Vernon Bubb - Social Selling Evolution
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Vernon Bubb, Head of Sales Solutions at LinkedIn, talks to the SMLF members and guests about why social selling is so important for organisations and how sales professionals can gain insights in to their prospects, by expanding their networks and reducing cold calling.
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Vernon Bubb - Social Selling Evolution
- 2. Agenda 9.30 – 10.00 Social Selling Evolution Vernon Bubb, Head of Enterprise Sales, LinkedIn, Europe Middle East and Africa 10.00 – 10.15 Questions 10.15 – 10.45 Relationship Capital, Replacing the Traditional Sales Force Bart Kusters, Vice President, AlphaSights 10.45 – 11.00 Questions 11.00 – 11.30 Coffee and Networking
- 3. The Social Selling Evolution Vernon Bubb Head of Enterprise Sales LinkedIn, Europe Middle East and Africa @linkedinselling @socialmediaLF #socialselling
- 4. Social Media Leadership Forum Jeremy Harpham Theo Priestley Earliest Adopter Most Connected Sean Godfrey Murray Grubb Jnr Most Popular Most Endorsed
- 5. Our Mission Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful
- 6. + registered members 277,000,000 74M Members in EMEA 26 Global offices 20 Languages 6
- 7. Our Vision Create economic opportunity for every member of the world’s workforce
- 8. What does this mean for businesses? Hire Market Sell We have transformed the world of recruitment. The best place on the web to reach professionals Leverage the power of relationships. 8
- 9. The Social Selling Evolution
- 10. The world and buyers have changed What once worked, will not anymore % 75 B2B purchaser influenced by social % 57 Buying decisions are made before sales rep involvement Sources: CEB, Connect & Sell, IBM % 97 Of the time cold calls do not work *7% worse every year since 2010
- 11. Social Selling Defined: Leveraging your social brand to fill your pipeline with the right people, insights and relationships.
- 12. What is Social Selling? 1. Building a strong professional profile 2. Proactively developing your network 3. Using your network for referrals 4. Gathering intelligence 5. Offering insights 6. Using social selling solutions
- 13. Build a strong professional profile Add a photo, experience and skills that showcase the brand of YOU 13
- 14. Proactively develop your network Build trusted relationships that can support your professional objectives
- 16. 2 Initiate Relationships with Prospects By Sending a Connection Request 148% Top Sellers sent 148% more connection requests in 2013 vs. their counterparts Introductions made via a 3rd party can be a powerful ice breaker and means to reach influential decision makers
- 17. Leverage relationships From serendipity to science Serendipity ©2013 LinkedIn Corporation. All Rights Reserved. or or Science? Science?
- 19. 2 Use LinkedIn’s Powerful Search Capabilities To Find the Right Prospects 52% Reps focused on new business that exceeded quota did over 52% more searches on LI vs. their counterparts Introductions made via a 3rd party can be a powerful ice breaker and means to reach Know who you are trying to influential decision makers reach and discover not only who your key decision maker is – but who will be influencing the decision making process at that company as well.
- 20. Contribute insights Share ideas through status updates, and participate in groups 20
- 21. 2 Strengthen Relationships By Engaging with what Prospects Share on LinkedIn Top performing reps engaged with their professional network 39% more than their counterparts 39% Use quality content viaengage withcan be a powerful ice and to raise your profile Introductions made to a 3rd party your target audience breaker and means to reach influential decision makers
- 22. Introducing the LinkedIn Social Selling Index How well does your team embrace social selling? Laggards 0 Leaders 100
- 24. LinkedIn Social Selling Index Correlates to sales success 15% 31% 21% More customer renewals Greater team quota attainment More reps achieving quota Source: Aberdeen Group
- 25. Social Selling evolution Doesn’t happen overnight
- 26. Social Selling Evolution Doesn’t happen overnight @linkedinselling @socialmediaLF #socialselling LSS
- 27. Who Are We Working With Today?
- 29. In summary, best-in-class social selling sales people do these three things Find Leverage Lead Right People Relationships With Insights
Editor's Notes
- The audience - Social Media Leadership ForumC.60 social media & comms professionalsThe goal - is to educate them and their teams about LinkedIn and social selling. The secondary goal is to get them to go back and ask their teams how they reach decision makers’ so we can create momentum and get the audience to introduce us to their sales leaders. It is predominantly an educational talk.
