"Real"ationships are the new outbound

As I mentioned in my last post, replicating social media success is essential for scaling across your organization. One hypothesis @gerardodada and I formed when beginning to experiment with social media is that we could generate new leads.

We proved this hypothesis with the launch of our social media product. By actively listening for certain phrases and engaging with people who made mention of the new offering we were able to register 5 new leads. Now that we proved social media could generate leads it is time to transfer this knowledge to our lead generation team.

Just registering the leads is not enough; they must be nurtured and not only in an automated fashion, Dear "Customer name". Insides sales teams who have primarily been an outbound channel must shift their mindset to work on building relationships thru social media.

We just started training our lead gen team on using social media. One of the questions that popped up was around geography and who gets credit if a lead generated from social media is converted. To address in the short term we will assign the manager of the group with responsibility for doing the listening and interacting. Once a lead moves into an offline state it can then be handled by the person in the geo.

The long-term vision once we refine the process and get more of the team connected is to use the work flow function in radian6 to assign people to respond. The challenge is that geo is not always obvious. What really needs to happen is re-thinking comp models for these teams, perhaps once success is shown that will be a possibility. If you have the flexibility to do this I would encourage you to think about how you can eliminate any barriers.

Assigning a single person is not the best long-term solution, but avoiding overlap is the main goal. Recently I made mention of a brand and within an hour received two email from sales people asking me if I was taken care of. There clearly was a lack of orchestration and it felt very spammy. This is an experience I do not want our prospect to have.

If anyone else has started doing this I would love to hear some of the concerns from your teams.