How to work like a network: for the sales professional

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR SALES

How to Work Like a Network: For the Sales ProfessionalYour Guide to Prospecting, Collaborating, and Closing Deals Faster with Enterprise Social


Estimated reading time: 15 minutes


IntroductionPart One: A Sales World Turned Upside DownPart Two: Enter the Enterprise Social PlayPart Three:Change the Way You Sell

Table of Contents

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Enterprise Social describes a new way of working that taps into the power of human networks. It’s an approach that brings the essence of consumer social networks—connecting with others, rapid information sharing, and easy discovery—to the enterprise. By connecting individuals to a dynamic network of people and information, Enterprise Social enables employees to respond faster, accomplish more, and keep your business moving forward together.

The Microsoft vision for Enterprise Social is to empower organizations to work like a network by delivering seamless social experiences across familiar applications people already use, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Yammer, SharePoint Online, Lync, and virtually any other application or service that matters to your company.


The saturation of social networking, review sites, and online forums has changed the game for salespeople. In a world where customers can nimbly discover what they want and need—and a few unhappy customers can unravel years of good marketing—salespeople need in-time information about what their peers and customers are doing and talking about.

In a hyper-connected landscape, people can find a wealth of product and service information on their own, and bypass the salesperson. The web makes product descriptions, customer reviews, and competitive comparisons universally available. Buyers form opinions and narrow their choices long before engaging with vendors. When they do engage with a salesperson, they expect a fast response tailored to their needs. And they deserve that.

It’s time to go straight to the goal of delighting and satisfying customers with your products and services.

“By tapping into the human networks that make a business tick, companies can listen to the conversations that matter most, adapt to an increasingly volatile market, and grow in ways never before possible.”

—Jared Spataro, General Manager, Enterprise Social at Microsoft

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This e-book’s objective is to show you how to optimize your sales organization to do just that, by adopting Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies. It describes these Enterprise Social tools and the value of these solutions for your sales team. It presents three common sales situations—prospecting, collaborating, and closing—and demonstrates how you can improve your sales processes with Enterprise Social.

Finally, it shows you and your team how to get started with strengthening relationships and closing more deals.

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A Sales World Turned Upside DownPart One:


To adapt to the changing sales landscape, Microsoft has woven Enterprise Social tools into core capabilities that can unify and ignite your sales team to close deals faster and better engage with customers.

Its integrated technology solutions enable sellers to thrive in a sales world turned upside down. On the one hand, selling is more difficult because customers do their own research and make buying decisions based on what they find. On the other hand, Enterprise Social technologies can accelerate the sales process by removing roadblocks that can hamper progress—making it more efficient than ever before.

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With Enterprise Social technologies, you can listen to conversations within your company over Yammer, an Enterprise Social network, and conversations outside your company with Microsoft Social Listening; you can adapt to changes and customer needs quickly by working together and by using Microsoft Office 365 productivity tools; and you can grow your business impact by using Microsoft Dynamics CRM to integrate marketing and sales campaigns to drive leads and close opportunities.

“Enterprise Social allows me as a seller to be constantly connected and agile enough to deliver the most targeted solutions for my customers’ needs,” says Lindsay Gardner, sales enablement manager at Microsoft. “The tools allow me to be more efficient in terms of operations, including customer relationship management (CRM) targeting and pipeline management. More powerfully, Enterprise Social helps me grow as a seller, crowd source remedies to obstacles, tailor discussions, learn from my peers, and achieve success with my accounts.”

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Delve, a newer cloud application within Office 365, surfaces your contacts and documents, including recently viewed, created, or sent presentations—in an easy-to-view card sorter. Delve uses machine learning from the Office Graph, smartly mapping all relationships, conversations, and documents. For example, before an important client meeting, you can review past meeting presentations and documents by clicking the Presented to me tab. Delve saves sales professionals time and eliminates the hassle of lengthy and sometimes dead-end document searches.

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, now integrated with social profiles, you can easily view your most relevant prospects. By using Microsoft Social Listening—a part of Microsoft Dynamics CRM that keeps track of the latest social media news regarding your brands, products, and services—you can gain a clearer understanding of your customers and the topics that matter most to them.

Microsoft has adapted to the changing sales landscape by weaving Enterprise Social into the following core applications: Microsoft Office 365, which includes SharePoint Online, Yammer Enterprise, OneDrive for Business, and Lync Online; and Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Social Listening.

