Employee and brand advocacy platform Socxo reveals insights on importance of social selling

Socxo, a Bangalore-based brand advocacy solutions provider, has released a whitepaper that gives a direction on what sales folks are seeking. Today, marketing and sales integration is a burning need. Before social media, there was always a marketing versus sales departmental tussle. But with the advent of social media, and the audiences, in general, being present on social media, it’s become imperative that sales also do marketing, and vice versa too. The room for the divide is diminished.

Keeping this in mind, Socxo, a SaaS (desktop and mobile)-based employee and brand advocacy marketing platform, conducted a month-long campaign on Twitter. Socxo’s circle mainly comprises marketing, social media and mar-tech folks based in the US and India.

What social selling promises to deliver is a boost to business connections, leads and conversions but are the actual users (sales and marketing people) convinced about it yet? Does it really work to deliver on targets? While industry data points to success in numbers, Socxo decided to test this hypothesis in the market on what marketing and sales folks thought about the system.

The research highlighted insights from reasons for doing social selling, to the source of content, to belief on the system, to choices of learning. One major point that stood out was that social selling is a massive business opportunity both ways – for the guys creating the market for social selling, as well as for businesses looking to leverage social selling.

Some insights from the research:

• There’s a massive opportunity for experts to teach, conduct workshops on, mentor on, and sell social selling.
• There’s a big need to help marketing teams understand sales content and campaigns.
• There’s a need to train both marketing and sales teams to not get into the old ‘Us and Them’ debates as their worlds are now merging for real, virtually.
• Social selling is still an evolving market, and there’s a need to prove that it works. Not just via research, but by actually showing people how it’s done.
• There’s a need for tools that take away the administrative pain from the process. Yes, there are data and CRM tools out there. But there’s a need for a tool that helps curate contextual content, besides managing social networks and teams.

Sudarsan Rao, Co-Founder and CEO, Socxo, said, “The idea of the study came because I was having a difficult time to get my own sales team to get into this mode. And, therefore, we looked at the problem and decided to find some insights around it. The why of it. This clearly points towards the potential of the industry around training on the subject. And we have many famous trainers as early adopters of this method already. This will probably get into an organised business soon enough.”

Ajit Narayan

Ajit Narayan, CMO, Socxo, added, “Buzz words are generally buzz only. And they are marketed. If anything has been marketed extensively, it only points in the direction of something being pushed and not organically adopted. So we wanted to find out what about the buzz was stopping the adoption.

This whitepaper includes:

• What people think about it
• What they seek from company leadership
• Where they go to for content
• And much more.

One can download the e-book here.