Sales, marketing, and enablement leaders must work together to drive a successful digital transformation within their organization. The transformation involves 6 stages from random social activity to fully integrated sales and marketing teams. Social selling helps restore balance between buyers and sellers by engaging buyers on their terms and viewing sellers as more authentic.

1. 1
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE
TO SOCIAL SELLING
THE
DEFINITIVE
GUIDE TO
SOCIAL
SELLING FOR
LEADERS

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THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE
TO SOCIAL SELLING
FOR LEADERS
CONTENTS
Introduction 3
The modern buyer’s journey
Industry insights
The rise of the modern B2B buyer
Part I — Digital Transformation for Sales 6
Your roadmap for Digital Transformation 7
The role of sales today 15
Restoring the balance between sales and customer 16
Benefits of social selling 18
Breaking down the silos 19
Part II — The Roles 20
Sales Leader 21
Marketing Leader 24
Sales Enablement Leader 26
Ways to align 28
Part III — How To Get Started With Social Selling 29
10 Commandments of social selling 30
Ideal Customer Profile 31
The Insights Factory 33
Where do you stand 34
Mindset, skillset, toolset 35
Beyond just social media 36
Part IV — How To Measure Social Selling 37
The Role of LinkedIn Navigator 39
Metrics 41
Quantifiable outcomes from social selling 42
A multi-threaded cadence 46
Technology 48
About Sales for Life 50

3. 3
INTRODUCTION
Today’s sales teams have evolved. No longer are sophisticated sales pros
taught to pressure buyers or use questionable selling tactics — instead they’ve
adopted a more buyer-centric approach. This is no doubt a great change for
the sales profession, but the evolution of the sales landscape is ongoing.
The average buyer in business is just like you and me at night, on our couch,
surfing the Internet. Buyers purchase clothes, electronics and learn about
their future vehicles online. What makes you think they don’t also research
software, HR best practices, insurance or corporate healthcare policies?
Businesses around the world have already forever changed because buyers have changed.
Buyers are arming themselves with more information than ever to make informed decisions.
They can now connect with their peers on social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and
Facebook to learn about the challenges, pitfalls and successes of any solution implementation.
INTRODUCTION —
THE MODERN BUYING JOURNEY

4. 4
INTRODUCTION
INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
THE CHANGE IN BUYERS’ BEHAVIOR THAT HELPED PROGRESS SOCIAL SELLING:——
“B2B sales is in a period
of transformation.
How to sell becomes
more important
than what to sell.”
—— Tamara Schenk
Research Director,
CSO Insights——
SOCIAL MEDIA FOR RESEARCH
75% of B2B buyers now use social
media to research vendors.
— IDC
INEFFECTIVE COLD OUTREACH
90% of today’s B2B buyers never
respond to cold outreach.
— LinkedIn
BUYERS CONTROL THE JOURNEY
B2B buyers are 57% complete their
decision before engaging with sales.
—— CEB—
FIRST TO ADD VALUE
74% of buyers choose the sales rep that
was first to add value and insight.
— Corporate Visions
CONTENT AS CURRENCY
95% of buyers chose a vendor that provided them
content to navigate each stage of the buying process.
— Demand Gen Report
WINNING VENDOR
82% of buyers viewed at least five pieces
of content from the winning vendor.
— Forrester

5. 5
INTRODUCTION
THE RISE OF THE MODERN B2B BUYER
“It’s no longer about interrupting, pitching and closing.
It’s about listening, diagnosing and prescribing.”
— Mark Roberge
Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School; Former CRO, HubSpot

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THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE
TO SOCIAL SELLING
FOR LEADERS
PART 1: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
FOR SALES
STAGE 0: STATUS QUO
STAGE 1: RANDOM ACTS OF SOCAL
STAGE 2: BUILDING A BUSINESS CASE
STAGE 3: SCALE
STAGE 4: SALES & MARKETING ALIGNMENT
STAGE 5: SALES & MARKETING INTEGRATION

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“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” – Aristotle
Aristotle’s definition is key to outline your road map to a Digital Transformation inside your organization. The
importance of this can’t be stressed enough: social selling success is a team sport, not a showcase for great
individual contributions. Great teams comprised of one cohesive unit always seem to outperform and win more
championships than the team that gathers amazing individual talent “on paper.” If there are only a few antidotes
that you remember from this book, please remember Aristotle’s definition of synergy, and how teamwork
in your organization is always going to outperform what you can accomplish individually in a vacuum.
Every organization, no matter how effective at traditional selling principles, will start its Digital Transformation
from simple beginnings. For hundreds of technology companies in San Francisco, these beginnings had
already happened, while many global financial services companies are just planting the seeds for a Digital
Transformation. To help you understand the Digital Transformation progression that all companies will face,
here are its six stages. The question you must ask yourself is: Where is my organization in this progression?
YOUR ROADMAP FOR DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION

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TRANSFORMATION
FOR SALES
STATUS QUO
Your organization is complacent and will continue selling as it always has. You have not established
with your sales team the mindset that social and digital communication will have a positive impact
on the business. There is little to no buy-in from commercial leaders on the effectiveness of social,
no social governance, and no formal training on social. The adage “Sales is from Mars; marketing is
from Venus” couldn’t be more true. These two departments couldn’t be more disconnected.
STAGE ONE
The first stage is where inconsistent social activity happens. At this stage, a handful of sales professionals are
using tools such as LinkedIn for research, booking meetings, and connecting with people. There are no best
practices or scale at this stage, but some sales professionals are making money by using such tools as LinkedIn.
The problem with this stage is that it allows only a small pocket of sales professionals to make quota,
but it isn’t helping your business as a whole to achieve your sales goals or revenue targets.
If your company has no formalized training program, governance, or best practices, and only a
small number of sales professionals are meeting their goals, you’ll know you’re at this stage.

