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Uncovering new sales opportunities and keeping your funnel full can be challenging for businesses of any size. With competitors always at your heels, it’s essential to find, assess, and take action on any possible lead you can - and ignoring social media as a valuable lead source would be a huge missed opportunity.

But the idea of social selling is not a new topic. There is plenty of advice available online about best practices, but when it comes to getting advice on how you can actually execute a solid plan, the resources are limited. Not to worry though; we are here for you!

In this use case, we will show you six simple steps for using Sysomos MAP and Sysomos Heartbeat to uncover, evaluate, and respond to sales opportunities on social media - and keep your businesses sales funnel full of quality opportunities.

USE CASE: Social Selling, Advice to Action

MAP is an ad-hoc social research engine that delivers deep, actionable insights into the people and conversations that matter most to your brand.

For more information click here.

Heartbeat is a social monitoring, analysis, and engagement tool that helps marketers understand and respond to their most important social conversations.

For more information click here.

“We want to uncover, evaluate, and

respond to sales opportunities using

social media.”

“We want to use social media as a

lead-generation tool for our business.”

“We want to analyze our audience on

social to help our sales strategy online

and offline.”

Do these challenges sound familar? Solutions from Sysomos

Social Selling, Advice to ActionStep 1 (MAP) Finding Your Audience

Knowing your audience is an essential component to social selling, but this can hard to implement due to the sheer size and scope of the social sphere. However, with the robust social research capabilities within MAP, finding and researching your audience (step 2) is easy. You likely already know the social channels your target audience is most active on and for them to be relevant you’ll want to look for language that references your brand, products, competitors, industry, or product categories. It also helps to be creative and think of things like the language used in scenarios that may indicate a product or service need you can fulfill.

Whatever you choose to search for to identify your audience, keep in mind the way people naturally speak on social media. Direct and indirect brand or competitor references, common misspellings and slang, hashtags used, word iterations, and owned social property references are all things to consider.

Take advantage of the ad-hoc and unlimited search capabilities of MAP by working through some trial and error Boolean queries, and checking the mentions to gauge accuracy and volume. Once satisfied with the results of your queries, choose five to ten queries that you feel adequately capture your brand and products, your competitors, your industry or category, and any additional buckets such as needs scenarios. To learn more about effective query writing in MAP click here.

Step 2 (MAP) Research How Your Audience Talks

Moving on to step two: using the queries you made in step one. Looking for references to your brand, products, competitors, industry and product categories is an important but relatively obvious first step in social selling, but within the thousands of mentions you’ll likely come across, there will be many different audience segments, voices, and topics that will be invaluable for assessing and routing sales opportunities.

By utilizing text analysis features like the BuzzGraph, Word Cloud, and entities, you can get a macro view of the thousands of mentions that make up your query volume and determine which ones require you to create segment specific queries for your audience.

For Example:

A homeware company may find a social post stating “Dinner party tonight, let the cooking marathon begin! #WorthIt #Hostess”to be a ripe sales opportunity, even though it has no obvious brand, competitor or industry reference.

Sample Search Queries

Sample Relavant Post

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Step 3 (Heartbeat) Segment and Categorize Your Audience’s Mentions to Uncover Sales Opportunities

Once you’ve been through steps one and two in MAP, and you are ready to commit your findings to long term everyday monitoring, it’s time to move to over to Heartbeat. At this point, it can be a good practice to consult and share your MAP findings with your dedicated Sysomos account team to either guide or help with your Heartbeat query and tag set up. To learn more about Heartbeat setup click here.

When you start building out the tags, which are useful for categorizing sales opportunities, there are a few things you’ll want to consider:

Naming Convention for TagsClear and specific naming conventions are important for ensuring your social teams can quickly identify, categorize, and effectively route sales opportunities to the most appropriate team or individual. Naming conventions are also helpful for reporting activities you may do after the fact, and also for the recipient of a social lead to know what’s being sent to them. You can even use your naming conventions to help your social team determine what to action first.

For Example:

A tag that categorizes ‘where to buy’ social questions could be labeled as “TIER 1 Sales – Purchase-Location” so that your social team knows to look at “TEIR 1 Sales” mentions first each day.

Tag Naming Conventions

Sample Tag Syntax

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Social Selling, Advice to ActionFor example you may see in the BuzzGraph that words like ‘expensive’ or ‘afford’ or ‘saving for’appear frequently together, giving you a strong indication that price is a sales opportunity category that is worth separating. Or, for example, you may see words like ‘store’ or ‘location’ or ‘where to buy’ or ‘available in’ occurring frequently in the Word Cloud, indicating that purchase location is another sales category worth separating.

Some additional sales categories to look for in your mentions analysis may include: price, location, purchase intent, cross sell, renewal, up sell, feature inquires, competitor comparisons, competitor complaints, and many more. Consulting with your own sales leaders can help a lot to expand out these sales categories further.

Buzzgraph

Step 4 (Heartbeat) Be Alerted to the Hottest Leads

Knowing when to act on hot social leads is extremely important given the increased demand on companies for quick social response – especially in situations where response time can dictate the outcome of a user’s purchase decision.

For example, certain types of sales mentions, such as ‘where to buy,’ can be critical – which is why it’s imperative that you have an alerting system in place within your social listening tool. Email alerts in Heartbeat are specifically meant for this, and they work especially well (see steps one through three to get proper tags and segments set up.

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Social Selling, Advice to Action

Saved Tag/Filter CombinationsA very useful feature in Heartbeat is the ability to create and save various tag combinations (which helps with qualifying and scoring your leads). Since Heartbeat allows for complex tag and filter combinations, where you can combine your own pre-set tags with some of Heartbeat’s global features, you can really get focused on categorizing sales opportunity mentions.

