For years, a truism among social media marketers is that B2B is a soft medium, better suited to raising awareness, thought leadership and passive relationship building than to pursuing hard sales objectives. We argued increased length of B2B sales cycles and difficulty of tracking customers from one platform to another as main reasons for not attempting full-scale CRM activities.
While those are both valid, one of the main reasons we steered clear was the sheer amount of work it would take to identify, track and funnel leads to sales in the absence of a comprehensive social CRM tool. Advising clients to build a custom database and assign community management resources to enter, tag and monitor individual leads by hand never seemed like a winning proposition.
And so, we stuck to strategies that made the most sense, to get the most bang for a client’s buck. And while establishing thought leadership by producing best-in-class content undeniably works, it’s got two things going against it, from an internal perspective. First, producing high-quality content on a regular basis takes a lot of work; second, it eats into time when employees could be pursing shorter-term wins through more familiar channels. Plus, we were always faced with the same measurement issues. If we can’t adequately connect follows, likes and mentions to the bottom line, how can we expect to convince skeptical managers and salespeople to participate in a program that seems like more work for questionable return?
Which is why I nearly jumped out of my skin with excitement back in March when I read that Salesforce.com was acquiring Radian6. Could we be on the verge of discovering the B2B social Holy Grail? That remained a question mark for the better part of the summer as details were ironed out. Now, according to Radian6’s website, many of the features we’ve been holding out for are becoming a reality:
– Enable social media and community teams to see a customer’s entire service case history from the Radian6 dashboard, providing context for outreach and engagement
- Build new contacts, leads, or service cases and push them to the sales team for follow-up actions to streamline workflow
- Link social properties like blogs or Twitter accounts to existing CRM contacts, or create new contacts or leads from social properties discovered through monitoring
- Automatically capture social conversations mentioning your brand generated by your customers or prospects in social media
- View your team’s engagement notes from the Radian6 dashboard within each customer or prospect record
This all makes great marketing copy, but what does it mean for B2B businesses that link these two powerful services?
1. Greater integration between marketing and sales.
These teams can sometimes seem disconnected, especially in larger organizations. Total lead-gen transparency between the two groups can lead to a greater understanding of each others’ efforts and decrease frustration as sales no longer has to wait for marketing to qualify and hand off new leads.
2. Greater understanding of social media ROI.
With the two systems talking to one another, it becomes relatively simple to track social-media initiated sales and assign conversion values to community activities, providing all-important justification for assigning work hours to social media efforts.
3. Better understanding of effective engagement tactics.
Giving marketing teams the tools to determine what types of engagements lead to sales allows for better resource allocation and less likelihood that social media audiences will tune out messaging over time.
4. Larger community management teams.
This one might seem like a bit of a flyer, but as marketing and sales teams refine lead-gen efforts to bring more sales in the door, marketing departments may be freed up to invest more heavily in the human resources required to step up social media-based customer service and intake efforts, creating new job opportunities.
These are just some of the immediate impacts that I can see coming. Can you see any other opportunities or difficulties the Radian6 and Salesforce partnership may present to B2B organizations?