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9
STAGE TWO
At this stage, your organization has had enough internal demand for social best practices that someone
is trying to formalize a game plan. Most likely though, you or your teammates have confused LinkedIn
and social selling as one and the same. As a result, you’ve probably made any of these investments:
• Your department’s sales tool stack needs to standardize a LinkedIn
product, so you invested in LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
• You started training workshops. Someone at your company was chosen to facilitate training; queue
the Social Media Marketer or a “digitally native” sales professional who seems to “get it.”
• Your sales enablement team is trying to gather ideas for a “Social Selling 101” workshop filled
with a basic assortment of tips, tricks and tactics. You and your sales team will learn the basics of
becoming social, starting with redesigning your social profiles. Unfortunately, there are usually two
missing ingredients. First, what is the roadmap to global change beyond these initial workshops,
and how will you measure success? Second, how do you get marketing involved in this social selling
equation, as the sales team is not being fueled with new insights to share with your customers?

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STAGE THREE
Your organization has top-down executive support to make social a priority. Your front-line sales
leaders are driving accountability throughout their sales force to ensure social actions are reaching
the defined measurable milestones. The digital marketing team is working side by side with sales
to fuel the insights (content) that sales professionals will use to engage their buyer.
Social selling is manifesting beyond a business unit and seeking to be standardized throughout your entire
sales and marketing organization. You understand that social selling effectiveness is not accomplished
through a few training workshops. You and your sales enablement team will seek to weave social
into the DNA of your existing sales process. Social selling is additive, not a replacement for how your
team sells today. You’ll also ensure the “skill gap” between existing sales professionals and future new
hires is nonexistent; thus, you’ll make social selling training part of your new hire onboarding.

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Throughout all business units, your sales and marketing teams are
leveraging social “every deal, every day” (as quoted by Jill Rowley) as
part of the following three intersecting pillars of social selling:
1. Trigger-based Selling: Internal or external events happening around
your buyer, and this digital information can alert a sales professional
in real time, allowing for highly contextual conversations.
2. Insights-based Selling: According to Forrester, “74% of buyers
choose the sales team that was first to provide value and insight
within their buying journey.” Shaping your Buyer’s Journey
early is critical, and leveraging digital insights will help arm
your buyer with information to make informed decisions.
3. Referral-based Selling: People buy from people. The road
map of relationships can be mechanized through tools such
as LinkedIn and Twitter. You can build a relationship road
map to establish deeper connections with your buyer.
INSIGHTS
SELLING
TRIGGER
SELLING
REFERRAL
SELLING
SOCIAL
SELLING

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PART 1: DIGITAL
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STAGE FOUR
Social Selling is simply a by-product of effective sales and marketing
alignment at scale across your organization. Your company has created
streamlined communication bridges between sales and marketing,
which have increased the flow of new ideas for digital insights. At a
tactical level, your company would have an insights committee, which is
a group of sales professionals that meets regularly with the marketing
department to develop new digital insights that fuel sales conversations.
Sales and marketing alignment also begins to formulate new ways to measure
success. Great social selling teams recognize that a buyer’s journey involves
both the marketing and sales efforts; thus, everyone in marketing and sales
becomes accountable to winning that new buyer. You’ll recognize greater
sales and marketing alignment when your marketing team is no longer
focusing on website traffic or lead volumes as their ultimate key metric.
SALES & MARKETING
ALIGNMENT

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PART 1: DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
FOR SALES
Alignment occurs when your team begins to create metrics around the
handshake between sales and marketing, at the sales qualified lead,
or opportunity level. Marketing will be accountable for delivering a
percentage of sales qualified leads to achieve a sales professional’s
quota attainment, and sales is accountable for timely pursuit and proper
nurturing of these leads with social selling best practices. Everyone
is ultimately accountable to new sales bookings. Tactically, a Service
Level Agreement between sales and marketing takes form and
becomes the blueprint for accountability among all team members.
This consistently developed intellectual property is repeated by creating
a process that we call the “IP Transfer Loop.” The IP Transfer Loop has
a sales professional story-tell an idea based on buyer’s challenges,
and the marketing team turns this idea into a new digital insight for
sales professionals to leverage with their buyers. As sales deploys
these digital insights into the market, buyers provide more feedback
in the form of objections, concerns, questions. This cycle continues
to repeat itself, with more sales feedback, while developing more
and more granular insights that are highly valuable for the buyer.

