Selling in a social business

A successful social selling strategy takes advantage of converged collaboration, dynamic content, and analytics. IBM now offers an open standards-based, security-rich platform for social business that combines these capabilities.

IBM Solutions for Social Selling can help your sales organization to reach people, engage them, discover new insights, and act swiftly to capture value.

Until now, CRM and sales force automation solutions have focused on managers managing employees and data with little attention to selling. IBM Solutions for Social Selling provide sales teams with tools that enable them to focus on selling by combining traditional CRM with analytics and collaboration.

Socially enabling your sales processes helps you create a sales team that:

• Spends more time selling.
• Can easily tap the wisdom of top sellers and experts.
• Understands your customers better than the competition.
• Only focuses on critical data and deals.

Social selling delivers real results

The results from transforming your organization with a social selling strategy can be significant and measurable:

• According to Frederick Reichheld, in his book The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value, if companies can increase their customer retention rates by 5%, they can grow their profits by 25% -100%.
• Nearly nine in 10 CEOs told IBM that they will focus on getting closer to their customers in the future. (IBM Institute for Business Value 2010)
• In a study of 541 executives at 500 companies, 40% found that they could see specific improvements and increases in sales from social customer relationship management and 71% found that it led to a reduction in time to resolution for support issues. (Coleman Parkes Research 2008)

With IBM Solutions for Social Selling, your organization can measure success with higher close rates, lower churn of important accounts, shorter sales cycle, and more competitive wins.

Contact your local IBM software sales representative for more information.