Unveiling account-based social selling: insights from a founder's perspective
In today's hyperconnected digital landscape, businesses continuously seek innovative ways to engage with their target audience and drive meaningful connections. One such approach that has gained significant traction is account-based social selling (ABSS). Unlike traditional sales methods, ABSS takes a personalized and targeted approach, focusing on building relationships with key accounts through social media platforms.
For the Straight to Business Podcast, we sat down with Sander Biehn, founder and CEO of Thought Horizon, to delve into the world of ABSS from a practical perspective, exploring its benefits, strategies, and real-life success stories.
Sander founded Thought Horizon in 2013 after a successful sales career at AT&T. His main goal was to help organizations build, manage, and succeed using social selling. Thought Horizon's tool, the ReadyForSocial platform, enables B2B sales and marketing teams to work together to create content and engagement for target markets and customers online.
Read our key takeaways from our interview with Sander below:
How do account-based marketing and social selling go together?
Account-based marketing has grown tremendously in importance. With an account-based approach, you focus marketing on reaching decision-makers at a targeted list of specific companies you want to sell to. That way, even if there are fewer leads, the ones you engage will be much more sales-qualified.
Account-based marketing and social selling are just two sides of the same coin in a certain way. But they are vastly different in another way. How to accomplish each is done by completely different means, which can cause some confusion. "We have salespeople out there doing social selling, but it looks more like account-based marketing. And sometimes we have account-based marketers who are doing something a bit more like social selling," Sander describes.
Many salespeople look to online marketing as an example of social selling. When they see the type of marketing on a social platform, they feel like they must create their own brand and do something similar, but social selling is much more about me-to-you.
How can account-based marketing and social selling go together?
Salespeople need to think about account-based marketing just like they would a sale. "When I first started this business, I had no customers, obviously, and I was trying to get some. And so, I looked around the market to try to figure out who I could talk to and who I could affect from an online social selling point of view," Sander says. He realized that observing a potential client's online activity and interacting with posts is essential. Once he had felt that he had made a connection, he decided to jump in and try to make the sale.
"I didn't handle the interaction, even though he was the CEO of a very large company, any differently than I would have if I bumped into somebody at a cocktail party or a conference," Sander describes. "I just observed what they were doing, walked over, tried to add something to the conversation, and then just made my introduction and told them what I was interested in talking about." Social selling is about building connections and relationships rather than creating awareness or determining a client's willingness to buy like a marketer. This effort to develop and maintain relationships is the essence of what salespeople do.
Determining who you are trying to talk to online is critical. Many sellers out there know who their prospects are already. It is worthwhile for a social seller to think about what their audience looks like whenever they are on social media because everybody out there is trying to get something done by the end of the month or the quarter. Pay attention to your top accounts and must-wins. Those are the people you want to focus on. Ask yourself if you are connected to everybody essential online and interacting with them. Keep those objectives in your mind as you scroll through your feeds and interact with people.
What does the account-based social selling strategy look like, and how does that translate into day-to-day life?
"We meet weekly, me and the entire sales team, and go through a PowerPoint of different accounts that we're trying to go after," Sander says. "All the people in the team have different roles. We have an SDR role; we have more of a relationship role; we have an executive role."
When looking at each account, it is crucial to consider what you are trying to achieve and who will do what. Another parameter to strive after is that the number of people in your organization connected or talking to the number of people in your prospect's organization are equal.
While looking at these matrices from a social point of view, try to assign people to research and find prospects or talk about something they have been doing. Other colleagues can help by congratulating them through social media, sending InMail, or even sending documents or reports we do for people via LinkedIn.
How does the marketing and sales team cooperate to optimize ROI (return on investment)?
"What we try to do is figure out what are the things that we're seeing from a social media point of view," Sander explains. "From a conversation with our clients, there are the pain points, the things we solve, and the reasons people buy from us. [These are] the different stages, as they say, in the buyer's journey that we find that our customers are in."
This information is taken note of, compiled, and sent back to marketing, which helps them build messaging and other content that can help us. Social platforms are used to share that content, as well as just having bits and pieces for the SDR to push over to a prospect when they find someone in that state of the buyer's journey or is that type of buyer. It is just a matter of building relationships and interacting with them.
How can marketers best support their sales teams when using social selling as part of the ABM approach?
One of the things that marketing decision-makers should keep in mind is that 95% of my sellers do okay on LinkedIn by being visible, sharing a baseline of content, and interacting with clients. That should be the objective of marketers regarding their social sellers. There are plenty of things marketers can do from a tooling and content point of view. However, a crucial missing part is having those sales teams understand what you are doing and what they need to do.
"Getting your sales teams activated doesn't mean you need to turn them into social media influencers. It's way simpler than that. It's just explaining what these objectives are, what content they're trying to put out, and in what stages of the buyer's journey so that the salespeople know where it is and how they might use it as they go through social media and create these relationships," Sander says. This is because, again, the conversations they are having on LinkedIn and other social platforms will primarily be about relationships. But when it is time for business, the salespeople need to know that they have this content and expertise they can grab from. To sum it up in one sentence: Don't forget to tell the sales team what you are doing.
What are the critical success factors from your perspective to get through to the senior executives?
While before, reaching out to executives was as simple as just sending a message, attitudes have changed since then. "People learn how to ignore things, especially on social media. So, it leaves an opportunity to do something that is a two-step process."
The first step in that process is remaining active on social media. Think of it as trying to create entertainment for my audience, for my network. While you do not have to spend hours and hours at it, try to remain engaged, interesting, funny, and genuine. From there, watch for the people you are trying to sell to.
"For example, I had a prospect who showed some interest before but wasn't ready to buy," Sander says. "We interacted on one of his posts, and he later messaged me. So, now I'm having lunch with the guy, and I never had to follow up with him at all. It just organically flowed from the relationship and conversation that I had with him on social." The one thing that does not change is humanity, and how we react to one another is extremely predictable. A great salesperson is nothing more than somebody who has studied and understands how humans interact.
Another very predictable thing about human beings is that we see the people we idolize create great traction on social media, and we try to become that person. This mindset entirely misses the point of being a salesperson. You don't want to be that person; you want to be someone who makes or exceeds the quota. Doing that is different than becoming a social media influencer. And this is weird as human beings because we want to be the hero, right? But sometimes, it gets in the way of your mission and what you have set out to do. So, it is essential, as marketers, that if people are doing the job and getting the content out, the assumption is they're making their numbers that we are measuring the effect of this and telling them, they are doing a great job.