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STAGE FIVE
“Team Revenue” is what we call the interlacing of marketing and
sales departments. Your commercial team recognizes emphatically
that everyone in digital marketing and sales is accountable for
helping buyers throughout their journey. Each team member has
also completely bought in to Aristotle’s definition of synergy, that
no role is more important than another, nor can be short-cut to be
a successful Digital Sales organization. We recognize that while
the business cards and LinkedIn profiles of sales and marketers will
always show the external world that they have a traditional role and
title, internally they are just a member of one unit — Team Revenue.
They are accountable to only one number — sales bookings!
Social selling continues to be one of the rising stars within B2B, as large
and small companies continue to incorporate it into their processes.
DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION:
SALES & MARKETING
INTEGRATION

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TRANSFORMATION
FOR SALES
Most B2B buyers are online, self-
educating about solutions before
speaking with sales professionals.
They view talking to a sales
professional as a distraction and do
not want to be constantly contacted
for a pitch. The modern buyer
demands that companies provide
a more relevant and easier digital
path towards their solution.
Although the apparent digital
shift has changed the way people
buy, buyers still want a personal
connection in some cases. This
presents an opportunity to
reboot your sales organization
to meet the modern buyer.
Consultative sales roles are best equipped to deliver
the services the buyer needs during their sales process.
Here are six traits of the consultative sales rep:
1. Embraces technology
2. Shares new ideas
3. Exhibits business acumen
4. Communicates effectively
5. Seeks collaboration
6. Leverages data
THE ROLE OF SALES TODAY
DID YOU KNOW?
By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their interaction
with companies without even engaging a human.
—— Forrester

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16
RESTORING THE BALANCE BETWEEN
SALES AND CUSTOMER
SOCIAL SELLING HELPS RESTORE THE BALANCE BETWEEN BUYERS AND SELLERS
Engage
buyers on
their terms
Listen and
learn
Share
buyer-centric
content
Engage
sellers on
own terms
Learn from
influencers
View sellers
as more
authentic
Sellers Customers

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PART 1: DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
FOR SALES
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SOCIAL SELLING ADOPTION
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
26%
33%
13% 12%
47%
50%
20%
24%
72%
67%
28% 27%
Social media is a highly effective tool to
identify new business opportunities.
Source: 2015 MHI Sales Best Practice Study
Social media is a highly effective tool
to identify decision makers.
2013 World Class 2013 All2014 World Class 2014 All2015 World Class 2015 All

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BENEFITS OF SOCIAL SELLING———————
REVENUE GROWTH
61% of organizations engaged with social selling
report a positive impact on revenue growth.
— State of Social Selling in 2016, Sales for Life
QUOTA ATTAINMENT
Social sellers realize 66% greater quota attainment than
those using traditional prospecting techniques.
— Forrester Research
CUSTOMER RETENTION
33%+ of customers are less likely to cancel/churn.
— McKinsey & Company, *Transforming Customer Experience: From Moments to Journeys,
2013
MULTI-THREADED APPROACH
There are 6.8 decision-makers participating in
an average enterprise purchase.
— Gabriel Tsavaris, CEB - Qotient Sales Disruption Seminar—
BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
62% of sales pros at large companies agree social selling helps
them build stronger & more authentic relationships.
— LinkedIn, States of Sales in 2016
EDUCATE CUSTOMERS
74% of today’s B2B buyers conduct more than half of
their research online before making a purchase.
— Forrester Research, B2B Buyer Journey Mapping Basics, 2015
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
78% of sales pros using social media perform better than their peers.
— Forbes, Social Media and Sales Quota Report
ENGAGE BUYERS ONLINE
82% of prospects are active on social media.
— InsideView, How to implement a Social Selling strategy

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PART 1: DIGITAL
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FOR SALES
BREAKING DOWN THE SILOS
We call your core social selling team “Three Amigos.”
The Three Amigos are made up of three senior leadership types:
Sales Leader(s) Marketing Leader(s) Operations/Enablement Leader(s)
The organization must mandate that all three divisional leaders are equally part of
social selling planning and execution. Each role will be a vital dance partner.
Don’t discount each roles’ involvement in success, or you’ll risk everything falling
apart. The important part is understanding what these three job functions require
for overall social selling success. Using this information, you can plot a course for
yourself or others in your organization to share these responsibilities.

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PART 2: THE ROLES

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PART 2: THE ROLES
SALES LEADER
You are the voice of accountability.
We’ve seen Marketers, Sales Operations and/or Sales Enablement leaders champion a
social selling program by themselves. The result has nearly been a 100-percent failure
rate because the sales professional ultimately does not report to those roles.
With proper sales leadership accountability, a sales professional will learn a new skill, and the sales
leader will be responsible for helping to ensure that newly acquired skill is actioned into a sales
outcome. Sales professionals will emulate you because they assume your actions are a reflection of
what made you so successful. Don’t forget that you as a sales leader are under the microscope of tens,
hundreds or thousands of sales professionals each day. If you’re social, they’ll become social.

