Is there still one decision-maker or is it a consensus decision?

Is there still one decision-maker or is it a consensus decision?

Selling is different today than it has been in the past. There is a dramatic shift. I see the change as being more difficult to find and connect with decision makers through traditional routes. Email is one of these road blocks; it’s less responsive and there are dramatic shifts in the way it is being used. Also different is how information is making it’s way to the decision maker; the catalyst that is forcing these changes is the abundance of information.

Google indexes two billion websites — that’s twelve times the population of the world. A lot.

This is changing the behavior of your buyers. At one time, the biggest currency that a sales person had was information. That is why buyers would call us. They would say, I want to know about your products, want to know about this or that. Now what are they doing? They use a search engine and research about your brand, your company, and who you are.

A huge percentage of their decision has already been made before they engage with you. They are doing this online and not connecting with you to find out more. So the other thing information affects is abundance – the amount of information is so great that people aren’t sure they are getting the correct information. They think they are, but to check, they ask their friends, colleagues, trusted sources, and anyone who can bring clarity to their question.

The decision-making process has also changed regarding this question: Is there still one decision-maker or is it a consensus decision?

So we have massive amounts of information that is the meteoric rise of a grand thing called social media. How do we deal with this? People are social animals by nature — they want to connect, understand, know, and relate to others.

Here are some amazing statistics (taken from an event I attended):

Ninety-six percent of the online population in the US used social media in January 2012.
Time spent on social media is three times that spent on email.
Fifty-three percent of active social networkers follow a brand but only thirty-two percent follow a celebrity.

The use of and need for email is changing greatly. One generation of users does not want email; certain education facilities no longer provide email accounts to students. To this younger generation, email is a thing of the past. Social media is change and it’s happening now.

Another wild statistic is that 294 billion emails are sent each day. It is believed 90 percent of them are spam.

Other aspects to think about:

Social media is an important channel.
Social media is used more than email.
Following a celebrity is nascent and already insignificant

The three big players in social media are FaceBook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. All of them have done tremendously well and are very successful. They each service separate markets, which is why they have done so well. Twitter is a fantastic broadcast system and should be used in your sales process for getting the messages out. LinkedIn focuses on your professionalism. So if you’re selling business to business, this is the place you need to be. It services the professional and not seen as a typical social media platform but a social networking platform. All said, together they can service industries very well depending on what your message is. You need to think content and context; whichever medium you are going to use to send your message is very important.

Let’s talk about LinkedIn for a moment. The conversion rates of individuals successfully using LinkedIn is very high. Recent figures from LinkedIn demonstrate that the success rate is three times that of other platforms. LinkedIn has some great tools that can help you capitalize your network.

Social selling. I hope many of you have heard of the phrase. Social selling is taking the forces of social media and the new buying tactics, and blending them. Taking social media channels and being able to reach out and provide information to your buyers will be key in this new era. The flip side to social selling is social buying, which your buyers are already thinking about and doing, in your marketplace.

What I want to do is give you a framework of how to think about these aspects in social selling and how you can use social media to your advantage.

To be continued…

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Not when… but how to do social business

The data is clear: social business propels results. Fifty seven percent of companies who invest in social business outperform their peers. They see real business value, whether it’s a 25% increase in business or a 20% drop in the time it takes to manage projects.

Social business is no longer “nice to do,” it’s a necessity to survive today’s volatile business climate. According to Forrester Research, spending on social business software is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016.

So what does a social business look like?

A social business isn’t just a company that has a Facebook page and a Twitter handle. A social business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both internally and externally.

There are three distinct characteristics of a social business:

Engaged—deeply connecting people, including customers, employees, and partners, to be involved in productive, efficient ways.
Transparent—removing boundaries to information, experts and assets, helping people align every action to drive business results.
Nimble—speeding up business with information and insight to anticipate and address evolving opportunities.

Social Business is about moving beyond the social media tools you’re currently familiar with to unlock the potential of the people and gain a competitive advantage. Today, by combining social networking tools—internally and externally—with sophisticated analytic capabilities, companies are transforming their business processes, building stronger relationships among their employees, customers and business partners and making better decisions, faster. This is what makes a social business—embracing networks of people to create new business value and opportunities.