- 8:45 Registration opens9:20 Welcome by Justin Hunt9:30 ‘Social Selling Evolution’ - Vernon Bubb, Head of Sales, LinkedIn EMEA 10:00 Q&A10:15 ‘Relationship capital, replacing the traditional sales force’- Bart Kusters, Vice President, AlphaSights 10.45 Q&A11:00 Thank you by Justin11:10 Networking11:30 Close
- GrabberMost people would agree that people are a company’s best asset. But for your companies – do you send an overview of the relevant people’s experience to your customers with proposals?Most people would agree that the majority of new customers are attained through word of mouth. But for your companies – do you routinely ask good customers for personal referralsor track them when they move from one company to another?While working at a small management consultancy for 6 years this was something we were able to do with great success. While I work at BT this was something we found much harder to do at scale. While I was a sales manager in BT with a £90m revenue target I was a trial customer for LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LinkedIn’s social selling solution, and it was off the back of that trial that I decided to join LinkedIn in January this year. In LinkedIn I am responsible for the sales of LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Enterprise customers across Europe, Middle East and Africa. Sales Navigator is an entirely new social selling tool that LinkedIn has developed – over the last three years we have gone from 4 to 40 to 200 people in the business unit. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an enterprise solution for sales people that offers members wider access to potential customers, daily updates on proposed customers (like Amazon recommending you a book) and an enterprise dashboard so the you can monitor and therefore manage usage.
- Ice Breaker Earliest Adopter – The first person to sign up and create a profile on LinkedInMost Connected– The person with the most 1st degree connectionsMost Popular– The person whose profile was viewed the most in the past 30 daysMost Endorsed – The person with the most total endorsementsIntroductionSo today we are going to give you an update on what LinkedIn is doing. We are going to talk about how people are changing the way they are buying and the growth in social selling. And then we are going to talk about a few tips for you and what we are doing to support the process of social selling.
- Our MissionWe drive a clear distinction between our Mission statement and our Vision.Our mission is our overriding objective, we believe that it should be realistic and inspirational. Our mission is to connect the worlds professionals to make them more productive and successful. This is what we do every day. And the most important word in our mission is the word professional, it started out being our focus, it has served us well and it continues to be our focus going forwards. We have recently also created a focus on students so that has increased our addressable market of knowledge workers from about 600m by an extra 160m people.
- Our VisionOur vision is our dream and it is what inspires us to come to work every day. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce – of which there are about 3bn people. And by economic opportunity we meanHelping them find workHelping them realize a dream job – Gallop and Pew Research suggests that there are millions of people that are unfulfilled at workAnd for those inspired by what they do – how can we make them great. This is an important vision for us for a number of reasons:Youth (15-24) unemployment in the Europe is 23% and in Spain and Greece is 50%. There are 75m unemployed youth globallyAnd specifically if you look at America there are 20m people unemployed or underemployed at the same time as there being 4m available jobs This last set of statistics points to a growing gap between the skills required by companies and governments and the aggregate skills of the workforce. And this gap will continue to grow as Oxford University predicts that 47% of white collar roles will be impacted by automation in the next 20 years. You only have to look outside – in a building near hear there are hundreds of people look for tax evaders and now in Florida they have employed massive computers to search across data bases in banks and pay rolls and tax departments to find discrepancies and highlight the most likely offenders – i.e., automating a previously manual process. And if you would like another reference point for how things are going to change consider a goal of the Chinese Government which is to move 250m people from rural living to living and working in cities by 2025, the greatest migration of human capital in the history of civilization in the next 11 years! All of these are major social issues and all of these are great opportunities for us to help our individual members with.Global Economic GraphTo help members address these issues we aim to build the worlds first Economic Graph:The first step is to create an digital profile for all our membersWe also need to create a digital representation of every company – we currently have 3.5m companies represented out of the potential 70-80 m in the worldWe need create a digital representation of every job – 5 years ago we had 8k jobs and today we have over 300k jobsWe need to create an overview of the skills required to get those jobs – we now have 10k skills registered and 3bn endorsementsWe also want to digitally represent all education organizations – last year we had none on our platform and today we have 23k. Over that digital map we want to overlay the billions of weekly updates and when we have done that we want to let the members identify for themselves where they can get the most benefit. And what is most scary is that this is not science fiction all of this exists and realizing the full potential is about time and execution.
