3 Ways to Shorten Your B2B Sales Cycle Through Personal Branding

Creating a personal brand and using social media to strengthen it can help you greatly shorten your sales cycle and ultimately achieve better results.

Accounting firm associates, agency account executives, law firm rainmakers, real estate sales representatives, pharmaceutical sales representatives, software sales professionals, and insurance producers all have one glaring thing in common - long sales cycles. In my recent discussions and interviews with professionals from all the above walks of life, it has been clear to me that the sales cycle challenge is one that needs some good resolution.

On top of the fact that these industries' sales processes are long, there is also the obstacle of saturation in digital marketing. There are literally millions of competitors locally, regionally, nationally, and globally that are all pushing to shorten their sales cycle. Some invest heavily in direct marketing, some through industry conferences, some in paid search marketing, some in meal and travel expenses and the list goes on. In that there is also one common advantage - each sales professional is a unique personality.

A properly developed and utilized online personal branding program can work to shorten your sales cycle. Learn the top three ways you can shorten your sales cycle:

1. Identify Your Winning Position and Exploit It

Your "personal brand" cannot work for you unless you first identify what it is that equals your winning formula. To do this, you need a review. Answer these questions:

• What type of clients are drawn to me and why?
• What do I know better than my colleagues, competitors?
• Where do I spend the majority of my time developing new business?
• What are my top strengths? 
• What do people love about me?
• How do I sell? Do I tell stories? Do I like to dig into facts? Am I great at uncovering the return on investment (ROI)?

From this, you will start to understand where you should focus your personal brand and develop a winning position. Exploiting this position through effective online personal branding style and communication will help to shorten the sales cycle because it will start to develop a relationship with your target, where they can see what you do without you having to push or worse, wait for them to reply.

2. Identify Your Best Online Personal Branding Machine and Make It a Daily Practice

Once you have identified such critical personal branding success metrics as your thought-leadership position, your target audience online behaviors, and your selling style, you need to identify your online selling machine. This is where social selling, social sales, or social business comes into play. You can utilize such areas as your own branded blog, your LinkedIn profile, your Twitter profile, your Google Plus profile, and your YouTube channel to deliver a daily online personal brand. This requires a social media strategy and commitment to delivery and management.

So that you can get started in building your machine, answer these questions:

• How do you currently communicate online?
• How do you prefer to communicate?
• How does your target audience make buying decisions? What information do they need and in what frequency?
• Where do you currently network online?
• Do you need the help of a writer?
• Do you need the help of a designer?
• Do you need a video person?

Social media channels and tools provide opportunities for you to amass a targeted online audience and the potential to shorten your sales cycle by creating relationships online.

3. Identify Your Sales Location and Focus, Then Commit to Relationship Development

In the world of SEO, we know that focusing locally first can help to drive results more quickly than going global or focusing on broad terms. The same holds true in the world of driving influence and sales in a local or targeted area versus a broad approach. This is why, as I am sure the sales professionals of large sales organizations such as Eli Lilly, Oracle, IBM, Aon, Northwest Mutual, etc. structure their sales teams in local areas or by specific vertical focus.

In the practice of personal brand development and delivery, the strength of the thought-leadership position is paramount to its success. This is why you will need to identify and build a strong position relative to your location and focus. You will be able to become an expert rather than the next salesperson in your industry for your target audience. If you are in a position to call the shots in terms of where you gain new clients, then a location focus can support community build.

A great way to shorten your sales cycle with a location focus is to join and participate in LinkedIn Groups in location and by target industry focus where you can demonstrate deep experience and help to nurture a community. Other ways you can support your personal brand online and drive more sales in a shorter time frame include starting and growing a G+ community based on your focus area or running a tweet chat doing the same.

When your prospects start to visibly see that you can provide education to support their needs and answer all their questions, they will hold you in a higher regard. Once you are seen as a thought-leader as opposed to a salesperson, prospects will undoubtedly stop playing the many games we as sales trainers know as "power-shifting." Once the games are eradicated, the sales process can be shortened.

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Improving Customer Targeting and Personalization Through Social Identity

Modern marketing is about more than just informing prospects and customers about products, but building relationships with them. The contextual insight available in social media offers marketers an opportunity to better know and engage audiences with compelling, personalized content and experiences across channels. The following is a condensed excerpt from a forthcoming report on the subject.

The Fragmented Customer Journey

The customer journey has become incredibly fragmented, moving across various channels and devices, and saturated with more messages than ever. At the same time, customers have been empowered by new technology, increasingly expecting consistent, personal experiences. As a result, it has never been more necessary—yet also so complex—for brands to target and personalize customer messaging.

So why are marketers still sending untargeted, “batch and blast” emails, serving static web pages, and mostly delivering the same ad to everyone?

So Much Customer Data, Such Limited Context

With the proliferation of customer data in CRM, eCommerce, web analytics, loyalty programs, and other databases, enterprises have troves of information about their customers. Yet companies often understand customers in the context of their transactions, but rarely as individuals. Without the right context, brands will never be able to build good relationships with customers.

The Value of Social Identity

Social media has played a major role in compounding the complexity of today’s customer journey, yet is also laden with customer insights unavailable on other channels. Suresh Vittal of Adobe says that, “Social yields sentiment, preference, and influence in ways that no other data source can.” Social profiles contain demographics, age, geography, affinity, influence, and more, while ongoing social signals can provide insight into a customer’s real-time context and needs.

