Social selling and its missing intelligence.

Author: Nathan Windle, Product Director at Gumbyte.

As a marketing or sales professional you may already be aware of, or be practicing, social selling. If you’re not, it’s exactly as it sounds: selling to people via social channels – simple!

If you’re not sure of the best way to go about social selling, the internet provides a number of best practice articles and tips, which focus predominately on how to optimise social channels for selling. Like these ‘5 steps to social selling success’ from Forbes. It explains, “Social selling success is comprised of both making new connections and sharing great content. You start by identifying your target audience and connecting with their network of influencers.”

However, the tips skip a fundamental stage – missing the part about how to identify who the target audience is – and jump straight into how to educate and sell to it. What’s needed is something we call social intelligence.

Traditionally, the way to segment prospects is via company (SIC code) or contact; using standard fields such as job title, industry, company size or revenue to qualify prospects for campaigns. This is so that organisations can more accurately target their marketing and sales initiatives to provide personalised and more relevant experiences for recipients. This data is often stored in Marketing Automation or a CRM system. Now, with the evolution of social, certainly for demand gen, it’s now possible to target prospects based on their interests and actions in addition to traditional data.

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There are a few places to search for individuals; the social channels themselves or by using services such as Klout or Kred which can identify key prospects or social influencers by topic and reach. However, both of these avenues are time consuming and not exhaustive, and once the individuals are identified there is no easy way of exporting usable data such as an email address, phone number or behavioural activity. Appending the data to existing contacts database or using it to feed demand generation initiatives, and drive unique and personalised campaign journeys automatically, is also a challenge.

Following many years of working with Marketing Automation platforms and listening to customer pain-points around social, we witnessed a trend emerging. That trend was in both the inability of Marketing Automation and CRM platforms to make social media really work from a demand generation perspective, and to provide a single view of the customer encompassing both traditional and social data.

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To resolve this issue we launched Gumbyte, a software development lab that specialises in intelligent SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications to directly address the needs of those responsible for sales, marketing and executive decision-making. We felt that SaaS apps were the way to go because it provides users with a cloud based service which can be securely accessed on multiple devices, anywhere in the world and provide advanced integration capabilities that customers have come to expect from modern applications.

The key point here being integration – we don’t want to provide another silo, we would rather have our app gathering data in real-time and automatically feeding sales or marketing initiatives, be it directly into an automated demand generation program or directly into the CRM to facilitate real-time marketing. For marketers this is great because a lower time to marketing is a great source of competitive advantage.

The first product to come out of Gumbyte is CrowdVu, launching July 29th. The app will take the user through three steps; search, enrich and connect, resulting in rich and untapped social data that can be used to empower your demand generation and aid social selling.

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