Tools for the New Rules of SellingToday’s effective sales professional can take advantage of a variety of Microsoft social selling features that are integrated into many of the familiar Office tools that salespeople use every day. You can build richer user profiles, collaborate with colleagues on developing sales collateral stored by using SharePoint Online or Microsoft OneDrive for Business, and create Office 365 Groups that facilitate structured and intuitive decision making across disciplines.

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Enter the Enterprise Social PlayPart Two:


Competitive disruption is a term for when your customers’ needs exceed or deviate from what you can deliver; when that happens, your customers find a company that can meet their needs.

Isn’t that a fancy way of saying somebody else got the business? Is the customer always right, as he was in 1971? Is it what Omar Little said to the police detail on the television series The Wire? “The game is out there, and it’s either play or be played.”

The game is out there, and there is an opportunity. The modern sales force is a collaborative one in which Enterprise Social gives salespeople more control over an

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opportunity and its advancement, and promotes agility and responsiveness in the face of challenges. With Enterprise Social, the sales process is smoother and more structured. Customers come to understand that best practices are in place in your organization and that your sales team is working in tandem with other disciplines companywide to serve them—from awareness and research to closing and adoption.

“Closing can be the trickiest stage of the sales cycle—the most challenging and unpredictable,” says Gardner. “With Enterprise Social, our team is fully supported with tools that help us be prepared, agile, and responsive to customers at the right time. It’s a monumental shift in approach.” Microsoft Enterprise Social hands you these modern sales capabilities, and here’s how.

ProspectingSales leaders have reason to celebrate. It’s never been easier to provide customized service with exquisite timing. With Enterprise Social tools, you can see in every direction. With a highly functioning sales team, important news, messages, and data are funneled at once to the front-line sales representatives. With the right technology, you are well positioned to serve existing customers and bring aboard new ones.

Twitter reported in September 2013 that 200 million users send more than 400 million tweets daily. Social media could unleash $1.3 trillion in value to

“It’s all about integration. Microsoft Dynamics CRM caps the stack, but behind the scenes we make sure that Yammer drives the conversations within the business; we use SharePoint to drive our knowledge-management systems; we use Lync to surface the presence of our colleagues—Office 365 is the backbone of our office infrastructure.”

—Paul Marriott-Clarke, Commercial Director, Metro Bank

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Listen UpBy using Microsoft Social Listening, a sales team tracks social networks and gets alerts to any mentions of their products and services. Researchers on the sales team can set parameters, such as hashtag searches and @ mentions, for listening to Twitter.

Get in ThereThe sales team can work without interruption in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which features InsideView, a tool that pulls information from 30,000 sources, including LinkedIn. Prospects’ social information is available without ever having to leave the CRM application.

Build TrustSalespeople make face-to-face connections with buyers, build stronger relationships, and encourage trust by using Microsoft Lync, or Lync Online with Office 365, to communicate with chat or video. Organizations avoid travel costs, too.

Be Productive Connecting is made easy with an in-the-cloud Yammer network available with Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and with SharePoint Online, a part of Office 365. Yammer Enterprise is social software that organizations use for private and public internal communications. Office 365 also includes productivity tools—including Microsoft Word Online, Excel Online, and PowerPoint Online—that enable you to co-author documents and institute version control.

Collaborate SeamlesslyOrganizations of any size can securely store, sync, share, and easily collaborate on files through a cloud-based storage service by adopting OneDrive for Business. With this easy-access storage in the cloud, salespeople in the field can work together on a contract, for example, with colleagues in the office.

Ways Enterprise Social Can Improve Your Prospecting Process

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the economy, according to a study from the research arm of business consulting giant McKinsey. The report says value will come from added productivity, improved customer focus, and better-functioning teams—among other benefits. Millions of messages daily, and with Enterprise Social, you have the technology to make sense of it.

Microsoft Social Listening

With Microsoft Social Listening—a part of Microsoft Dynamics CRM—your sales, service, and marketing teams can understand the customer better and deliver personalized customer experiences. They are empowered to monitor social networks such as Twitter for information about your brand or competition, and analyze sentiment and engagement.

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Even learning about negative statements related to your competitors helps you focus your efforts. Microsoft Social Listening alerts you to trends so you can stay on top of the topics that matter the most to your market, and preempts loss by addressing buyers’ concerns immediately and on target. “One tweet we found uncovered a company that didn’t understand the point of a competitor’s software,” says Gardner. “We reached out and explained the business value, roles, and responsibilities. And we also drew their interest away from this competitor.”

Microsoft Social Listening is extremely powerful. By strategically listening to customers’ mentions of keywords related to your particular industry, you get a better understanding of what’s important to them and can tailor your pitch accordingly.