- So what does this mean for business?The value that we have created for our members gives us an opportunity to create value for enterprises. If you take a list of processes that a company has to perform - sales, accounting, training etc. –You cannot achieve your goals without hiring great talentYou have to get the word out about what you do – you have to market to peopleAnd finally you need to be able to turn services into revenue So these three things seem worthwhile business processes to focus on.. Traditionally, people would have thought that these are disparate processes but in actual fact they are more common than people think. In each of these three processes the goals are firstly to identify the person, secondly you have to engage with that person and thirdly you have to spur that person to action. And it is this commonality that is the bridge from our consumer proposition into our enterprise propositions. Although never loosing site of our value that we focus on members first, the services we provide come under the banners of Hire, Market and Sell.
- The power of social selling became most apparent to me on three specific occasions during a social selling trial that I was running in BT Global Services.In the first example …. Zambia villageIn the second example… IBM 15 years so likelyIn the third example… my team had a key customer that was buying about £1m of Cisco kit from us a quarter and due to the growth of the customer the people were constantly changing roles as new people joined the team – with my saved searches we were able to track where people moved and the latest roles and responsibilities – I am sure that this kept us one step ahead of the competition.
- Buyers are increasingly tech savvy and are using the internet and social media to get more information. Quite often they know as much or even more about your products than your reps will. They will have reviewed not just the information from the vendors but also from 3rd party reviews, blogs and forums which give them a 360 view of what they are thinking of buying. And because of that they are less inclined to believe the sales and marketing messages from vendors and increasingly believing what they learn from social media. Recent research has showed that 75% of B2B buyers are influenced by social media and 57% of buying decision are made before the sales reps involvement. I practices this presentation with my brother this weekend and he totally agreed with this – he has spent about £1m so far this year and he gave me a list of the different forums that he uses for the various things he buys.We need to start to think differently how we sell and how we engage earlier in the increasingly non-linear or convuluted buying process.
- Social Selling DefinitionOur definition of social selling is “leveraging your social brand to fill your pipeline with the right people, insights and relationships.” Your social brand is the brand and profile that you have online in a digital format.The right people are those people who you want to influence – in a recent article by IESE business school a professor outlines his view that in any given space there are 100- 150 decision makers and those are the people you need to be connected to and influencing.Use your network and the Influecners you follow to get the insight that you need to identify opportunities and increase your win chance.And finally once the relationships have been made you can use them to identify new customers that you would like to engage with and sell to. I think that social selling is here to stay and not a fad because, the consumer buying process has been changed for ever by companies such as tripadvisor and trutpilot – and the trend of using web sites like those in the B2B space is set to continue and I think that LinkedIn will contuniue to play a key role in the as we continue to grow our network at 2 people per second and the majority of the people who sign up to our premium subscriptions are sales people looking to grow their pipeline.
- So just to re-iterate our view of what social selling is: Our view is that social selling is:Building a strong professional profile: I.e., a reputation that showcases your experience and your credibilityProactively developing your network: Developing relationships with people who can share information and provide referralsUsing your network for referrals Gathering intelligence: Researching social information to prepare for sales conversations Offering Insights: Providing meaningful insights that earn opportunities to engage with and influence contactsUsing Social Selling Solutions: Taking advantage of innovative selling solutions such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- In my view profiles are the most underutilised asset that any marketing person has. I am not an expert like many of your are but I believe £’000s are spent on great content for web sites but in my experience a massive proportion of people that visit your web sites also visit the profile of the sales people and executives they are meeting – some may only visit profile views and not your neatly scripted web sites. So profiles need to look good and the issue for many of you in here today is not how good your profile looks but how good the profiles are of your sales people – in some cases some of you have over 1,000 sales people and keeping those up to date is very difficult. Part of our Sales Navigator training includes a session on building the perfect profile – but my top three tips are:Add a photo – this gives you a 7x increase of having your profile viewedCreate a summary profile – that is not about how great you are but an engaging description of who you are and what you do.Ensure that your content is up to date with rich media and with marketing messages from your organisation
- Social selling relies on a good quality network. And many people ask who they should connect to and who they should accept connections from. The advice that I have heard and that I follow is that after meeting people I generally connect to them if I would be happy to ask them for a favour or if I would be happy to introduce another person to them on request. The same happens when people ask me for requests to connect. If I know them and I would be happy to ask them for a favour – or I would be happy to introduce a person to them then I accept. If I do not know the person then I reply with the question – can I help you at all? If the reply is clearly a sales pitch them personally I delete the request. At times I also go through my contacts and delete those people who I no longer want to be connected to. In general I love meeting new people and I love managing my connections on LinkedIn. Networking is about building and maintaining mutually beneficial, long-term relationships that both sides genuinely appreciateAnother turning point for me last year was when I sent out my annual fund raising mail for Byte Night, if you have heard of that, and I got 30% rejected e-mails because my Microsoft Outlook list of contacts was not up to date. So instead I used the e-mail list from my LinkdeIn contacts and there was on return mail – so in my view the LInkedIn network has replaced not only the Rolodex but Microsoft Outlook for storing e-mail addresses.
