We see a lot of gurus sharing recipes to transform social media (in particular LinkedIn) into a highly efficient B2B revenue generating machine. Some of them share good pieces of advice, I am certainly not questioning this. The real question here, for any company whose revenue model stems from complex sales, is: what should I expect from B2B social networking? 

I use social media a lot, to learn about on any B2B marketing & sales trends which could help me reach my objectives, as a marketer. My main clients are sales, pre-sales and business developers, so my success as a marketer mostly depends on my ability to contribute to their objectives. I believe we will all agree on the fact that the best KPIs to evaluate this is potential revenue, opportunities, whatever we call them.

This being said, the next question is: can B2B social media marketing help me achieve my company’s goals, in terms of revenue. Probably, yes. But at what cost?

It is all about alignment between B2B sales & marketing

As explained by Sales For Life, “Social media marketing and social selling operate as parts of a single mechanism for driving revenue, but only when sales and marketing work together effectively”.

B2B social media marketing, simply put, is a branch of content marketing, consisting of delivering the right content you created at the right place, under the right format, with the right timing, to influence clients or potential clients on moving to the next business stage. Employee advocacy is the exponential lever which can transform social media marketing into a powerful communicative machine. Employee advocacy allows you to reach a much larger audience and have your message be seen by an exceptionally larger audience.

B2B social selling is a way for your sellers (most sales, pre-sales and business developers) to use social media for engaging with potential customers, with the clear objective to accelerate the revenue generation process. In comparison to social media marketing, it goes much further than employee advocacy, it is clearly online prospection. This approach certainly needs to be properly orchestrated for the following key reasons: territory management, no overlap between different salesmen targets, tone of voice, what level of aggressiveness the sellers can adopt and making sure everyone is following the rules of ethic social selling, and so on.

For a B2B company, I believe that (1) social media marketing, (2) employee advocacy and (3) social selling should be three steps to reach, one at a time, but which are completely interdependent to each other. Step 2 cannot be achieved without step 1. Though step 3 can be run in parallel of step 1 and 2, as social selling targets a population which is complementary to the one targeted social media marketing and employee advocacy. Some will disagree, but what I have already observed in the B2B industries since 2009, makes me think this way.

As a decider focused on revenue generation, you must be interested in social selling, besides the brand awareness and indirect business acceleration hidden behind B2B social media marketing. If you call a specialized company tomorrow to help you implement a strong social selling approach, if you are ready to invest a significant amount of resources, money, time and a lot of energy, yes, you will increase your revenue. That is for sure. You will also understand that this type of approach will require you to re-think, re-consider and re-build the whole way you have been communicating since the initial existence of your organization. This is heavy. I’ve contributed to such projects in the past. And most importantly, you will need the help of marketing to make it in such a way that will not damage the reputation of the company. Many companies dived into social selling too fast and are now biting their fingers about it.

B2B social media marketing + B2B employee advocacy + B2B social selling = B2B social networking

Whatever approach you want to implement in your company (pure social media marketing, pure employee advocacy, pure social selling), it will be efficient if the strategy establishment and implementation comes from the top business managers of the company, and not essentially (as is often the case) from digital marketing highly-educated stakeholders CMOs and CDOs. Every business unit director, every sales and pre-sales director (indirect and direct business) should be globally involved and locally in charge of a long-term approach, tracking the efficiency of the strategy.

I had a chance to interview Susan Tatum, B2B Social Media Business Strategist recognized in the B2B marketing playground. She agreed to share with us her vision of today’s B2B Social Media main challenges. 

You are specialized in social media marketing for B2B businesses, but what actually makes you specialized in B2B? What do you think is the difference between B2B and B2C?

It might be more accurate to say that I am specialized in online marketing for complex sales. In other words – businesses that sell products and services where buyers have a multi-phased decision-making processes and often there are many people involved in the buying decision. This tends to be uniquely B2B. It differs from a transactional sale where the purchase decision is low risk, made relatively quickly and where the quantity of leads and prospects is often more important than quality. So the approach is quite different from B2C. In the complex B2B world, we have to educate and build trust over time. In this situation some social media networks (not all) are good for generating awareness, initial connections and ongoing engagement. At some point though, the relationship has to be moved offline and into phone calls and possibly face-to-face meetings before a sale is finalized.

Please describe your history with social media? How did you realize that there was a potential in social media marketing to increase B2B sales? Do you honestly believe that SMM can generate sales?

I’ve been a marketer all my life — always B2B and mostly tech. I watched social media for many years before I got involved in it. I recognized that it was substantially changing the way people communicated – at least in the B2C world, and I felt sure it would change B2B at some point so I kept an eye on it. About 6 or 7 years ago I saw LinkedIn morphing from a mostly job site to an online networking site for business people. As a communication person it was obvious to me that LinkedIn had the ability to replace or enhance “live” communication in the beginning stages of a sale. I experimented with it and found that I could identify and connect with people I would have difficulty reaching by a cold email or phone call.

Back then, the only people I could find who were running successful lead generation programs on LinkedIn were focusing on internet marketers and “solopreneurs”. I contacted them to learn about their process and together we refined it to support complex sale situations.

As any B2B marketer I have my Twitter sources. People whose B2B tweets are relevant, helpful, not essentially promotional and mostly neutral. I decided to highlight 10 must-follow BtoB marketing Twitter accounts in this article today.

Alex Clarke (@alexclarke_b2b): Alex is working as a digital content manager at @MarketingB2B, which became a reference for every B2B marketer. Alex sounds very passionate about what he posts and about his job, I like his enthusiasm and I am definitely supportive as a young B2B marketing fellow myself. He is mixing professional and personal tweets quite interestingly, which makes his approach look real (another social media marketing best practice fellows…). Alex is a good writer, as you can see in this great infographic-based article “10 musts for your B2B website homepage”: https://www.b2bmarketing.net/resources/blog/infographic-week-10-musts-your-b2b-website-homepage

Ardath Albee (@ardath421): Ardath is the CEO of Marketing Interactions Inc., which basically helps B2B companies to elaborate and implement efficiently their digital marketing strategies. Ardath is a pleasure to follow: she shares views and 30 years of experience in business management and marketing operations as well as fresh news about B2B marketing and she has great interactions with her peers on Twitter (besides pushing a lot of interesting information). See her nice video contribution on Backbone Media. Looking forward to interviewing you soon Ardath!

David Hubbard (@MOutfield): David is the CEO of Marketing Outfield, a Sales and Marketing consulting and implementation firm.  What I like in David’s Twitter feed is that he is permanently trying to fill the gap between Sales and Marketing, and this is typically the type of challenge I face on a daily basis as a B2B marketer, besides the usual Marketing-related challenges (“how to make your campaigns more efficient?”, “how to make my webinar announcement more exciting?”, “how to implement my marketing automation tool?”, etc.).