Streamline Training & Documentation: Social Networking in Sales

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Social Networking in Sales

For ideas on how to engage in productive networking, there is no better place to look than the discipline of sales, in which networking skill has an especially large impact on the degree of a professional's success.

In the July-August issue of the Harvard Business Review, Tuba Üstüner of the Cass Business School in London and David Godes of Harvard's business school offer their analysis of how best to improve a company's sales network.

Üstüner and Godes cite three types of resources embedded in networks:

Access to the right information.

The ability to disseminate information to the right people.

The power to coordinate the efforts of groups of people in order to deliver value to customers.

Üstüner and Godes argue that the configuration of a network makes a substantial difference in how much it contributes to progress in a given phase of the sales process. The two basic types of networks Üstüner and Godes discuss are:

Widely dispersed networks — networks with limited duplication of contacts and plenty of indirect contacts. Dispersed networks are most useful when the salesperson is scouting for leads (market network), is trying to achieve prospect buy-in (prospect network), or is at the point of identifying who can best help with drawing up a proposal for a particular prospect (intra-organizational network).

Dense networks — networks in which there are lots of interconnections amongst individuals. Dense networks are most useful when a salesperson needs to coordinate efforts. For example, at the proposal stage for a custom solution, the salesperson needs to have a tightly coordinated team (possibly ad hoc) contributing the requisite specialized expertise.

Learning network skills is of paramount importance. Among Üstüner's and Godes's recommendations:

Encourage salespeople to consider joining online networks, where they can learn from "a vast pool of contacts who are entirely different from their current contacts."

Teach salespeople how to evaluate their own and others' networks.

Areas to cover in training include:

Questions to ask to evaluate networks. For example: Are my marketplace ties sufficiently diverse? Should I de-emphasize a redundant contact so I'll have more time to build new relationships? Who in the prospect firm has the biggest and sparsest networks? Who will be likely to promote my offering effectively to colleagues at the prospect? Who are the brokers, the people who make connections between people I need to be in contact with?

How to evaluate such factors as the extent of a contact's connections in a prospect firm, whether contacts are connected to one another, and how well the salesperson is positioned to make use of key influencers and decision-makers.

How to evaluate a contact's personality type.

How to keep in touch with contacts without being annoying. The key is to deliver value, e.g., via a newsletter with information relevant to the contacts.

Parallel to the training provided salespeople, there needs to be coordinated training for managers to ensure that managers are equipped to coach the salespeople effectively.

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Labels: Networking

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