- So this is a digital representation of my network map – here you can see the different places that I have studied and work - with the key connecting people in these areas and who are the key people that connect the different worlds together.Althoug I have no evidence I think that the average time a person stays in a role is dropping from three years to closer to two years and for me – having this digital network is a great way of keeping in touch with everyone.
- At LinkedIn we did some research – from 5,000 respondents we got a sample set of 2286 B2B sales reps with reliable data which I think is a statistically significant piece of research. And we asked them a set of questions including their view if they were ahead of target or not – in Q3 2013. From the research we took the following tip.Initiate relationships with prospects – top sellers sent 148% more connection requestsA top tip here for you: Customise every connection request you send. Just because LinkedIn provides a basic message “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn,” that doesn’t mean you have to use it. No one wants to receive a generic request to join your professional network. If the person doesn’t recognise your name AND your request has not been customised you will see a lower response rate.You’ll get much better results if you write a brief, personalised, polite note to each potential connection that includes for example you may know in common.
- So with this science and now that we have our network in place we can now look to start getting introductions to our target accounts. Giving a you a vital “In” at an organisation so that you can learn more about them or talk directly to the end buyer. If I can give you my own example from last week rather than the one on the slide – Simon Kelly in my team is responsible for the strategic relationship with Cisco – but having just got back from setting up a team in Singapore his key contacts had noved on – he saw that I knew a few people in Cisco and asked me to refer him to the people I knew. I introduced him to Julie Ridge and David Farrimond who I have known for years – he had a meeting with them within 24 hours, and from that I think we now have some Cisco people here today.Why is this important?Research from Edelman Trust Monitor tells us that 84% of B2B decision makers start their conversations with a referral – which means in 2014 – sales people will hit their targets based on the quality rather than quantity of their connections.
- So lets go back and look at some of the research that we have doneThe first piece of insight uncovered by our team was that those reps that beat their target did over 50% more people searches on LinkedIn vs. their counterparts.Actively scanning their networks for relevant contacts and ways into new accounts
- So as I have mentioned LinkedIn has a social selling service called Sales Navigator – and although it is a tool that sales people use I refer to it as a service because it includes a huge amount of training in social selling and an enterprise dashboard that enables customers to monitor usage. There are many aspects of LInkedIn Sales Navigator that I am not going to go in to but there are two aspects that we thought we would share with you. The first is that we can measure social selling activity on LinkedIn and looking at everyone’s activity we can create a single score called a social selling index score.I like this score for a number of reasons:At BT I could compare the score of my team before and after the trialI could also compare my score against that of my direct competitionAnd finally – I think that this is a potential score that will go into annual reports – we are starting to see Talent B|rand Index (a nother LinkedIn score) being used in annual report
- Do I need this slide?
- In summary best in class social selling sales people use tools such as Sales Navigator to Find prospective customers, leverage the relationships they have in their networks to get introductions they are looking for and then, lead engagement on insights about those people.So I hope that today we have given you a flavour about LinkedIn, our view of social selling and some information on our social selling tool LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Some of you work in companies that are using Sales Navigator – so if you have any feedback from your sales teams it would be good to hear. Otherwise if you would like to like to know more we would love to come and talk to you and your sales teams.Just in case…LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an enterprise solution for sales people that offers members wider access to potential customers, daily updates on proposed customers (like Amazon recommending you a book) and an enterprise dashboard so the you can monitor and therefore manage usage.