In the Web 2.0 era, your business can scarcely afford to be without a sales strategy deployed on social networks.
With the development of highly effective CRM tools, middle managers have gradually focused on leveraging customer data rather than sales management. Today, social networks and social selling techniques enable these field personnel to restore meaning and a human dimension to your company’s sales activities.
Social Selling: when Sales Professionals Meet Community Managers
Did you know you’re probably practicing social selling without realizing it? This discipline, halfway between community management and sales management, involves leveraging social networks as full-fledged sales channels. According to this approach, each stage of the relationship with internet users on social media must be associated with a ‘soft,’ non-intrusive, value-added sales action for the prospect or client.
Social selling therefore leads your sales professionals to collaborate closely with your company’s community managers, but also with all stakeholders who contribute to developing its e-reputation.
By adopting social selling, you create synergy between different sectors of your company to better understand and engage your prospects via social networks, in order to turn them into loyal customers.
The Middle Manager: a Key Coordinating Role
The different departments of your company may struggle to communicate: technical language or key performance indicators (KPIs) can vary widely from the marketing department to the sales department.
More than just a customer data manager, your middle manager must enable all relevant teams to work together for a coherent social selling strategy.
This coordinating role includes several aspects:
- Training for sales professionals, which can be prepared with community managers or those responsible for content published on your web platforms, for better involvement of the stakeholders called upon to collaborate.
- The organization and implementation of social media strategies, while ensuring their integration into a global and coherent marketing strategy.
- Sales management and team allocation, which notably involves implementing effective tools for internal communication.
- Reporting to sales management: often criticized, this role of the middle manager remains essential to guide the long-term sales strategy.
Exemplary Middle Management
In companies where collaboration and autonomy now reign supreme, middle managers can no longer be content with customer relationship management and reporting to sales directors.
They must now facilitate and support decision-making within your sales department, but also among sales professionals, thanks to exemplary rather than authoritarian sales management. Leveraging social networks as monitoring tools, for prospecting and sales, should enable them to better understand your company’s prospects and customers.
At the same time, they must train and help sales professionals acquire strong social selling skills in order to foster innovative and creative solutions within their teams.
It is therefore up to middle managers to prepare the fertile ground on which sales forces, marketers, and community managers can grow the e-reputation, and thus your company’s digital revenue.