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PART 2: THE ROLES
Chris Brydon
Vice President, Enterprise
Sales West Sprint
“I was looking for a way to get my
sales force from ‘zero to sixty’
though social selling. Like most
organizations, my team was all
over the board, with little time,
money or expertise to develop
a social program. Working with
the team from Sales for Life we
were able to achieve a significant
lift in our social selling index,
skills and most important our
funnel. Sales for Life got us there
in 10 weeks flat, leaving us with
a sustainable social program
accelerating our time to revenue.”
We see our sales professionals
to a high extent using social
every day which is fantastic —
both to find the right prospects
and to more importantly
communicate with their
network and become a valued
asset out in the world.
As we gained competence as a
team, leadership really felt we
had modernized the sales force
and invested in them by giving
them a new social playbook.
We started to measure activity
from the get-go and our activity
quadrupled in the social space,
and we started to see this
immediately in the funnel. In
terms of demand, we started
to see social translate to sales
early on in the process.
HOW IMPORTANT IS
EXECUTIVE BUY-IN?
It’s critical. Sprint is a
transforming company, so every
penny is managed and looked
three times before we spend it.
Getting buy-in and having
a CEO believe in social
definitely helped us.
WHAT KPIs HAVE YOU
BEEN MEASURING FOR
SUCCESS?
It’s ultimately pipeline
and revenue.
Though the first KPI for us was
just SSI. We wanted to keep
our team’s SSI scores up. Then
we looked at their connections
as well as certification.
But it’s all about results. At the
end of the day, we’re doing this
to become a more effective
selling machine. We want to
reach out to more customers,
tell our story and bring value
through social. It really helped
us to become a better selling
organization, but out of the
gate, it started with the simple
things I could measure like SSI,
connections, how much time
spent on social. In the end, it’s all
about how the funnel is looking,
more interactions through
social and driving more sales. In
many cases, can we accelerate
the sales cycle or improve our
close ratio? Because we’re
now first in as a thought leader
and we’re seen as a valued
partner to our customers.
We’re getting first call, not
necessarily called into the RFP.
WHAT SALES LEADERS
ARE SAYING TODAY
GOING FROM “ZERO TO SIXTY”

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PART 2: THE ROLES
SALES LEADERSHIP COACHING
The second way to drive accountability
is to manage and coach social selling
in your one-on-ones. In his book Sales
Management. Simplified, Mike Weinberg
talks extensively about the importance
of the one-on-one between sales
professionals and their sales leader.
The results of successful one-on-one
coaching is straightforward; you get
the results that you measure and coach
toward. If you don’t explore your sales
team’s social activity as part of your
one-on-ones, how can you expect social
activity to happen? If you’re constantly
reinforcing elements of social selling
to go deeper and wider into accounts,
expect that social will become part of
their daily cadence. Here is a tactical
example of what you can implement:
1. LEARN FIRST
Before your sales professionals
learn a new social selling action,
you learn the action first.
2. CONTEXTUALIZATION
You then contextualize the action for
the sales team (why it’s important,
how it works within your sales
process, what value it will provide).
3. REINFORCEMENT
Later, reinforce that same social
selling action at each one-on-one
meeting until you feel each sales
professional has incorporated this
action into his or her sales DNA.
4. BUILD HABITS
Once the previous action has
become habitual, layer on a new
social selling action into a sales
professional’s daily cadence.

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PART 2: THE ROLES
MARKETING LEADER
According to Forrester’s Report Embrace B2B Social And Meet Buyers On Their Terms,
67% of companies need marketing to support social selling activities with content. No
longer do teams work in silos; instead, successful social selling programs require sales
and marketing to constantly exchange resources, expectations and expertise.
You will be expected to run a data-driven machine, but most likely throwing away the current ways
you’re measuring your current success. A social selling organization has its marketing team measured
against its delivered percentage contribution of sales quota with sales. This alignment between sales and
marketing will allow for much faster and effective insights creation, which will fuel buyer conversations.
Marketing must become the factory that creates, organizes, helps expand discovery of
and measures the engagement of all insights consumed by your buyers. Your analysis
will go deeper than you’ve ever gone before by measuring the percentage of marketing’s
efforts (direct leads and accounts, and indirect influence) to the sales team’s quota
attainment. And you’re most likely nowhere near hitting sales targets today.
This simple accountability change is where you’ll establish your first mindset shift. Gone are
the days of thinking about website traffic, clicks, opens, retweets and lead volume. None
of these metrics are going to be sufficient goals for your team in 2017 and beyond.
67%

