Social Selling Influencers

May 11, 2016 by brianoconn

The Bitter Business is delighted to be named in the TOP 100 BRANDS and influencers for Social Selling. The report complied by Onalytica was to identify which Social Selling brands and individuals were leading the online discussion. They analysed 263K+ tweets from 16 November 2015 – 4 February 2016 mentioning the keywords “Social Selling” OR socialselling OR socialsales OR “social sales” and identified the top 100 most influential brands and individuals leading the discussion on Twitter.

In the top 100 brands there is organisations such as Salesforce and Hootsuite and some top industry resources such as SocialMedia Examiner and Social Media Today.While 38 on the global list is a great achievement, it should be noted that The Bitter Business is flying the flag for social selling from Ireland.

Social Selling is an evolutionary step forward making the sales process more productive and meaningful

The Top 4 Reasons Why Companies Embrace Social Selling

Old sales tactics have diminishing returns:

90% of decision makers say that they never respond to cold outreach

(Harvard Business Review).

Buyers use social media:

75% of B2B buyers now use social media to research vendors (IDC).

Bigger deal sizes:

Buyers who use social media have larger budgets – typically 84% larger than the budgets of buyers who do not use social (IDC).

Better Sales Achievement:

Social sellers realize 66% greater sales achievement than those using traditional prospecting techniques (Sales Benchmark Index).

Social selling starts by being about the relationship between sales professionals and the connections they have nurtured in social media spaces. While there is a lot of social selling that takes place on LinkedIn (which is considered the businessperson’s social media space), there is also a tremendous amount of it going on in all social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Google+, Periscope, Blab, and others. (If you aren’t familiar with all the social media spaces and how to use social selling that your sales team can be a part of, don’t worry! there are lots of articles in our Social Selling category to keep you going.)

Monday 9 May 2016

Connecting Content Marketing to Sales – The Bitter Business

How to use content marketing for improved sales enablement is a big discussion point among sales and marketing leaders. Most B2B companies rely on selling by direct sales teams to generate a large percentage of their revenues. For these companies, improving sales performance is a critical business objective, and sales enablement alongside the use of social media is seen as the best method for delivering company revenue goals.

When executed correctly, sales enablement has the involvement of both marketing and sales. Content marketing resources such as research articles, whitepapers, e-books, testimonials, video content and case studies plays a vital role in sales enablement. The marketing department are the ones usually tasked with creating the content assets.

Does your sales team understand your content strategy?

Research shows there can be a mismatch between the content that marketing produces and the content the sales people need to progress their sales opportunities. The findings included that:

Only fifty four percent of sales people and sixty five percent of sales managers understand their company’s content marketing strategy.
While 65 percent of sales people and seventy four percent of sales managers say the content their company publishes is valuable to their customers.
However, a full fifty two percent of sales people and forty three percent of managers say the content their company publishes helps improve sales effectiveness.

The results show that nearly 50% of sales people do not understand the content strategy. So what is the issue?

Read the rest of the article here:

Connecting Content Marketing to Sales – The Bitter Business