For the purposes of the report and this blog post, I’ll define Social Identity as, “The information about an individual available in social media, including profile data as well as ongoing social activity.” Social Identity can:

• Enable better targeting and personalization throughout the customer lifecycle
• Help provide consistent customer experiences across channels
• Provide a clear source of social media ROI
• Increase the efficiency of marketing and advertising budgets

Targeting and Personalization

In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, Jack Krawczyk, Pandora's director of product management, said:

“Targeting users is basically the currency in data right now. Companies like Pandora and Facebook know users' names and can track their media consumption or stated preferences across computers, tablets and phones, and have an advantage over companies relying on Web browsing cookies.”

Brands can access many of the same data points today, and those that do can better personalize content. For example, NFL.com is using social login to allow visitors to register and sign into its website. Not only does NFL.com then personalize the site experience, but it also sends highly personalized emails. For example, it sends offers for personalized jerseys based on a user’s favorite team and last name as their birthday approaches.

 Social Media ROI

While the value of social media is typically hard to measure beyond vanity engagement metrics, other channels have metrics directly associated with ROI (e.g. open rates, CTR, downloads). Social Identity can directly impact those metrics.

Improving Marketing and Ad Spend

Marketers are spending more on technology every year—especially technology that can engage customers in personal ways at scale, like marketing automation, email service providers, retargeting, and dynamic web content. Social Identity improves value of these tools by improving targeting capabilities. Interscope Records has seen email open rates increase by over 9x in some cases, by sending customers messaging relevant to the artists they care about, based on their social signals.

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Lack of social ROI measurement holding industry back

The world of social media is a ever changing landscape. In recognition of that, the Social Media Advertising Consortium (SMAC) was created in 2009 to educate member companies on issues and trends in social media. More recently, it has been striving to create standards in social media for the advertising industry.

We had the chance to talk to Nichole Goodyear, former CEO & Co-founder of Brickfish.com and Co-Executive Director of SMAC, about social media standards, how our ad spend needs to change and if Facebook advertising is really worth it.

Why is it so important to create standards for social media for marketers?

Standards need to be at the forefront. Measuring the ROI of social is the biggest thing lacking. This is preventing the industry from moving forward.

It's not that we don't understand the value of social but we don't know how to quantify it when we try to base it on the old way of measuring traditional, paid and earned media. What is social? It's the intersection of all three of the media types. We try to put it in a bucket but we can't.

So it comes down to how to measure value on presence, engagement and the value of social opt ins. Likes were measured as if likes equal value but this was because we had nothing else to measure.

How is social impacting search?

We've been tracking since last summer the impact of social on search. Twitter changed it's search capabilities this month. People want real people's answers and comments, so Google has turned up the volume on social signals. Twitter and Facebook will go after the search revenue. At the moment 97% of Google revenue is from search but Google has limited access to the conversation on FB and Twitter. It's a fundamental groundswell change and is driven by how consumers changed - word of mouth carries more weight than what the brand says. 

This will have a profound impact on where we spend dollars and spend our time. We can't just buy the reach but have to influence people as what they say will feed what people think about your product.

If new consumers discover brands because other consumers introduce them to it, then marketers have to create campaigns that allow for that. All of those comments are little seeds that influence how search engines drive brands. In 2006 Amazon added reviews to their websites and 50% of customer purchasing is now based on review. If a product is not reviewed there is a red flag, and if the majority of the reviews are positive, that affects purchase decision.

This makes having proactive programs around mobilizing existing customers to be an important marketing channel as their comments now live on.

Are the efforts in social really driving sales? 

This is the question we need to bring ROI to. For paid media it is easy to do because the time range is shorter to measure. Content lives on in social and has a longer time frame. Because social has a better placement now due to the changes in SEO, it's not about how recent the post was made but the relevancy.

Is Facebook advertising worth it? How is it any different than standard display ads?

Originally, Facebook engagement ads were no different than display ads. When they were introduced, these ads were the hottest thing so it was ok to move display ads to Facebook instead because everyone was doing it. Limited targeting was available but that was because the data wasn't very structured. The bulk of the population didn't give the information that was needed to target. 

Now with sponsored stories, structured data can be pulled but it will only appear to people who are friends with someone who liked it. The click through rate is 47% higher, while CPC is 20% lower. The likes of a brand on Facebook was an histeria. The number one channel is still the brands own website. It's usually decades old and hasn't disappeared because FB was born.

How do you think Facebook open graph will affect the social space? 

Facebook is moving beyond the likes and it is more about how can FB capture expressions. With open graph it's really about moving customer expressions out to different websites. It's a fundamental sift as it could give us the ability to drive sales that live on multiple owned channels. 

For instance, Pinterest is based on Facebook open graph technology. Once you start using it, then all your Facebook friends start following as they got notification that you were there even if you aren't pinning yet.  Human based discovery gives ripple effect.

Facebook's move beyond the like has also created structured data for them to serve better advertising to brands. This will help marketers put paid media dollars to work on there.

What do we have to do to make social a bigger part of our marketing spend?

As an industry as a whole, we need to work together and establish and put stakes in the ground to determine ROI so we can get the dollars needed. The largest amount of time costumers spend is in social while marketing dollars are only on average 10-15% of a company's budget. Not only does social have immediate impact but plants the seeds for the long term with the merge of social and search.

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