What other charateristics do you think there are for a social business?

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What do today’s CEO’s think of Social Media? [Infographic]

Category: CEO, IBM, LinkedIn, Social Media, Twitter | No Comments »

If You Don’t Have a SOCIAL CEO, You’re Going to be Less Competitive

Guest Post: Mark Fidelman

IBM STUDY: If You Don’t Have a SOCIAL CEO, You’re Going to be Less Competitive

The list of the world’s CEOs regularly includes celebrities, billionaires, big egos, risk takers, and failures. What it does not include are social media experts; but that’s about to change. When IBM (NYSE: IBM) conducted its study of 1709 CEOs around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years.

Why? because CEOs are beginning to recognize that using email and the phone to get the message out isn’t sufficient anymore.

The big takeaway: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers and employees will enable the organization to be more adaptive and agile.

“As CEOs ratchet up the level of openness within their organizations, they are developing collaborative environments where employees are
encouraged to speak up, exercise personal initiative, connect with fellow
collaborators, and innovate,” the IBM study concluded.

Simply put, CEOs and their executives set the cultural tone for an organization. Through participation, they implicitly promote the use of social technologies. That will make their organizations more competitive and better able to adapt to sudden market changes.

Other key findings of the study include:

The study reveals that CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos that has characterized the modern corporation for more than a century.
Companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness – often characterized by a greater use of social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation – as a key influence on their organization.
While social media is the least utilized of all customer interaction methods today, it stands to become the number two organizational engagement method within the next five years, a close second to face-to-face interactions.
More than half of CEOs (53 percent) are planning to use technology to facilitate greater partnering and collaboration with outside organizations, while 52 percent are shifting their attention to promoting great internal collaboration.
Championing collaborative innovation is not something CEOs are delegating to their HR leaders. According to the study findings, the business executives are interested in leading by example.
CEOs regard interpersonal skills of collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent) as key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment.
The trend toward greater collaboration extends beyond the corporation to external partnering relationships. Partnering is now at an all-time high. In 2008, slightly more than half of the CEOs IBM interviewed planned to partner extensively. Now, more than two-thirds intend to do so.
CEOs are most focused on gaining insights into their customers. Seventy-three percent of CEOs are making significant investments in their organizations’ ability to draw meaningful customer insights from available data.

I’ve often held IBM as the best example of a Social Business and a company to emulate rather than Apple. I believe this study and the analysis behind it, reinforces that view.

The IBM study shows that CEOs and the companies they manage must constantly evolve to stay competitive. Partners, suppliers, employees and customers want CEOs to communicate with them on a personal level to build trust and to help align them to the organization’s strategy. There is a lot at stake here. And if CEOs continue to hide in their Ivory Towers under the guise of some old command and control mentality, the next chapter in their career might be written somewhere else.

No one wants that.

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Why Eminence Matters for Sellers

In this digital age sellers now have to take on an additional job role and become a marketeer. Creating a personal brand that raises your profile above the rest, sharing your expertise and knowledge as well as leveraging the online world to ensure that you become identified as the eminent leader in that field are all important.

So why does eminence matter?

You have called, written, called again – you believe that the potential customer should be interested in talking to you, but they never return your call. Why?
Understanding buyer behaviour is key; they have limited time and will have recognised sources of influence. It may be their boss, their colleagues or their peers – whoever it is; they are listening to them – not you.
To become heard you have to start seeing their position from their world. This was summed up by a CEO who said:
“I don’t have any time to listen to a sales pitch … but I have all day to talk to a peer I can bounce ideas off and get real insight from. If more salespeople made the type of call where I’d be willing to write a cheque for their time, they’d have a better chance of winning contracts. The product they’re selling is less important than knowing you’re in expert hands.”
The challenge you have is that the CEO doesn’t want to buy a product or service and probably isn’t the slightest bit interested that you have ten percent off today. Unless your story resonates with their challenge – then in most cases you are wasting your time.

Then we get to the second part of the challenge – why should they listen to you?

