Account Planning strategies need to include social media. Learn how LinkedIn Sales Navigator can enable your team to build better client relationships and drive more revenue.
Account planning in the digital age is inextricably linked to social selling. We no longer cold call, cold email, or make sudden appearances to make products and services known. Social selling is now key in the account planning process. The marketing team designs the inbound funnel, and the sales team executes on it. Sales leaders give feedback so that marketing can optimize it for the best possible revenue outcomes.
While multiple social media platforms enable a social selling process, LinkedIn is by far the most effective. LinkedIn allows salespeople to quickly identify relevant Business Decision Makers, connect, and interact with them.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator in Account Planning
LinkedIn Messenger is an excellent digital tool for direct interaction, but it’s a lot to manage. This is especially true if your personal accounts have hundreds or thousands of connections. Messaging, another facet of nurturing leads, requires consistency. If you don’t keep in touch with your leads often enough, they could forget about you or go elsewhere. Additionally, each interaction with them needs to feel authentic. Sending a canned message to everyone disrupts the natural flow of conversation.
Enter LinkedIn Sales Navigator–a powerful add on for interacting and monitoring relationships. The dynamic search filtering features ensures that your people are consistently finding the right people to connect within less time. Salespeople can quickly identify key decision-makers to drive fruitful interactions as a team. Since it can filter by current connections and people that engage with posts, conversations will center around building relationships with warm leads and current clients.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator can also sync with Salesforce and Dynamics CRM. Now, all of your most important conversations and where each lead is in your funnel is visible to everyone on the team. If your approach is more collaborative, there is an option to create shared lists or shared searches. This allows Sales Enablement to feed back data to marketing, detailing how leads respond to current messaging. This feedback loop will inform Sales Enablement of how to best correct the salespeople’s course to bring in more revenue. How does this all tie into social selling? Every interaction is tied back to the larger growth goals. Whether it was via posting or direct interactions, all facets of successful social media selling require frequent interaction.
Steps to Sales Enablement
Sales Enablement begins with selecting the right tools and using them to their fullest potential. Because we now have so many possible channels to market to customers, we need to use those that are going to drive the best results. Active LinkedIn accounts with LinkedIn Sales Navigator will be your first and foremost to nurture your customers and engage with leads.
These tools and the interactions that take place are only one layer of Social Selling. Success cannot only be measured by the number of sales or interactions. The data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator that is fed back to your CRM (Salesforce or Dynamics) serves to inform Sales Enablement and Marketing how to adjust best messaging on both ends to drive more revenue. Each piece of technology you use should be interconnected as your Sales and Marketing teams are aligned.
Managing Connections
This approach is challenging because salespeople are busy. The interlink, Sales Enablement, doesn’t need to be your own employee. Hiring out this key role to a trusted partner allows your people to focus on what they do best. We help sales enablement leaders to implement the right strategy — providing training, coaching, insights and potential decision-makers for your sales and marketing teams. The information they need to inform and adjust the business strategy. It also serves to make sure that Marketing and Sales departments are combining forces to execute higher goals. Eventually, Sales Enablement will activate their sales and marketing teams to tailor their account-based approach.
Tricycle Europe supports organizations worldwide by coaching and training sales and marketing professionals. We’re also specialized in helping your Sales Enablement or Sales Excellence people drive their teams’ growth strategies. We evaluate your current position and lay the foundations you need to win in the digital world.
Companies that fully leverage the power of digital tools are going to be the frontrunners. This is why we are proudly partnered with companies like Microsoft, Citrix, or Accenture — building their foundations to optimize their digital selling strategy and become the leaders in the digital space.
The question that pops up now is ”how can you enable your sales teams to leverage social media at scale? Our upcoming webinar will break down some of these key activities you can implement to scale digital selling. We are fast approaching a digital revolution and want to help you confidently succeed. Click the link below to reserve your slot.
BOOK YOUR FREE SEAT HERE TO ATTEND OUR SCALING DIGITAL SELLING WEBINAR
We believe the future will be shaped by how people use digital tools and platforms. Therefore, we are enabling organizations to win in the digital space.