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CONNECTING THE DOTS GLOBALLY:
SCALING WORLDWIDE
For any company that
is rolling out social
selling, you have to
have executive buy-in.
Necessary for
social selling
implementation:
1. ALIGNMENT
BETWEEN SALES
AND MARKETING
Sales can’t do this
alone so we started as
a pilot together.
2. EXECUTIVE BUY-IN
This is necessary
for reinforcement
and support which
then trickles down
throughout the
entire salesforce.
3. SCALABILITY
Sales professionals use
different strategies,
however adopting best
practices and ensuring
scalability across the
organization is key.
WHAT SALES LEADERS
ARE SAYING TODAY
GOING FROM “ZERO TO SIXTY”
Kristine Vick
Principal Marketing
Specialist: Analytics
SAS Institute
Jennifer Hill
Senior Manager,
Sales Operations
SAS Institute
“Sales and marketing is constantly looking
at ways to enhance each other’s experience
along the modern buyer’s journey.
“We needed a way to continue getting content along
that journey from a prospect’s behavior standpoint.
One of the problems was empowering sales reps to
share the content themselves. Marketing had programs
in place so we needed to partner with the marketing
team and empower our sales force to get the right
content in front of prospects in the digital landscape.”
THE GREAT DEBATE: BUILD VS. BUY
Our EVP of Sales (Carl Farrell) wanted to role
this out to not just the United States but to Latin
America and Canada. We need to have a scalable
solution and we also wanted to roll this out in a very
short timeframe. For us to build that in house and
get that expertise, we knew that was not going to
happen for the timeframe we wanted to reach.
We were able to roll this out to 600 folks very quickly
in Latin America and the U.S. and now Europe.

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SALES ENABLEMENT LEADER
Sales Operations and Sales Enablement is the glue between sales and marketing. Your responsibility is to bring all
the people, process and technology together into one workable system. We have found that successful social selling
implementations come from progressive enablement teams that have no fear pushing the internal sales status quo.
These progressive leaders have no time or patience for hearing sales professionals grovel about “not having time
for training.” These enablement leaders know that learning behavior is a leading indicator to future sales success.

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One of your first steps is visualizing and documenting your current sales process in
complete transparency for both sales and marketing. After plotting your sales process,
and gaining approval from sales and marketing that this is your go-to-market system,
you can interweave where social selling slots into that process. 85% percent of your
sales and marketing teammates are visual learners – so leverage visual documents
that help everyone see the tactical steps. This visualization is the basis for an
accountability document you’ll create called the “Service Level Agreement.” Social
selling is an additive process that complements your existing sales process.
Do not attempt to boil the ocean by trying to reengineer a huge portion of your sales
process for social selling in one dramatic fashion. All you’re going to get from sales
professionals are blank stares and rolling eyes. Your goal is to showcase tactical steps
that sales professionals have been missing, and with a slight altering to their current
activity within their current process, they would be effectively social selling.
85%

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WAYS TO ALIGN
LEADERSHIP
The role of sales leadership is to provide
accountability. Leaders need to provide
accountability to their sales professionals.
Without it, the program can’t succeed.
BUYING JOURNEY
Start with a clear picture of your customer.
This will help you gain insight into your
ideal customers, define common goals and
identify each step of your buyer’s journey.
PEOPLE
Team building helps people get to know each
other. Team lunches, celebrations and outside-
of-the-office gatherings helps build trust among
team members and ensures that people feel
comfortable leaning on each other for support.
SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT
Service level agreements are outlined for each
stage of the revenue cycle. They determine
how quickly the sales team will respond to an
MQL, what happens if they don’t, etc. They
encourage accountability and make it easier
for each team to measure their results.
TECHNOLOGY
Technology is not wholly responsible for
alignment and should only follow after aligning
people and process. The role of technology is
meant to accelerate and scale your strategy.
COMMON METRICS
It’s recommended you measure these activities
together. Each is good individually but in unison
they are the best predictors of sales impact.
CONTENT CREATION PROCESS
Creating an Insights Committee achieves sales and
marketing alignment because it gets sales involved
in the content creation process—and ensures that
marketing is always creating content buyers need.
COMMON DEFINITIONS
Create a common set of definitions to make
sure you’re communicating effectively.
DEFINE IDEAL
CUSTOMER PROFILE
The ideal customer profile is who sales and
marketing decide to target. VP of sales at
enterprise tech firms? Director of marketing
at IT corporations? Research your ideal
customer and define who they are.

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PART 3: HOW TO GET STARTED
WITH SOCIAL SELLING

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PART 3: HOW TO
GET STARTED WITH
SOCIAL SELLING
1. GET EXECUTIVE BUY-IN
2. LINE UP RESOURCES
3. IDENTIFY CONTENT GAPS
4. START WITH A PROOF OF CONCEPT
5. LINK TO METRICS
6. INTEGRATE INTO EXISTING PROCESS
7. COMMIT TO ONGOING TRAINING
8. HAVE CLEAR POLICIES AND GOVERNANCE
9. INVEST IN TECHNOLOGY
10. PROVIDE ONGOING COACHING
AND ACCOUNTABILITY
DID YOU KNOW?
30% of companies say their social selling
training needs “a complete overhaul”.
—— CSO Insights
10 COMMANDMENTS OF
SOCIAL SELLING

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EXAMPLE OF AN IDEAL CUSTOMER
PROFILE OR BUYER PERSONA
CEB Global found that an average of 6.8 decision makers are involved in the average B2B buying committee.
Social selling is the most effective route to create a comprehensive customer profile that covers the internal
politics of buying. Sales teams need to penetrate deeper into an organization, beyond the buyer representatives
to the decision makers who support them. Successful teams concentrate on finding and engaging with the
“mobilizer,” or internal brand advocate, who can keep the buying process in motion from the inside.
Source: Hubspot

