It’s almost here. The Social Media and Sales Quota Report will be released this week and boy are the findings interesting.
Working with Barb Giamanco over at Social Centered Selling, we set out to find out what impact, if any, social selling, that is using social media as part of the selling process, had on revenue and quota attainment. The results are in and they are astounding.
Simply put, social selling and social media increase revenue and sales people’s quota attainment.
The report will be available by weeks end, but I wanted to give this community first peak.
The most compelling insight from the report is that in 2012, 72.6% of sales people using social media out performed their peers not using social 
media.
The findings in the report are pretty compelling and if you’ve felt social selling and social media were suspect you’re going to have to re-evaluate your thinking.
Our Key Findings:
Quota attainment and sales performance. In 2012, 72.6% of sales people using social media as part of their sales process outperformed their sales peers and exceeded quota 23% more often.
There is a direct correlation between closed deals and social media usage. Sales leaders want to know where the Return-on-Investment (ROI) is if their sales people spend time on social media sites. 54% of oursurvey respondents have tracked their social media usage back to closed deals.
Top reasons that sales people are using social media. The top three reasons that sales people use social media: Networking, Prospecting and Research. In that order. For those sellers using social media two years or longer, research moved into the number two spot .
The time investment in using social media to sell. A common concern among sales leaders is that their sales people will spend more time on social media sites then they will actually spend selling. It turns out that their concern is unwarranted. 50.1% of sales people told us that their time spent using social media ranged from less than 5% to up to 10%.
Top social sites used for selling. Given that the majority of our respondents said they sell in a B2B environment , it is not surprising to learn that LinkedIn® is the number one site being used for sales activity. Twitter, Facebook and Blogging followed right behind.
Ignoring the use of social media to sell. The 21.7% of the sales peoplewho told us they were not using social media, the vast majority said that they either did not see the value (18.9%) or they did not understand it (45%).
Lack of training. As we also discovered, 75% of the respondents told us they were given no training in the effective use of social media. This certainly explains the large majority of sales people who are not using social media as par t of their sales process. We think this is a huge opportunity for sales organizationsto improve sales results – across theboard – by investing in training for their sales teams.
Pretty interesting stuff uh? We will be publishing the full report by end of week. I’m pretty excited. It was fascinating to see the effect social has had sales people, quota attainment and corporate revenue.
