these factors in mind, Milan typically calculates a ballpark number. "From our experience, if you count all these costs in, it's probably somewhere between $100-200 per participant per month." Milan further explains, "It's going to be way less if there are 1000s of salespeople in the program. And it's going to be on the upper side of that range if you're looking at just a small program." 

How can you measure a social selling program's result? 

Measuring results also starts with your objective. Continuing the previous example, Milan and his team want salespeople to project leadership, promote the brand, and start conversations. If this is the case, then the first thing you need to track is participation. How many salespeople are trained and actively participating in the program? This participation drives the volume of content you can push out and engages with the audience.

Another critical question to ask is, what are the numbers they should see? "In our experience," Milan states, "we see that if you have a long-term, active user base of people who are driving your brand on social media, somewhere in the range of 40-60% participation among your sales force." That is a sizable number to keep in mind when designing the program.  

Milan also advises considering its impact on the market and how active you want the salespeople to be. A factor in this is how many networks you can actively play on in B2B social selling. Most importantly, LinkedIn and Twitter, and (if you have holdings in Europe) some other local LinkedIn alternatives. While some salespeople participate actively, rationing content on a profile is good. While an active user is essential, posting multiple times a day or every day of the week can cause an oversaturation of content that doesn't reach anyone. To avoid this potentiality, it is crucial to plan out exactly how many posts you want and how many days you want to post them. 

"Four posts per week, that roughly equals 200 posts a year, and that's a good number, right?" Milan states, "And you can create this interesting flood of content, which is reaching your existing customers and prospects and helping you to start conversations on both sides of that coin—even your existing customers can come back to you for more business if they see that you have a new idea or capability they didn't know about." 

The last thing used to calculate results is engagement. Content pressure fulfills a particular purpose: to engage the audience. Typically, in such a program, you measure how many likes and comments people leave with the content your people are sharing and the clicks on the content being presented. This content often leads to your website, generates new traffic, and starts the customer journey on your digital property. 

"To give you a number to think about," Milan states, "roughly 400 relevant engagements per seller per year is good. That means some of those posts will fall completely flat because it's not something the audience is interested in, or it's just the wrong day, and others will do really well. The rule of thumb we use is two or more relevant engagements on each of your posts, and you're probably doing well." 

How do you handle distributing to the right audiences with your clients? 

There are three ways in which you can go about measuring relevant engagements, and not all of them are necessarily practical. The most solid, reliable, and scalable solution is a CRM integration between the main social network, LinkedIn, and your company. That requires two things. One, you need to be running one of the few systems LinkedIn has deemed as worthy of this integration, such as Dynamics and Salesforce. 

The other way to deal with it is some approximation, which is reliable but less robust than a CRM. "My company deployed it in trial a few years back," Milan explains. "Until we get solid CRM integration, I think it's a good beta; it helps clients get the information they need with a good degree of precision," Milan states. 

An additional last option applies to specific cases where businesses design their social selling program with a limited target customer audience in mind. These cases allow business owners to go with account-based sales because they know their prospects. 

Ultimately, humans must review the content, look at who engaged with it, and provide some overviews. Milan explains that one way to do so is by having a junior person in your organization or an intern look through the posts of participating social sellers. That way, they can identify potential clients and prospects from the engagements on a post and figure out if the target audience is seeing the posts. While you don't have to look at every post, it is essential to look at a sizeable amount of them, as the more posts you look at, the stronger your assumptions and approximations.

Milan also reminds us that content typically leads to your landing page; there, you can capture that incoming traffic and authenticate it with some degree of precision. While this could be considered another field of measurement, the metrics of landing page traffic can differ from that of social selling.

What does attribution mean in social selling, and how do you measure it? 

With attribution, we are moving from solid ground with good hard data points to a field of speculation. Sadly, this means there is no simple formula to measure or calculate the return on investment. Doing so requires you to pinpoint to what degree the social selling program contributed to winning an opportunity next to all your other marketing activities. And this detail can be hard to calculate if you don't have an extensive data set over a long time. 

"My recommendation would be if you are starting, I wouldn't really worry about attribution that much," Milan says. Instead, he advises looking at the KPIs he mentioned, such as participation, views, engagements, and network size, before the program starts and using this data as a baseline to compare to future metrics. "As you get more experienced with it, you will start to accumulate the data. You can look at your baseline of regular performance campaigns on top of that. How does that integrate with your other marketing messaging? And you can play with attribution," he says. 

What kind of ROI can people expect from social selling? 

After all these factors, we are left with one question: Is there a hard ROI in social selling? Milan explains that when he and his team do their calculations, they typically see the ROI fall somewhere in the 5x and 8x range, which is enormous. The number is especially impressive, considering how difficult it is to create a marketing campaign that gives you $5 or $8 back for every dollar you invest. 

But there are some limitations. Milan explains that social selling programs are not always the best option for companies doing smaller deals. He has seen the best ROIs with clients who have six-figure contract values. That's the sweet spot where content marketing and social selling can play well together, help address buyers and win deals. "We see typically that the social selling program helps the client get two additional deals a year," he said.

The good news: There is a hard ROI in social selling! It just takes a lot of calculation and speculation to figure it out. You must consider many details and data to run a successful program for a long time. In addition, Milan says, "Having somebody on your team on your vendor side who can really spend time and understands how these things work together and can go through the data. That's priceless because people will find new ways to improve the program for you."