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THE CURRENCY OF BUYERS: CONTENT
As you may know, sales reps who engage buyers with content facilitate better relationships and reinforce insights
without a sales pitch. The right content can gradually transform ordinary sales professionals into trusted resources,
thought leaders and industry experts. Content can come in the form of blogs, eBooks, videos, webinars and others.
Secondly, creating a centralized content library
that is aligned with the buyer journey and persona can
accelerate the entire education process. This is not just
about your company’s content but third-party thought
leadership content that sales professionals can
leverage to demonstrate subject matter expertise and
knowledge about the buyer’s challenges.
Typically, sales is demanding the marketing team
to produce content that answers questions they
hear in everyday interactions with prospects and
buyers. The question now is, why isn’t marketing
producing this? By including sales into the content
creation process, this will create a fundamental
alignment between sales and marketing.
Build Trust Thought Leadership Credibility Authority

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THE INSIGHTS FACTORY
Your Insights Factory will travel from the foundations of
creating insights, all the way to evaluating the engagement
of these insights to make informed decisions for incremental
improvement. There are four pillars to the Insights Factory:
DID YOU KNOW?
Reps who exceed quota
share 23% more content
each month on social media.
—— LinkedIn
1. Create: a foundation for
developing new insights at
scale. The scaling process will
accelerate depending on how
much you invest in people,
process and technology.
3. Organize: insights, which need
to be exposed to your buyers
fast. This is only possible
when you enable with tools
that allow the sales team to
capture and share insights
in a seamless motion.
2. Discover: innovative “guerrilla-
marketing like” ways that you
grow sales pipeline. Great
marketing teams experiment,
measure, rinse and repeat.
4. Evaluate: every interaction
your insights are having with
buyers. By compounding
these interactions together,
you will uncover trends
that help you roadmap a
prescriptive way to make
incremental improvements
to your Insights Factory.

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WHERE DO YOU STAND?
On average,
approximately 20% of
sales professionals in
technology companies
are sharing content.
We checked this over a
4-week period across
the top 250 technology
companies of the world.

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The initial focus will be to convince your sales team why this is important and that will take some good, old
fashioned elbow grease work. Causing a mindset shift will allow sales to understand why social is needed.
Once behaviors have demonstrably changed and upside ROI is the output, you can layer technology
and tools to accelerate results. But sales acceleration happens only when mindset is shifted first. Often
times the challenge in any organization is the sales teams’ low technology and tool adoption, even
social selling tools. Focus on retooling the mindset first before offering any technology to sales.
“Learning how to use Social Networks requires more
training than dialing the phone or sending an email.”
——Jill Rowley
Social Selling Evangelist
MINDSET, SKILLSET, TOOLSET

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When we hear the term social selling, we immediately think of LinkedIn’s many features (e.g. LinkedIn
Sales Navigator, Trigger Selling, InMails, groups, etc). But the reality is that social selling, in order to
be successful, is a process that involves a lot more in an organization. Social selling incorporates other
platforms, as well as strategies like marketing alignment, CRM integration, and measurement.
LinkedIn can only take you so far because you’re just skimming the surface. Many Sales Enablement teams
fall into a fallacy where they believe LinkedIn is the end all, be all. This unfortunately is what leads to
inconsistent social activity. Throwing LinkedIn Navigator at a sales team and hoping they learn them is like
blindly throwing a dart at a target. By doing so, there’s a lack of a concrete follow-up plan to ensure that
strategies turn into an actionable process which ultimately builds pipeline and generates revenue.
This problem doesn’t exist in traditional sales training, nor should it exist in social selling
training. However this is what happens today. In short, the plan to strategically incorporate
social into the overall sales process and activity cadence should be the goal.
BEYOND JUST SOCIAL MEDIA

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Leading Indicators: Learning, and the
willingness to learn, is a Leading Indicator.
You first need to understand whether you’re
creating a behavioral shift in your organization.
• Leading indicators are the tools and
processes you can implement to help
you understand if sales and marketing
professionals are digesting new ideas and
applying those ideas to their daily activity.
• Leading indicators can help you determine if
your sales reps are taking full advantage of
social selling. In a nutshell, you’re measuring
the mindset shift that translates to behavior.
To measure leading indicators, companies
will often leverage learning management
systems during training programs. They can
see the engagement of their team—who’s
watching videos, doing assignments, doing
their practicums and certification tests.
Current Indicators: You have tools
that measure if new learnings are
being translated into sales outcomes.
Examples of these tools are:
• CRM – Are your sales professionals having
new social conversations logged as Activity?
• Marketing Automation – Are new Leads being
driving through Social Campaigns? What
increase is social having to your new Leads?
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Are your sales
professionals leveraging the tool on a daily
basis? Which teammates are consistent
users and driving new social conversations?
• Employee Advocacy – Are your sales
professionals consistently sharing
insights? How are your sales team’s social
networks becoming lead generation
machines for your company?
Lagging Indicators: If you’re not
keeping track of the leading and current
indicators, you can’t do anything about a
lagging indicator for the next 90-180 days.
Lagging indicators provide a summary of your
efforts in trying to hit major milestones and goals.
For example, they help you answer
the following questions:
• Are you trying to hit a certain sales
quota attainment with a certain
percentage being social selling?
• What percentage of your pipeline
is attributable to social?
• Is there an incremental change in
pipeline because of social?
• What net new bookings and
conversations can be attributed to
social conversations either from sales
professional-driven and or marketing-
driven through demand gen waterfall?
LEADING, CURRENT AND
LAGGING INDICATORS

