by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
With Social Selling now being “business as usual” here at DLA we always great a “tingle” when a new customer start’s a social selling a project. It’s amazing when we see the way social can change people’s lives, especially with sales people. Social enables a sales team to get leads faster, get higher in an organisation and more scalable than traditional “cold calling” methods.
Here at DLA we find that after the first few training sessions and with the momentum of the project behind you and you should see the results start to flow thick and fast.
But here’s the problem.
How do you measure the program?
Off the Peg Measurement – The Cookie Cutter Method
As when you buy a suit, there are some pretty good methods that offer an “off the peg” or a “one size fits all” measurement. Such as LinkedIn’s SSI score. This can work well, especially during the early days of a project. The assumption being that if your SSI has increased by 30%, then you must have 30% better behaviours. I know this might not actually be the case but I will come to that.
As social selling programs mature and people realise that LinkedIn is only 30% of the social graph, a more broad measure such as Klout is often used. Or I’ve seen people turn to manual methods, just to get a cross platform measure.
Unfortunately Klout lost a lot of it’s credibility when people started openly scamming it, and manual methods, take time. So what do we do at DLA?
Made to Measure Methodology
DLA have used Brandwatch since we started the business six months ago and use it in both pre-sales and post-sales to measure the impact we, (and therefore our customers) have on social. Reports can show client momentum and we can chart this especially when compared to their competitors. We have seen too many “social media experts” claim they can “move the needle” but we provide a data backed approach. We find this is an excellent way of making sure senior management, not only buy-in but also continually support a social selling project.
For example, we increased one client’s share of voice by 4000% compared to their competition within two months. Now at this point a number of you will be crying “vanity metric”, they key thing for us in measuring this for a clients is to show how far we have travelled. Of course, the real metric is meetings or inbound in some shape or form such as, speaking at industry events.
For example we check social media performance, but we are not looking at the details. We are looking at trends. This is how social selling analysis scales, and should be the central theme when you build your own report. Your boss likely has a lot of metrics they’re accountable for, so they aren’t able to drill down into each area that you’re on the hook for. They’ll look first to ask:
Is this program improving? Are we doing better or worse? We’re investing more. Is it paying off?
But compared to measuring SSI and Klout and with it the insight we are able to bring to our clients, this is a game changer!
Having a close relationship with Brandwatch brings our customers a number of benefits, one of those is we get to see new versions ahead of time. The new Vizia 2 platform will enable us to make a further impact on our clients social selling, social media and digital marketing programs.
Brandwatch Vizia 2 Vision for Social Selling
When we at DLA pulled away from the need of using SSI or Klout to measure Social Selling programs and offer real insight we knew we were on to something. The first time we presented the results and the way our insights drew the sales management as well as the sales people in, we knew this was making the impact that our customers expected from us.
If we take the Google interface as an example, here is something that is so simple, but provides us such power as we search. This is the similar principle behind the power behind of Vizia 2, you have all the power behind the Brandwatch product, so you can gain information on you, your products, your reputation, your campaigns, your competitors; right there in your pocket.
In our experience we have found that sales and marketing want the results and transformation and they don’t care if this is difficult, complex or requires a reorganisation of talent, processes or IT, to get it. The nature of a social selling project means our customers want to show immediate value to management, not that they are “warming the needle” but “moving the needle”.
Customer Data on Tap a Must for Digital (Social Media) Transformation
Since 2000, 52% of the companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired or cease to exist. Companies need to question the status quo and pose questions of the current operating models. Access to data and being able to action that data has become a competitive advantage. Fundamentally we are looking to unravel patterns in that noise and find those new opportunities to find and convert prospects to customers as well as turn customers into advocates.
Now Vizia 2 is not a BI or big data tool, it is designed to showcase the voice of the customer in an engaging way across your organisation. In the past, Brandwatch was known for Social Data, this is about giving people a total view of your customer data with a number of new visualisations. These visualisations enable companies to create a story and narrative about your customers, not just in a social selling project but wider across the organisation. Here at DLA we see this as a great way to support your digital transformation so data about your customers is available right across the company.
What DLA see in Vizia 2 is data driven story telling, it helps to move away from spreadsheet tables and “numbers” to crafting recommendations and insights in a storyboard format.
Visualisations and Data StoryTelling
For example, visualisation of what content is trending / making the most impact out in your social channels. With the move away from text in social to image, we are seeing visualisation through a data representation of that image and score. This should give you a quick and visual way of understanding what is trending, enabling you to react to what content is resonating and trending with your customers. This can provide inspiration for your own campaigns, which to support and which, maybe to drop. For example, you can measure the impact of quotes and photos and not just text.
The real cool thing that DLA see in the Vizia 2 platform from a social selling prospective is the network visualisation tool. It allows you to define the top 5 most influential authors, the conversation that exists around them and the topics that are driving that discussion.
Integrating your Social and Customer Data with your CRM
In addition, Vizia 2 also has a number of standard “plug and play” connectors, the first being Salesforce. This will allow us in the future to merge our social and campaign data with the data within your Salesforce CRM. This will have for DLA and our customers a massive impact as we are able to report right across the social selling process. Linking what we do on social with leads and revenue and present it in a story format within our organisation, right across the enterprise.
Conclusion
DLA want us all to be more heroic with your social selling program and we want the insight we can create with Brandwatch to offer more stories and change the behaviour that a social selling program needs to change.
Want to learn more about how we can help you become a social media superstar? Contact our co-founders to find out how we can impact your business at info@social-experts.net