“Sometimes we have tapped into key words so early that our prospects have not even begun an evaluation. Our team is the first one to the account,” says Gardner. “In this modern era, when your customers have so much influence, if you’re the first to the conversation, there’s more trust, control, and momentum.”

Social sellers are 51 percent more likely to reach their quotas than non-social sellers.

—Aberdeen Research

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Collaborating InternallyAs a sales leader, you need a tight, top-notch sales team who can find out exactly what’s happening in the minds of customers and collaborate with one another to drive success. In most cases, salespeople can no longer operate individually. Marketing and sales are more tightly aligned than ever before, with more accurate analytics, delicate lead nurturing, and precise handoffs. Sales teams need to get more work done more efficiently, and put their minds together as a team to capture and carry out the best ideas.

Sales needs the right collaboration and communication tools to stay connected with the rest of the business. The range of Microsoft Enterprise Social solutions makes it easier for internal teams to share knowledge, work together, and make real-time decisions. Lync, Skype, Yammer, and SharePoint are integrated to enable teamwork from within the CRM application. And because the world is mobile, so are all Enterprise Social tools.

“I use Lync to conduct all my meetings and screen-sharing presentations. With Lync, we have voice, screen sharing, the ability to upload attachments, and referenceable documents. It is very powerful.”

—Lindsay Gardner, Sales Enablement Manager at Microsoft

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Ways Enterprise Social Makes Knowledge Sharing, Teamwork, and Decision Making Easier

Open a DialogueGather the information you need from the right people at the right time. Tap into your company’s organizational knowledge from any location with Yammer’s centralized communication and document repository. Conversations can also occur within contact, account, lead, or opportunity records inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Keep It TogetherTeam members working on presentations, proposals, or RFPs will be able to use the powerful co-authoring and version control capabilities with Microsoft SharePoint working directly within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Know Your ExpertsQuickly identify subject matter experts with your company or decision makers, and make use of their insights to close deals. Lync and Skype provide a powerful and simple way to interact with colleagues, partners, and contacts. Presence icons within Microsoft Dynamics CRM facilitate one-click interaction.

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“We established a Yammer Group within our sales team,” says Gardner. “We shared best practices and successful pitches. When you’re reaching out to a CEO, you need to know what unique approach to take and what tactics will work best. There was one particular methodology that worked really well.

When you’re collaborating around different approaches to the C-level suite, you can also collaborate around key talking points for different industry verticals—talking points that really drive the ‘why you, why now?’ conversation with prospects.”

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Closing (aka “Winning”)Closing faster means creating personal, targeted experiences with prospects. Salespeople must be constantly connected. They must be incredibly agile. The stakes are high, and there are no excuses. If you want an Enterprise Social play in the game, and if you want to win, there are three must-have tools you’re going to need:

Gain Access to Prospects’ Social Information

By using Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrated with solutions by InsideView, connecting to prospects though social networks helps generate warm leads. For example, you can access your LinkedIn contacts without having to leave the Microsoft Dynamics CRM app.

Get to Know the Person Behind the Contact Data

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM with 360-Degree View, you can get real-time professional and contact information from 30,000 business and social sources. Available profiles provide account, lead, and contact updates.

Employ and Customize Expert Process Flows

Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers a guided sales experience with built-in sales best practices and customized process flows designed by industry experts. Your team can drive toward successful outcomes, ensure consistency, and easily adapt to change. The point-and-click process designer makes even the most complex business processes manageable.

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A message sent by LinkedIn InMail that uses a second-degree connection has a whopping 67 percent response rate.

—Neural Selling

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Change the Way You SellPart Three:


People have changed the way they buy, so you need to change the way you sell.

Enterprise Social solutions include intuitive features that help ensure rapid, widespread adoption by sales professionals. Ramp-up time is fast, and training costs are low. You can reduce risk while expanding capacity with world-class Enterprise Social tools from Microsoft, a longtime productivity leader and trusted IT vendor.

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“[Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM business processes] we have observed an increase in revenues by improving the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate by more than 75 percent and closing more sales.”

—Ashish Pandey, All India Sales Head, Godrej Infotech Ltd.

But those benefits are trivial compared to the insights and timing that will justify your investment in your sales networking environment: better prospecting, improved team collaboration and information sharing, and stronger personal relationships.

To work like a network and learn about sales productivity solutions that help you close deals faster, contact Microsoft Enterprise Social at www.enterprisesocial.com.

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www.enterprisesocial.com

How to work like a network: for the sales professional

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