How does your business use social media – does it drive key messaging? Connect your customers with the people you employ to give it a human face? Does the tool even have a place in the B2B sector or industries where it maybe doesn’t seem intuitive to use on the face of it.

Most of all though, what’s social media’s value as a selling tool?

This was recently broached in a research report by Aberdeen-based business consultancy Doqaru. Their Sales Performance report details the importance of social selling through an extensive B2B sales survey.

Much of what’s in the report serves to further reinforce Gartner’s predication in its Future of Sales research that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions will take place over digital channels.

In an interview with DIGIT, we talk to Yekemi Otaru, Co-founder and Director of Doqaru, to discuss the social media zeitgeist and how it applies to business, as well as unpacking many of the eye-opening assertions found within the company’s Sales Performance report.

The fear of using it wrong

One of the big takeaways from the report is a prevalent unwillingness of upper management in many big companies to engage with social media – it’s a clear indicator of failure on the part of business leaders to keep up with cultural zeitgeists that have huge impacts on a modern business.

While this isn’t the case for every company of course, even the ones that did it well previously haven’t really pushed on. “In 2012, I was conducting some research, talking to companies like IBM and Dell that were at the forefront of using social media in the business space.

“They were training their employees to be able use this technology for driving the brand and for selling.”

10 years on, however, there’s an argument to be made that social media often strikes an anxious chord with big companies. It could be argued that the rise of cancel culture and social media mob pile-ons have contributed to a kind of malaise when it comes to engaging with social media.

On this, Yekemi says: “Big companies were always aware of the risks around using social media, but they had frameworks in place to mitigate this so there was always somewhere to go if someone wasn’t sure about what they were posting.

“These companies are still very concerned about having staff using social media to interact – they’re worried about the wrong thing being said. Some are – in my view – in denial about the impact that it has to not have social media as a tool.”

Again, this is a problem that seems to be most prevalent in big companies – the larger and more successful they are, the more difficult it is.

This is exactly what Otaru’s research ended up pointing at, “as companies got larger and larger, we start to see larger deficiencies as they consider themselves as having more to lose, have more traditional ways of doing things, as well having structures that are inherently challenging to change on a company-wide scale”.

According to Yekemi, utilising social properly is an excellent way to highlight the key experts within your organisation, as well as helping to reach people globally – offering avenues to your sales team that would have been otherwise impossible.

In a broader sense, large companies must adopt greater malleability to help come to terms with the nimbleness and cultural changes required to really make more effective use of social media.

Social selling to drive lead generation 

Social media is at its most effective when working as a peer-to-peer communication framework that organically reinforces the best aspects of your business. You’re much more likely to believe in a company when you read plaudits on your LinkedIn news feed that comes directly from someone in your ecosystem as opposed to reading it from a press release.

When it comes to Doqaru’s ways of engendering this when they consult with clients, Otaru says: “we say to the sales teams that it’s all about building those peer-to-peer relationships. If you’re not using social selling – as in starting conversations and not selling to people in terms of sending a pitch deck – but getting to know people in a human-to-human sense, then your sales cycles will be so much longer.”

Beyond this, Otaru extols the virtues of your staff being key players in building brand trust by using social media – engaging with people and having discourse around the topics that you are experts in.

Otaru expands on the benefits of this approach, commenting: “Sales developing relationships with prospects, potential partners and collaborators isn’t a linear journey anymore. People want to get to know you and make sure your values align.”

A quick way to bring this to fruition within your own company, as Otaru details, is to look within your staff to those who are ready-made to take a more active role within how your organisation operates within the social media space.

In fact, training in general has become a huge problem that Doqaru’s Sales Performance report highlights, stating that 42% of respondents have said they’ve not received any social media training.

This becomes more of a problem when you talk about success stories, as there’s certain commonalities that show that this statistic is very problematic. Companies that enjoy success through social media tend to, as Otaru puts it, “hand pick people within the organisation that have certain profiles – people that they feel were credible in terms of technical knowledge and understanding, have an existing following and are already maybe creating content online. From there, they train and support those people.”

In Otaru’s book The Smart Sceptics Guide to Social Media in Organisations, she details a case study by way of data consultant SAS that follows this pattern in particular. “After proactively training their staff in the proper use of social media, they saw a 40% increase in lead generation through social channels as a result of their staff going online and – not selling – but talking about projects that they were working on and actively sharing things that were salient to their businesses interest – or just generally interesting.”

It’s a lesson that Otaru and Doqaru as a whole impart to their clients, wherever appropriate, and the feedback almost universally is that they get faster responses, more leads, more engagement with their content and shorter sales cycles.

Social Media mistakes and tokenism

As well as illuminating the challenges of lead generation, one of the big thematic subjects Doqaru’s Sales Performance Report tackles is the unwillingness of companies to leave behind sales methodology that has proven to be ineffective.

Beyond that, many believe themselves to be forward thinking in how they adopt things like social media, but really they are just moving archaic practices to a new medium.

Beyond this though, there is simply still a lot of bad practice down there that’s more often than not, borne from good intentions.

Otaru expands on this, saying: “A mistake I often see with smaller businesses or SMEs is that they try to be everywhere when in fact they should just pick where their client hangs out. Even if it’s just one platform, just do that platform really well.”

According to Otaru, there’s real opportunity for small and medium sized businesses to use social strategies for growth.

All the good practices Otaru discussed all inform an end game of sales – it is why we are here. And while social media is undoubtedly an incredible tool for sales, it is absolutely not a conduit to simply funnel old practices. An example of this would be the social media equivalent of cold calling, or trying to close a sale way too early in a relationship and it’s something Otaru unfortunately sees a lot of.

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“If you connect with someone on LinkedIn, don’t just say hello, attach a brochure and go straight for the sale.

“It’s really the antithesis of what we’re saying. It takes time to build relationships.”

This really feeds into the core messaging behind not only the Sales Performance report, but Otaru and Doqaru’s take on social media as a B2B sales tool.

“One of the pitfalls is that people think social media is a quick fix. It’s something you have to do over time, consistency pays off.”

MarTech Summit 2022 | Join the Conversation

Scotland’s Marketing Technology Conference

Yekemi Otaru will be joining us at the the 2nd annual MarTech Summit, held on 10th May at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh, and streamed live through our virtual conference platform.

She will be joined by an impressive line-up of speakers including representatives from Boots, Wood Mackenzie, Zoopla and many, many more.

The programme will discuss the advancement of digital marketing amidst an explosion of new tools and technologies – from web analytics, social selling, AI and SEO to, CRM, BI and personalisation.

For more information, visit: www.martech-summit.com.