Let’s face it, sales business and social don’t sit that well together. Sure, if you employ the correct social selling techniques then there are gains to be made but all too often sales led organisations just get it completely wrong. It’s not that they aren’t having a go, it’s just that the culture within the organisation prevents them from doing the correct thing.
Let me explain…
To make my point I’m going to focus on one specific sector, estate agents, but this could be as easily applied to car dealerships and a plethora of other sales organisations.
It doesn’t take long to do the research on this one. Have a think about the main estate agent businesses in your area and take a look at their social (I’ve selected a number of local and national ones from my area) and you’ll notice one thing. They are on social, but they’re not being very ‘social’.
Below is just an example of the posting upon posting of house listings that we have come to expect from pretty much every estate agent.
The result is that many of them have very little following, virtually no engagement and I would bet a team of people in the business all saying that posting on social is pointless.
Well, if they keep doing what they are currently doing, then it is.
I’m not here to take shots at them over what they are doing because I think it’s less to do with the knowledge held about social and more to do with the business culture which has created this current social behaviour.
If you consider the average make-up of an estate agency, you’ll know that the majority of staff occupy a sales role. These people are paid on results, personal results, personal sales. For this very reason, why should they give a damn about the overall brand perception or user experience that they provide on their social channels. After all, that’s not going to affect their sales package at the end of the month. And here we are, back to the same old sales vs marketing battle with short term results leading against long term perception.
Given this battle is not going to disappear any time soon and I’m certainly not going to provide a magic solution to solving it (if I could I would be a very rich person), I’d say we need to look at alternatives for these types of organisations which marry the needs of a sales team and the overall business marketing approach.
By incentivising sales to create profit increase through social delivery we can create a win-win situation whereby the overall marketing objectives are met while the short term sales bonuses are met.
With our value based social approach at our heart, we have developed a unique approach specifically for this challenge which results in increased business profit, individual sales profit and a solid social marketing approach. Here’s the clever part, if delivered correct, the marketing part is effectively free, it doesn’t cost the estate agent a penny compared to the existing approach.
If you think this is a flight of fancy, I don’t blame you. I would however urge you to get in touch and we’ll happily explain how it works. Maybe you might even become one of the first estate agents to truly get social.