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LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps your organization mechanize the LinkedIn platform for Current
Indicator measurement. The platform has evolved beyond general prospecting, and become an
excellent account-centric sales tool. Its ultimate value is LinkedIn speed-to-execution, and depending
on the size of your organization, the scaling speed can mean huge selling hours saved.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator aggregates many of the processes that your sales team is naturally doing with a regular
LinkedIn account, but packages the process for Account-based selling. Save 10 minutes per day, times 250
business days, times 1,000 sales professionals and the speed-to-execution becomes massively important. As
you’re seeking ways to leverage the tool for measurement, LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index Score (SSI Score) is an
obvious choice. This score out of 100 is a gauge for your team to stack rank team members, and against industry
peers. You can also leverage the reporting section to give you highly valuable information on the following:
• What is our usage and adoption? • Are we “Socially Surrounding”
our Accounts?
• Are we committing to
Social Engagement?
On a daily basis, you want your sales team finding social signals and creating greater
conversational engagement. LinkedIn Sales Navigator will centralize that information.
THE ROLE OF LINKEDIN NAVIGATOR

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THE CURRENCY OF BUYERS: CONTENT
If you’re a professional – in sales, marketing, finance, etc. – LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index
score is one measurement of your social media and networking progress.
The SSI Score is out of 100 and weighted equally across 4 areas:
Basically, the SSI score is everything you already know you should do in sales
overall, but now captures these metrics with your social presence.
1. Establishing your
professional brand.
2. Finding the
right people.
3. Engaging with insights. 4. Building relationships.

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Sales Operations is the lynchpin to developing your Social Selling KPI metrics and milestones, and aligning
these to corporate goals. You will centralize the numbers to create one source of truth. We
cannot stress enough that improper metrics is where social selling programs crash and burn the
fastest. The reason for failure without proper centralized metrics is each of the “Three Amigos” department
leaders begins creating “what’s important to my group” metrics in a vacuum.
Even worse, we’ve seen many departmental leaders decide to roll out a social selling program, but never
inform the other departments the program even exists. How can you have expected to succeed? Your goals
may have little consequence to the overall corporate goals and initiatives. Ultimately, and we’ve watched this
misalignment unravel against my constant advice, the failed program ends in a company “blame game.” This is
a circle of blames that get passed off to other departments for your Social Selling program failures.
• If sales leadership is not
aligned, then expect there
will be little accountability
for sales professionals to
drive social selling actions
with any consistency.
• If marketing is left in the dark,
then the sales force will be
without sufficient content
and inbound leads to fuel
buyer conversations.
• If enablement hasn’t been
part of designing a continued
education plan, then expect
the sales force to revert to old
habits within a short order.
METRICS
MEASURING BEHAVIORAL CHANGE

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To mitigate this frustration up front, get sales, marketing, and sales operations/sales enablement leaders
in a room and develop “what does success look like for you?” Remember, people are typically self-serving,
so get their needs out on the table. Listen to what success means for each of these departments and begin
crafting a common goal. What shared successes can you all align to? From this vision, begin creating
more tactical goals for each department. Each goal has to be quantifiable – no fluff, no subjection.
QUANTIFIABLE OUTCOMES
FROM SOCIAL SELLING

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WHAT DOES SUCCESS
LOOK LIKE FOR
THE COMPANY?
The CEO said on our last
conference call that, within six
months, we need to create a
20-percent incremental uplift
in the sales pipeline. That sales
pipeline growth can come
from either new prospective
accounts and existing accounts.
WHAT DOES SUCCESS
LOOK LIKE FOR SALES
LEADERSHIP?
Within the 20-percent sales
corporate goal, the sales force
will contribute 50-percent
of that corporate goal. That
equals 10-percent, half of the
20-percent incremental uplift
required. This half from sales
will be a socially-driven pipeline
from direct sales activity.
WHAT DOES
SUCCESS LOOK LIKE
FOR MARKETING
LEADERSHIP?
Within the 20-percent sales
corporate goal, digital marketing
will contribute 50-percent
of that corporate goal. That
equals 10-percent, half of
the 20-percent incremental
uplift required. This half from
marketing will be from inbound
leads driven by digital insights.
Second, the other 50 percent
(which sales is being measured
against) will be marketing’s
responsibility to map the indirect
Lead Attribution (within the
“Content Consumption Story”)
of each buyer in the pipeline,
showing the value insights are
having on sales pipeline.
WHAT DOES SUCCESS
LOOK LIKE FOR SALES
ENABLEMENT?
To make this sales pipeline growth
possible, within the first 90 days,
90 percent of the sales team
will be certified on social selling
through a written and practical
test. The certification will be a
combination of a multiple-choice
exam, plus practicum presentation.
The practicum will have each sales
professional create a new lead
using social selling activity, and
present that new lead to their
sales manager for verification.
By multiplying one new lead
per sales professional, against
all sales professionals, we will
reach the sales pipeline goals
necessary for the required sales-
portion of our social selling KPIs.
Here is an example of that alignment:

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Behavioral change happens through practice. Often, commercial leaders who, by no fault of their own, immediately
want to only measure “how much money did we make from social?” Don’t get me wrong, this is the most
important measurable. But sales from social selling is a Lagging Indicator to success. Measuring socially-driven
sales will give you a snapshot of the last 90 or 180 days, but what do we do about these sales numbers if you’re
not hitting your quota? That correction should have been made weeks or months ago. Change your mindset to
thinking of measuring three levels of indicators. First the Leading, then Current, and finally, Lagging Indicators.

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LEADING, CURRENT AND LAGGING INDICATORS
FOR THE KIRPATRICK MODEL
Level 5: ROI Capture Can ROI be measured?
ROI =
(Revenue – Investment) / (Investment)
Level 4: Sales Impact Can sales impact be realized?
1. Sales Meetings Generated
2. Pipeline
3. Revenue
*Tracked in Marketing Automation and
CRM systems
Level 3: Behavior Change Has behavior changed as a result?
1. LinkedIn SSI Score
2. LinkedIn Network Growth
3. Daily Time Spent Social Selling
4. Content Sharing Impact
Level 2: Knowledge Transfer Has knowledge transfer occurred?
1. Module Completion
2. Live Training Attendance
3. Certification Completion
Level 1: Satisfaction
Are learners satisfied
with the content?
1. Satisfaction data on curriculum
2. Satisfaction data on instructor
Goals of Each Level KPIs Measured

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Like a great business plan, you need to plot your action plan. Random acts of social in an account will get you
nowhere. The statistics from InsideSales.com are clear: sales professionals are attempting less than two
touchpoints per buyer, when the needed touchpoints for your business could be 7-10 over 30 days. Today
sales professionals have even less structure and patience for a defined cadence and follow-up process.
Perhaps you have an existing multi-touch cadence. The only difference between this new sequence, and your old
sequence, most likely, is adding social touchpoints. If you don’t have a defined cadence, please feel free to use the
below framework to help you get started. A defined cadence isn’t about barraging a buyer with all mediums, all the
time. But it does require you to be fluid and to experiment. Experiment with different articles, video messages and
email templates that include a digital insight attached, voicemail messages leading to a landing page and so on.
Whatever you do, add value on every touchpoint. Value means teaching your buyer
something new that he or she didn’t know yesterday. We personally find it gratifying when
prospective buyers email, LinkedIn or Twitter message us, and first acknowledge that it’s
been our “point of view” and content shared that has led to them reaching out to us.
A MULTI-THREADED CADENCE

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11 STEP DAILY ROUTINE
THE ULTIMATE SOCIAL SELLING ROUTINE
FOR THE MODERN SALES PROFESSIONAL
A social selling routine that works only takes 30-60 minutes a day. How do we know? We
spoke with 65,000 sales professionals who are on social day in, day out. Below
you’ll find what those sales people told us — a comprehensive, up-to-date routine of
social selling best practises to ensure you can impact every stage of the buyer’s journey.
EDUCATE
STEP ONE1
Discover relevant content to share.
Does my content spark meaningful conversations with
buyers?
15 Insights That Prove
The Value Of Social Selling
NABEL BENDAGO
NABEL BENDAGO
STEP TWO2 Share or publish content with your social network.
Am I sharing content where my audience is?
ENGAGE
STEP THREE
Who viewed your Linkedin Profile?
3
Check who viewed your LinkedIn profile.
Do you have a common connection with this person?
Consider asking for an introduction.
DANIEL KU
TO WEBSITE
Click here to see
the full routine.

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TECHNOLOGY

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TO SOCIAL SELLING
FOR LEADERS
Sales for Life is known as the global leader in building, scaling and managing social selling programs.
We train sales and marketing organizations—from leaders to individual contributors.
We have built social selling programs for over 300 clients in nearly every
industry, ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 corporations.

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THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE
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FOR LEADERS
ABOUT SALES FOR LIFE
CHAT WITH OUR EXPERTS
Transform your organization to serve today’s buyer with digital and social selling
Create buy-in, measure success and scale digital and social selling across your
organization with Sales for Life three levels of implementation:
1. Create organizational awareness.
Teach people about the changes
happening in B2B sales and
marketing with insightful
keynotes, and actionable digital
and social selling workshops.
2. Build a business case. Understand the
state of your organization through
tailored assessments and audits.
Kickstart digital and social selling,
get results and build your case for
scale with our robust education
and enablement platform.
3. Scale your success. Drive
accountability, measurement and
scale digital and social selling success
with an integrated strategy.
CHAT WITH OUR EXPERTS