Tag SyntaxThe composition of your tags is also an important element to ensuring that sales opportunities fall into the right buckets. Being comprehensive with keywords that accompany any given tag, for example, will ensure the right sales opportunities match the right tag. Less manual tag assigning or reassigning will also save your social teams time. You’ll also want to consider terms you don’t want see in certain tags.

For Example:

You could combine and save a bookmark for tags such as “competitor” and “complaint” and “price” with a filter for “USA” and “English”.

This would allow you to see mentions with this qualification: A) Mention a competitor B) Also mention a complaint term C) Also mention a price term D) Are only users from the USA E) Are only English speaking users

The above is a simple but powerful example of how saving tags and filtering combinations can effectively streamline and hyper-categorize the mentions your Heartbeat collects into very actionable buckets of sales opportunities.

Advanced Tag Filtering

For Example:

If you’re looking at a tag classified around price, it may be helpful to exclude mentions of ‘coupons’ or ‘deals’ or ‘discount’ as this will likely help remove any spam can occur with these terms.

Step 5 (Heartbeat) Set Up Workflow to Ensure Lead Handoff

Finding, categorizing, assessing, and being alerted to social leads are important, but without proper lead hand off and workflow tracking, it’s a useless exercise. Luckily, Heartbeat has a very effective workflow tracking tool, as well as a Salesforce plugin, which make tracking lead hand off and follow up very easy.

Workflow Report Options

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Social Selling, Advice to ActionApplying email alerts in Heartbeat is simple. Anytime you view the “mentions” tab, a certain tag, or an advanced saved tag (and filter combination), you’ll have the option to ‘subscribe’ to the view. In the email alert settings, you’ll have a few options with some considerations:

AddressEnter the email addresses you want the email alert sent to. Depending on the importance of the tag you are viewing, you may want to include your community manager, customer service team members, sales managers, or have emails sent directly to sales reps.

Subject Enter what you wish to have the alert titled. Make it something that’s easy to understand, as this will be the subject of the alert in your inbox. For immediate action mentions, you may want to give it an obvious title like “ACTION NOW – Immediate Purchase” so that it’s certain the recipient knows they have to follow up right away.

Frequency: Choose how frequently you want the email alerts to trigger. This is the most critical part of your alert set up and you’ll want to consider how often you want to see emails about the mentions from certain tags. For example, mentions for tags like ‘consultation,’ ‘appointment booking,’ or ‘demo request’ may be classified at hot and need immediate action - whereas tags around ‘send literature.’ ‘product feature question,’ or ‘customer evidence’ may be colder leads and more suitable for daily or weekly email alerts.

Within your frequency options you also have a threshold option. This can be useful when you want to trigger alerts for mentions which don’t occur frequently but are important enough that you want to be notified when conversation spikes. For example, if you have a threshold alert set up for general mentions of one of your product lines, a sudden spike above a normal number of mentions could indicate an opportunity for your sales staff to get engaged with what your audience is talking about.

Email Alert Options

Social Selling, Advice to Action

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Worklflow Management:The workflow tracking system is designed with several features that allow for tracking the handoff and follow up of sales opportunities to specific users. On the mention level in Heartbeat, every mention will have the option to assign it to another user and also to add comments to the handoff to add context. As soon as mentions are handed off the assigned user will be sent an email notifying them of the assignment. When you combine the ability to assign mentions, with the segmenting and categorizing you did in step three, your social teams can become incredibly efficient at seeing, instigating first response, and immediately passing along a hot lead to your sales team.

Salesforce Plugin:Heartbeat also has an easy to use Salesforce plugin to ensure that your social activities as they relate to sales can be easily logged and submitted into Salesforce for proper routing through your CRM strategy.

Similar to the workflow management system, each mention will also have the option to create either a lead or case in Salesforce with lead and case options that are populated from your own unique Salesforce set up. For example, your own list of leads or case types from Salesforce will be available in a drop down menu so that when they go from Heartbeat to Salesforce they are properly routed and tracked according to your own sales operation rules. For more information on using the Heartbeat salesforce plugin, please reach out to your dedicated account team.

Whether you choose to use the Heartbeat workflow tracker or possibly the Salesforce plugin, it will be important that you align your social strategy and activities with your sales teams response SLAs and opportunity routing so that there are no critical gaps.

Step 6 (Heartbeat) Post Hand-Off and Historical Analysis

Implementing a social selling strategy into your social listening and engagement activities can be a big undertaking, and being able to track your success and post handoff activities is essential to learning where improvements are needed and what your return on investment has been.

Utilizing the segmenting and categorizing of tags we did in step three, we can combine our tags with many of the powerful analytics features available in Heartbeat to pull the analysis that matters to you. This can include data on: average mentions, share of mentions, sentiment trends, text analytics, engagement levels, content popularity, demographic data, influencers, impressions, and tag comparisons to name a few. With all these options you can also layer on various workflow categories such as cases opened or closed, unassigned cases, and favorited cases.

In addition to some of the pre-made metrics available for general use in Heartbeat, it also has the ability to make fully customizable dashboards and reports with data you choose and set up that specific to your needs.

Mention Assignment

Dashboard and Report Widgets

So Much More

These are just a few examples of how you can use Sysomos MAP and Heartbeat to help facilitate your social selling strategy. To learn more about how we can help your business achieve its social goals or to book a demonstration, contact your Sysomos account team or visit sysomos.com.

Additional Resources

If you’re interested in viewing additional Sysomos resouces such as other use cases, case studies, tip sheets, reports, and videos; check out our resource library at sysomos.com/resources.

Social Selling, Advice to Action

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