How to Get Your Sales Team Onboard With Social Media

revenue startup tipsLast week I had the honour of co-hosting and presenting at the first KW B2B Marketers Meetup, alongside Brainrider.

I was surrounded by great talent in the marketing industry, including my co-presenters Alan Quarry of Quarry Integrated Communications and Scott Armstrong of Brainrider.

In an effort to continuously promote the success that can come from implementing social media into your marketing strategy and efforts, I presented on “Social Media for Sales Professionals,” with a focus on how marketing can work WITH the sales in order to get sales teams onboard the social media train.

For a full view of my presentation, you can take a look here.

Marketing is too market-y

Does your sales department perceive the marketing department as a tight knit group of professionals who sit around and do arts and crafts all day? If so, you are a witness to the great divide between the sales and marketing departments. By separating the two, we are classifying them as isolated functioning units, when in fact, they work best when working together

Sales is too sales-y

Perhaps the marketing department perceives their fellow sales peers as avid golfers who only claim to be moving the company forward. Isolating the efforts of the sales department from the marketing department reaffirm the divide between departments and ultimately hinder the success of the company.

What can marketing do?

Create great content and implement social media strategies that the sales team can follow. Generate a plan, consolidate resources and start executing the social media efforts you hope to see from your sales team. For example, update your company Linkedin page, post content and start generating a following base. Update your company Twitter page, share content about your company and industry and start to increase your Twitter community (aka your followers).

What should the sales team be doing?

Executing these well thought out strategies for their own accounts. Increase their networks and simultaneously direct traffic back to the company platforms and website.

How can marketing help sales along the way?

Set up Linkedin and Twitter tutorials. Setting up tutorials along the way will help your sales team keep up with their efforts, as well as keep them posted on new trends and tools they might not be familiar with. For example tutorials, take a look at the presentation shown above.

How else can marketing help?

Send them to events in the area. Instead of sending your marketing team, send the sales professionals. They will not only learn a thing or two about marketing but they put themselves in an environment to make new connections. Beforehand, have them research who will be attending for any potential prospects; from here, put them in a private Twitter list. Ensure they know the proper social media etiquette in order to follow up with those they met (or didn’t get the chance to) after the event.

To keep their social media efforts simple and to the point, outline a weekly plan the sales team can follow. Remember not to set up unrealistic expectations. Here is an example.

Weekly Plan

15-20 minutes/2-3 times per week

Twitter

  • Check home feed, lists, mentions and DMs
  • Schedule 2-3 tweets throughout the day (and next) – use Hootsuite
  • Follow 3-5 new users during 15-20 minute social media intervals. Add them to lists!

Linkedin

  • Review messages and take a look at who has viewed your profile
  • Review 2-3 group discussions and post 1 comment
  • Send out 1 update. Note: In the first few weeks, the marketing team can help provide some great resources for content (Hint: Education material on company website)

Thank you to everyone who came out and made the first KW B2B Marketers Meetup a success! Stay tuned for information on the next one taking place on Thursday, September 13th.

For more information on how you can get your sales team onboard with social media, take a look at our whitepaper on Getting Started with Twitter.

How to Get Your Sales Team Onboard With Social Media