The document discusses 7 steps to get ahead in social sales: 1) get in the game by knowing your customer hangouts, 2) build your social market value, 3) first friends then leads by connecting with your pipeline on social media, 4) connect with social intelligence by getting social insights, 5) get together and sell smarter by organizing social events, 6) inject social into the demand funnel to accelerate deals, 7) make your sales team effective, social and self-reliant through social media. It provides examples from Rackspace of how engaging customers on social platforms like LinkedIn helped improve recommendations, followers, and leads.

1. The Social Sales Revolution: 7 Steps to Get Ahead
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Get in The Know Your Build your First Friends, Connect With Get Together,
Customer Social Tweet-up Your
Game Then Leads Pipeline Social Sell Smarter
Hangouts Market Value
Intelligence
The power is in the hands of the buyer
Earn credibility and respect to be a recommender - be helpful – trusted
advisor

2. Build your Social Market Value
A social savvy rep needs to:
• Join social dialog
3
Build your
• Build credibility Social
Market Value
• Have experience
• Know the industry
• Be transparent
PHOTO BY KEXINO 2

3. Case Study:
WE SERVE OVER OPEN TECHNOLOGY AT
60%
4,500+
RACKERS WEB SCALE
Choice, flexibility and freedom
190,000+ from vendor lock-in
CUSTOMERS
OF
THE FORTUNE® 100
84,000+ SERVERS
SEAMLESS PORTFOLIO
OVER $1.2
120 +
COUNTRIES Public Cloud, Private Cloud,
Hybrid Hosting and Dedicated
BILLION $$$$ Hosting
Annualized Revenue
8 GLOBAL
DATA CENTERS

4. Credibility > Selling
4

5. Inject social into the demand funnel to accelerate deals
Recommendations
Relationships
Referrals
5

6. Online Display
Trade Shows
Webinars
Whitepaper
SEM s
Events
Email
Videos SEO
Blogs Demos
Qualified Leads
Loyal
CUSTOMERS 6

7. Department involvement
BEFORE
Marketing Sales
NOW
Marketing
Sales
7

8. THROUGH
Awareness Consideration Decision
8

9. SharePoint Tuesday – Real life use case of Social Value

10. How we do it
Intro
Connect Follow Listen
Groups
prospect prospects to for
with social and have prospects feedback
platforms them
follow us

11. Build
Advise
Content
prospects Including
on social case
media studies,
webinars
and more

12. We train our sales teams to think and act social
Build contacts by
territory and
customer list
Involve prospects
Join groups and
in the
gain credibility
conversation
Engage directly
Build and
with
maintain
recommendations
relationships
and relationships
Build
Research and
personalized
social profiles on
multiple platforms
How to: monitor social
media

13. Make your sales team:
1. Effective
2. Social
3. Self-reliant
1
3

14. The Power of
Recommendations
on LinkedIn
1
4

15. % Who Would Trust a Recommendation From:
Work colleagues / professional network 93%
Industry analysts (Gartner/Forrester/IDC) 80%
IT publications (CNET, ZDnet, etc.) 59%
Consultants 58%
IT forums and message boards 51%
Vendor websites 23%
Vendor salespeople 22%
Base: All IT survey respondents (N = 800). 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
“When deciding whether to purchase a particular software product for your
company or institution, do you trust recommendations from the following sources?”
IT Software Study – March 2011

16. Rackspace vs. Company X
554Recommendations
17K Followers

17. We failed before we succeeded

18. How we first failed:
• Our initial approach was too
aggressive in scale
• Mass mandate failed
• No instant results
• More planning needed
• Disconnect: tying social to
quotas

19. How we succeeded
• A pilot team that
• Understood
relationships
• Connected the dots
• Had patience

20. Key Results
Event
Engagement
Participation
Content
Leads/Signups
Marketing

21. Sameer Khan – Rackspace
Marketing Manager
Linked: www.linkedin.com/in/ninjamarketing
Twitter: @ninjamarketer
“Social media is revolutionizing and empowering
sales and marketing teams to become self-
reliant, connected and social”