Influence through association

Perhaps the direct approach is not always the best. If we want to influence the CEO but they are not listening to us, then we need to work out WHO they do listen to. In such circumstances understanding their ‘web of influence’ may well give us a clue as to who we should use as a conduit for our message. Understanding where buyers get their influences from changes the communication process and the target audience. In your industry who are the influential bodies and why?
Perhaps the CEO is interested in thought leadership and would be interested in your companies position in a particular area. Create a web of influence and work out who you should be targeting and with what message.

Now we get to the nub of the issue.

If you are not known in your industry or product area then why should someone listen to you? You may well have the thought leadership, expertise and the skills BUT unless you are prepared to share those thoughts and become known for them, then nobody will be listening.

Being known for your skills and opinions is eminence and that is why eminence matters.

What are your thoughts?

Category: Blogging, Careers, LinkedIn, Sales, Social Media | No Comments »

IBM set up first social business center in Singapore

SINGAPORE–IBM signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National University of Singapore’s Institute of Systems Science (NUS-ISS) to set up its first ever Center of Excellence (CoE) for enterprise social business here. This would help bring up Asia’s level of social business adoption to match that of Europe and the United States, one executive says.

Lim Swee Cheang, director of NUS-ISS, said the CoE will be operational in May this year, and will target local senior business executives to educate them on the benefits of tapping on social technologies within their organizations.

The Center’s goal will be to help companies here evolve into social businesses by advising them on the roadmap and strategy, as well as conduct research on the topic, added Christopher Chia, chairman of the NUS-ISS management board. Both executives spoke during a press briefing held in conjunction with IBM’s Business Gets Social 2012 event on Wednesday.

Both parties declined to reveal how much was invested to establish the CoE, though.

In terms of content, the CoE will offer two courses initially, said Lim. These include a half-day seminar on the benefits of social business, as well as a two-day course meant for companies interested in implementing social technologies. The longer course can also be customized for specific businesses as each organization would have its particular needs, he added.

The director said the “cautious” initial estimate for enrolment is between 100 and 300 participants for the first year. However, the Center may open up free courses to provide for more participants if the need arises, he said.

Lum Seow Khun, business unit executive of ISV (independent software vendor) and developer relations at IBM Singapore, added the company plans to conduct one session per quarter in the beginning and increase the frequency based on take-up rate. She added both parties would co-conduct the lectures, and IBM will provide free software and course ware.

Asia “ripe” for social business
Sandy Carter, vice president of social business sales and evangelism at IBM, pointed out that with social media expected to create more jobs than the Internet did, it is good for those in Singapore to be trained early in social business.

The executive, who was a keynote speaker at the event, also said that while the region’s adoption of social business is slightly behind that of Europe, which leads the pack, and the United States, companies here are “ripe to catch up” due to the high personal social media usage. This is because users will look to bring social technologies they use frequently into the enterprise arena, she explained.

Indonesian restaurant chain Bumbu Desa, for one, has adopted Big Blue’s SmartCloud Connections collaboration tools to enable franchise holder to discuss store strategies on a single platform, noted Christopher Blake, Asean regional executive for collaboration solutions at IBM, during the briefing. Besides internal collaboration, the platform can also be opened to external parties such as food critics to join in the conversation, he added.

Zooming in on Singapore, Carter cited a 2011 study conducted by a GlobalWebIndex that ranked the city-state’s social network penetration higher than the global average.

Additionally, users here have moved beyond using social media for personal communication and on to creating online communities. These factors mark Singapore out as having the potential to be a proponent for social business, she said.

What advice are you looking for on becoming a Social Business? Leave a message or feel free to reach on Twittter or LinkedIn

Inside the Brain of a CEO [Infographic]

In these difficult times, CEOs are turning to partnerships and technology to help them overcome the challenges their organisations are facing. CEOs that drive their organisations to innovate, collaborate and understand their customers better will be well-placed to achieve success, both now and in the long-term.

UK lags behind in organisational ‘openness’, holding businesses back from collaboration, finds CEO study. FULL ARTICLE

Collaboration is key to employee success FULL ARTICLE

Category: CEO, IBM, Social Business, Technology | No Comments »

What Does Social Media Success Mean to Your Business?