Social Media and Pipeline Acceleration
Instead of focusing exclusively on generating yet more new leads that may or may not qualify, an effective way for marketing to impact the elongated B2B sales cycle is to help move deals that (for whatever reason) have stalled in the pipeline, an activity we call pipeline acceleration. While marketers have many tools to help prospects buy, and sales sell, there are two ways that marketing can drive late-stage pipeline: stimulus offers (specific programs extended to a prospect to increase the velocity of customer buying processes) and enablement/knowledge (internal programs designed to help sales build competence and neutralize roadblocks when dealing with stalled selling opportunities).
Social media can play a key role in stimulus offers. Giving a prospect controlled access to your online customer community shows that prospect the experience of what it would be like to be a customer. This lets the prospect see how customers interact with each other and your company; select prospects can browse and search community discussions to match their interests or concerns. Having the prospect see how issues and negative experiences with the company are resolved goes a long way in giving prospects evidence of how you treat customers. Also on the stimulus front, tap your subject matter experts to focus the critical content already available in whitepapers and other collateral into concise, customized podcast, blogs or tweets that align your message directly to known prospect pains. Podcasts can also be effective in distilling down case studies that can have direct relevance to prospect needs.
On the enablement/knowledge side, the inclusion of social media features within sales enablement platforms continues to gain steam as a more organizations leverage internal communities built around knowledge sharing and best practices; this is especially valuable for leveraging the group experience of not only other sales reps but also subject matter experts that reside in other parts of the organization. The use of podcasting as an internal training and communications tool continues to grow and is a proactive way in helping arm reps with the talk tracks and selling points to help accelerate prospects, particularly if they include the experiences of reps that have success accelerating their deals.
Remember, marketing is not just about new leads. You already have prospects in the pipeline that have a strong interest, now do what you can to help them close.