MUMBAI: Socxo, the Bangalore-based brand advocacy solutions provider, has released a whitepaper which gives a direction on what sales folk are seeking. Today, marketing and sales integration are a burning need. Before social media, there was always a marketing vs sales departmental tussle. But with the advent of social media, and the audiences, in general, being present in social, it’s become imperative that sales also does marketing and vice versa too. The room for the divide is diminished.
Keeping this in mind, Socxo, a SaaS (desktop and mobile) based employee & brand advocacy marketing platform, conducted a month-long campaign on Twitter. Socxo’s circle mainly comprises of marketing, social media, and mar-tech folks based in the US and India.
What social selling promises to deliver is a boost to business connections, leads and conversions but are the actual users (sales and marketing people) convinced about it yet? Does it really work to deliver on targets? While industry data points to success in numbers, Socxo decided to test this hypothesis in the market on what marketing and sales folks thought about the system. And the results were surprising.
The research highlighted interesting insights from reasons for doing social selling, to source of content, to belief on the system, to choices of learning. One major point that stood out was that social selling is a massive business opportunity both ways – for the guys creating the market for social selling, as well as for businesses looking to leverage social selling.
Socxo co-founder and CEO Sudarsan Rao said, “The idea of the study came because I was having a difficult time to get my own sales team to get into this mode. And therefore, we looked at the problem and decided to find some insights around it. The why of it. This clearly points towards the potential of the industry around training on the subject. And we have many famous trainers as early adopters of this method already. This will probably get into an organised business soon enough.”
Socxo CMO Ajit Narayan said, “Buzz words are generally buzz only. And they are marketed. If anything has been marketed extensively, it only points in the direction of something being pushed and not organically adopted. So we wanted to find out what about the buzz was stopping adoption. This book will tell you: what people think about it; what they seek from company leadership; where they go to for content; and much more.”
