The Role of Social Media in a B2B Sales World

I noticed a really interesting post over on SalesBlogcast – Doyle Slayton’s sales blog. The post introduced a question from a member about the emergence of blogs and social media for sales professionals.

I posted a response as this is a really interesting issue and one that I’ve been spending quite a bit of time researching and trying to get my head around. So much so that as I’m now in the US for 2 weeks, I’ve made contact with a number of thought leaders in this space to try and get a better feel for this and what we should all be doing.

Personally I’m very excited about this direction and I’ve been talking to our customers and prospects about this trying to get it onto their radar (with some success). I love researching my prospects and customers and using this information to give myself an edge – I guess that’s come from years and years of competing against much larger foes (like Oracle and SAP) – timely relevant knowledge was our competitive advantage and we’d spend hours looking for facts and building this information into knowledge. What we’re seeing now is the power of this technology to do that for us. It’s like an application of neural network technology in a way that sifts and organises information en masse.

Interestingly, I feel we’re in phase 2 of this revolution. The first phase started when Google really got going. Google started the information overload Tsunami and has now swamped us all. What we’re seeing now with solutions like Avitage, MindTouch (their Dekki for CRM is quite amazing), Mzinga, Brainshark. These guys and a few others are really pioneering the business oriented application of Web 2.0

Where it then gets exciting is how we can use these new information organisation type services with the next generation of CRM/Sales Automation that we’re now seeing – the guys at InvisibleCRM, and SugarCRM (the open source leader) are starting to apply this technology in new ways so that it’s easier to evolve the role of the sales person. I’ll come back and create another post about the discussions I’ve had with SugarCRM around mobile CRM as this is a really interesting space now that we’ve FINALLY got some useful devices like the iPhone, BlackBerry Bold, HTC, as well as some of the emerging/proposed devices from Google and Sony Erikson.

The question is how quickly will we evolve as sales professionals so that we take advantage of these new generation tools?

How do we time manage ourselves when in most cases the culture is still one of ‘hit the number’ above all else?

Are these tools going to deliver the process improvements required so that we can do more with less and more?

Will these tools actually detract from core skills development in new sales people? Are we automating too much? Relying too much on non-personal information?

I’ve been reading a really interesting book that’s related to this topic – Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by social technologies and the authors seem to address some of these points with their notion that social media is another form of listening (the core skill of any good salesperson).

The question I can’t answer is how the revolution will deal with this…