Leveraging Social Media for Early Customer Engagement

Key Insight

The conventional approach to 'social selling' often amounts to mere broadcasting or noise, failing to leverage social media's potential. Given that customers often complete 57 percent of their purchase journey before contacting suppliers, there's a critical need for sales reps to engage early with Mobilizers. The rise of social media presents a unique opportunity for marketing and sales to collaborate, moving beyond traditional social selling towards 'social teaching.' This redefinition focuses on using social platforms to actively challenge Mobilizer mental models where they increasingly seek information and learning.

The goal is to enable sales reps to 'get in early' by engaging customers during their passive learning process on platforms like LinkedIn and other social communities. Marketing's role is to equip sales with counterintuitive 'social sound bites' and 'Spark-Introduce-Confront' content specifically designed for social channels. This content is inherently more likely to capture attention, get shared, and influence Mobilizers' early thinking, thereby boosting sales reps' ability to source leads through their own social networks. This collaborative approach fosters early teaching opportunities that begin to 'break down the A' (presumed customer agreement) before formal sales interactions.

By strategically using social media for 'social teaching,' organizations can proactively influence how customers define problems and solutions at an earlier stage. This contrasts sharply with waiting for customers to develop established demand based on their own learning and then inviting suppliers into a price-based competition. Engaging Mobilizers through disruptive social content helps shape early demand in favor of the supplier's unique strengths, paving the way for more valuable conversations and potentially higher-quality deals when sales reps eventually engage directly.