How B2B Sellers Are Offering Personalization at Scale

As consumers in this data-driven, algorithmically obsessed world, we’ve come to expect highly personalized experiences that are tailored to our specific needs. Companies like Netflix and Uber set that tone, giving us what we want, when we want it – usually on the first try.

These “have it your way” consumer experiences have changed the way the business world thinks about sales. B2B buyers have slowly been conditioned to expect the same personalized treatment that they get while shopping on Amazon. They want to be approached with relevant offers at the right moments, not when it’s convenient for a sales rep. They have little to no patience for ill-timed, generic pitches.

Sales professionals and organizations are responding with new strategies and technologies that allow them to deliver personalized experiences at scale. The best sellers are combining the information served up by social platforms with the latest sales tech to go in warm, rather than cold, with a message that is on point from the start. In other words, they are using social selling.

Here are three areas where leading reps distinguish themselves:

Smarter targeting. Social media platforms offer rich demographic information, and the smartest sales pros are using it to segment “likely buyers” into “buyers who are ready to buy now”, capitalizing on something that yesterday’s sales pros could only dream of: intent signals. These signals, which include job changes (people are more inclined to make bold moves when they enter a new role), social posts (an indicator of top-of-mind questions), and hiring patterns (an indicator of investment), help sales pros know when it’s time to reach out. Sales pros can use social media features like advanced filters and lead bots to further facilitate the process of identifying qualified leads.

Better understanding. A recent survey found that 80% of buyers don’t believe that the salespeople they deal with understand their business. When salespeople start the conversation with a tried-and-true opener like “Can I ask you a few questions?” they reinforce this perception. By contrast, leading sellers tend to open with “I noticed that you’ve been thinking about…” How? They’ve followed social media threads to prepare for the face-to-face meeting long before it happened. Part of asking the right questions is understanding who’s on the buying committee, which is particularly challenging given that 6.8 people are involved in purchasing decisions, on average. Since buyers have next to no tolerance for vague questions fired off by the uniformed, the sales pro who can most quickly get to the heart of the matter with every decision maker typically wins.

Closer engagement. Twenty-three percent of deals go dark because reps fail to engage buyers through the entirety of the sales process. When sales professionals are unable to provide ongoing value, the buyer feels no obligation to maintain a dialogue. On the other hand, when connections are made through a trusted mutual acquaintance, a buyer often feels obligated to stay engaged longer. And once contact is made, the best sellers use technology to gauge whether the information they’re sharing with a buyer hits the mark. Tools like email tracking and PointDrive allow sales reps to see where a buyer digs in and what a buyer ignores, providing a feedback loop. They can then use that information to tailor future interactions.

At an individual sales rep level, social selling can be powerful. But when it’s rolled out across sales organizations, the impact can be significant. Marrying social selling with the right technologies can deliver a measurable impact on a sales pro’s performance. A global survey of sales professionals conducted by LinkedIn (where I work) last year found that 83% of top social sellers work at companies with focused social selling programs. When social selling is deployed, win rates increase by 1.2x, and deal sizes increase by 1.3x.

To achieve this level of impact, companies can do three things:

Build centers of excellence. Leading sales organizations are establishing a “center of excellence”, which defines and oversees the rollout of practices that operationalize social selling. Investing in tools and the change management that goes with them is essential. Eighty-four percent of sellers working with companies that prioritized this saw real impact.

For example, when the Sacramento Kings took on new ownership, the basketball franchise’s sales leadership adopted social selling, which drove a shift in confidence, especially among its newer reps. With support and buy-in from the owners, sales leaders, and sales reps themselves, the sales team saw a 20% increase in attendance, 42% increase in deal size, and 3.2x larger deals sourced through social platforms.

Measure the impact. Second, companies measure leading indicators, such as meetings secured through social engagement and time spent on social media preparing for interactions, as well as lagging indicators driven by social selling, like impact to bookings, win rates, and average selling price. This typically requires integration with the CRM system.

Gain executive buy-in. Lastly, success requires that social selling be led from the top-down. Executives need to be active on social media and leverage their networks to open doors for their teams. If execs aren’t comfortable with this, they can get help from their marketing team members, who are typically the most socially savvy. Eighty percent work for companies with a CEO who supports the adoption of a new approach.

Here’s what all this looks like in practice. When SAP expanded from its enterprise-resource-planning business to cloud solutions, a major hurdle it faced was negotiating a new, more rapid sales cycle. The inside sales team was brought in to nurture leads and help manage the pipeline, and it found immediate value using social selling for high-volume but highly targeted prospecting. SAP’s inside sales team saw a 40% increase in the sales pipeline, saw $4 million in revenue from its first phase, and closed several deals of more than $300,000.

As buyer demands continue to inch higher, it is imperative that both sales professionals and sales organizations evolve their strategies to address those expectations. Embracing new sales tech and social selling strategies is the key to creating one-to-one interactions at scale – but thoughtful, strategic execution is critical to making it all work. Only then will B2B sales professionals be able to capitalize on personalization at scale and fully realize how disruptive it can really be.