What Are The Best Social Selling Platforms For B2B Sales in 2020?

VERY FEW SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM VENDORS DELIVER ON THE SALES ENABLEMENT

Few marketing and social media platforms are built to entirely deliver on the sales use case.

Organizations that utilize social media for an assortment of activities, which include employee advocacy, sharing company content, amplifying marketing with customers and prospects. Contemporary sellers require social media for community engagement regarding their equipment and products, but many lack adequate support. In the latest analysis by Forrester, just 25 % of respondents mentioned they routinely equip sellers with the ability and tools to engage with potential customers online while just 8% — have improved on these essential practices.

Few vendors tailor their services and offerings solely for sellers. Many vendors in Forrester’s Recent 2019 Q2 Report fell short of giving revenue generators and sellers proper capabilities to use social media to drive revenue. In addition to give full attention to the advocacy use case. While some of those vendors like tier-one Fortune 100 customers, they lack the comprehensive range of subject matter expertise as well as the functionality and efficiency} to support sales users.

WHICH DIGITAL SALES ENABLEMENT PLATFORMS ARE DELIVERING RESULTS

After reading Forresters Q2 2019 report, only emerging technologies should be evaluated since many of them are built from the bottom-up with sales and revenue generation in mind rather than marketing which all of the initials platforms were built to do.

Forrester included 8 vendors in their assessment: Grapevine6, Dynamic Signal, Sociabble, PostBeyond, Hootsuite, Facelift BBT, EveryoneSocial, and also Thought Horizon. Each of the platforms supports more than 3 social networks which is essential for your sellers to reach prospects across a spectrum of online communities they are active on. As we know, prospects are people and use more then just LinkedIn, they also use Twitter, Xing, Facebook, and many others especially if they are outside of the North American market or have more than 1000 employees.

Every social media marketing platform is racing incorporate AI and machine learning into their marketing platforms. The issue is that all of these platforms have been built as marketing platforms from the ground up. Most of the platforms evaluated by Forrester had their backbone build for marketers and later pivoted to add social selling elements to them in order to compete with the growing importance of social sales and digital sales enablement. This means that almost all of the vendors evaluated were not specifically engineered to help salespeople build key customer relationships, build thought leadership needed for top-tier clients in varying industries.

Furthermore, most lack the ability to personalize their own content for each rep to lead the pack in speeding up the sales cycle and build trust fast enough to become the trusted advisor top-tier clients are looking for. Part of this problem is the difficulty in ensuring that all content is vetted from approved sources and that each post pushed out to each sales rep is both compliant with their industry (FINRA, HIPPA, etc.). This requires the right partnerships as well as artificial intelligence (AI) capable of ensuring that thousands of posts distributed daily meet these requirements. This requires pulling from millions of vetted publications and having AI determine which posts are optimal for each sales rep while applying certain rules ie. Not mentioning competitors or content contradictory to your organization’s goals.

Visually it may look something like this:

Because I disagree with Forrester’s evaluation criteria and believe AI and compliance are the two most important aspects of the emerging digital sales enablement platform, I disagree with their findings and believe Grapevine6 is the number one choice as the best employee advocacy and social sales enablement tool currently available.

Here is Forrester’s take on Grapevine6 in their recent 2019 Q2 report:

• Leads the pack with its seller focus and AI functionality. Grapevine6 enables mobile-first one-touch publishing to multiple social networks and allows sellers to automate common workflows. The tool leverages AI to help sellers enhance their personal brands and recommend the most relevant content to their audiences and unique contacts.
• Needs to get the word out and prepare to scale. Grapevine6 has tens of thousands of users in North America and Europe, but no vendor mentioned it as a competitor. In addition to focusing on brand building, it needs to support more social networks in more geographies.
• Is the best fit for companies that want to avoid risk. Grapevine6 has focused on acquiring big-brand financial services and high-tech customers. Two deeply embedded risk detection platforms reduce regulatory and brand compliance risk.

Grapevine6 Customer Reference Summary

Grapevine6 customers are very satisfied with its UI, personalized content recommendations, and ability to help them better understand metrics and program ROI. Customers want to see Grapevine6 expand its number of out-of-the-box integrations with relevant adjacent solutions.