Social Media Solutions Impact Key Sales Metrics

In my last post Do Social Media Tools Help B2B Companies to Sell? I looked at a recent study by ESResearch Group. The research found that Social Media tools were no help to B2B companies wanting to close sales.

When I read the report I immediately wondered if the B2B companies surveyed might be companies the Aberdeen Group terms as “Laggards.” Perhaps, perhaps not.

Aberdeen Group classifies companies into three groups as follows:

Best-in-class (the company uses practices and processes superior to industry average, resulting in top industry performance)

Industry Average (the company uses practices that are more or less average, resulting in average performance)

Laggards (company uses practices significantly behind the industry average, resulting in below average performance).

While Laggards struggle they also can learn a lot from their industry average colleagues on the path to becoming best in class.

In its report called Sales 2.0, Social Media for Knowledge Management and Sales Collaboration, the Aberdeen Group found that:

Best-in-class companies were more likely than the other two groups to incorporate social media tools into the sales department. Not necessarily for directly closing leads, but certainly for supporting the sales process, for collaboration and for knowledge transfer. According to Aberdeen Group 59% of Best-in-Class companies thought integrating social media solution within sales was a top priority compared to 35% of others.

Best-in-class companies are those experiencing year over year improvements in several key metrics, for example:

Bid to win Ratio, (BIC improved 89%, Laggards only 2%)

Revenue per account (BIC improved 86%, Laggards 14%)

Time to Quote, (BIC improved 79%, Laggards just 2%)

Market Share, (BIC improved 66%, Laggards 11%)

Sales contribution margin (BIC 66%, Laggards 8%)

Even though B2B companies are not singled out, the breadth of difference is considerable.

Find the problem then work to fix it

According to Aberdeen Group organizations evaluating sales technology solutions needs to identify those areas in a sales process where there are bottlenecks or communication breakdowns. Then they should apply the appropriate social media tools to the particular area. The research makes a point that unless the company is actually struggling in a particular area they may miss the value of social media tools.

For example companies need to decide which sales metric they hope to affect with the use of social media solutions. The overall advice is: identify the specific problem and work to fix that problem rather that simply bring in a new solution.

Maximizing CRM

While ESResearch made it clear that Customer Relationship Management solutions outclass social media tools for B2B Aberdeen Group’s research found that BIC companies were looking to integrate social media tools into their existing CRM solutions, bringing together the benefits of contact management and collaboration. Since these companies are top performers perhaps B2B companies struggling with seeing the value of social media can learn something from these BIC enterprises.

And among the relatively small sample of of survey respondents (11%) that currently integrate social media applications with their CRM solution, customer and prospect information from third-party data sources (73%), blogs (53%), wikis (45%) and content tagging (45%) were identified as the top social media tools currently being integrated.

Relevant B2B Fast Facts

90% of BIC companies improved average opportunity deal size, compared to 48% of IA and 10% of Laggards

65% of BIC companies decreased the time it takes to move leads through the pipeline. For Industry Average companies it was 13% and for Laggards it was just 2%.

Next: Steps to success for Laggards.