A typical sales development process consists solely of phone and email touchpoints, with the occasional in-person meetings or networking connections in some circumstances. But what if you included social touchpoints into your cadence? How would adding that extra-personal connection affect your sales process?
Social media activity varies by prospect — from which platforms they frequent most, to which profiles they dedicate to professional or personal use, to whether they’re even active at all.
Because the majority of professional social activity occurs on LinkedIn, some SDRs will simply view the prospect’s LinkedIn profile as their first touchpoint. The automated notification to the prospect helps warm up their call or email, making it the default initial touchpoint. Others will take an even deeper approach, sending an InMail message based on something eye catching on the prospect’s profile.
A more casual approach to social touches with a prospect is interaction through Twitter. A simple retweet or favorite can go a long way in the introductory stage.
But do these social touchpoints have a specific place in your sales process? And if so, what would that process look like?
Take it from HireVue, a SaaS company with a Talent Interaction Platform™ and a vested interest in bringing personal relationships back to business. As they’re currently undergoing a heavy social media push, the concept of having Twitter engagement or LinkedIn messaging as a touchpoint option would fit perfectly into their process. Not only would the touch help ramp up their social presence as a sales team, but the importance of having these engagements seamlessly logged into Salesforce.com is an even stronger advantage for their process.
That being said, cadences should only include social touchpoints IF buyers spend time on social. When prospects are on Twitter and LinkedIn, here’s how it should work:
- The SDR sets up their cadence of phone calls, email, LinkedIn invites/messages, and Twitter touches.
- SDR then executes phone and email steps.
- System next prompts SDR to send LinkedIn InMail message and helps them by presenting the link via the cadence.
- Once an InMail message has been sent, system automatically saves the activity in CRM for measurement purposes.
- System looks up all prospects to see which have a Twitter account and allows SDR to auto-follow all prospects.
- System highlights most important tweets from prospects, allowing SDR to easily favorite, reply, and retweet these messages. System automatically saves the activity in CRM for measurement purposes.
Just like with email and phone touches, consistency is key when adding social touchpoints to your outreach process. It’s likely only effective when added as a specific touchpoint, accelerated for execution, auto-saved to CRM, and measured scientifically for success.
Do you think all of these social touches should have a place in Salesloft Cadence, and if so, what would that process look like to you?