Why you Should Restore Power to Middle Managers

With the development of extremely powerful CRM tools, middle managers have gradually focused on the exploitation of customer data rather than on commercial management. Nowadays, social networks and social selling techniques allow these men of the field to give back to the commercial actions of your company a sense of human dimension. Below is the importance of middle managers for social marketing or how middle managers impacts the social marketing.

Impact of Middle Managers on Social Marketing

Did you know that you probably do social selling without knowing it? This discipline, halfway between community management and commercial management, corresponds to the exploitation of social networks as sales channels in their own right. According to this approach, every step in the relationship with social media users must be associated with a “soft”, little intrusive and value-added commercial action for the prospect or client.

Social selling therefore leads your salespeople to work closely with the community managers of your company, but also with all the actors who contribute to developing its e-reputation. By adopting social selling, you create a synergy between different sectors of your company to better know and tame your prospects via social networks, so as to transform them into loyal customers. Inspire yourself of these 10 French companies at the forefront of social selling to develop your own commercial strategy on social networks.

The Middle Manager: A Key Coordinator Role

Different clusters in your company may have difficulty communicating: technical language or key performance indicators (KPIs) can vary widely from the marketing department to the sales department. More than a client data manager, your middle manager must allow all the teams concerned to work together for a coherent social selling strategy. This role of coordinator comprises several components:

• The training of sales representatives, which can be prepared with the community managers or the content managers published on your web supports, for a better involvement of the actors called to collaborate.
• Organizing and implementing strategies on social media, while ensuring their integration into a global and coherent marketing strategy.
• The commercial management and the distribution of the teams, which pass through in particular the implementation of powerful tools for internal communication.
• Reporting to the sales department: often decried, this role of the middle manager remains essential to guide the commercial strategy over the long term.

Towards Exemplary Middle Management

In companies where collaboration and autonomy now prevail, middle managers can no longer be satisfied with managing customer relations and reporting to sales managers. They now have to facilitate and support decision-making within your sales department, but also in sales, thanks to an exemplary commercial management rather than an authoritarian one. The exploitation of social networks as monitoring, prospecting and sales tools should enable them to better know the prospects and customers of your company.

At the same time, they must train and help salespeople acquire strong social selling reflexes in order to create innovative and creative solutions within their teams. It is thus up to the middle managers to prepare the fertile ground on which commercial forces, marketers and community managers can grow e-reputation, and thus the digital turnover of your company.

How to Boost your B2B sales

You probably noticed it at the end of the year; the holiday period generally boosts your B2B sales. Indeed, the buying frenzy linked to Christmas puts your customers in conditions conducive to the signing of contracts. This affects your business. Why not surf this dynamic during the sales? Trade teams often underestimate the beginning of the year, believing that the favorable period has passed.

Yet winter balances create a certain desire to buy from your customers and can also prove to be an engine for your sales. This period of compulsive shopping is indeed a golden opportunity to increase your business performance. Here’s how, in two key steps:

Strengthen the Confidence and Motivation of Sales team

It is essential to reassure and encourage its salespeople by reminding them that sales are a favorable period for their business, where sales can explode. If your sales teams are confident that they will sell more during sales, then there is a greater chance that they will sell more. Indeed, giving them confidence increases their ability to do business while boosting their motivation. Your sellers will certainly have a more assured approach to their prospects, their sales pitch will be more “aggressive”, and thus their closing rate more important.

To further stimulate your teams, why not challenge them through a challenge over this period? For example, you can use the “booster” mechanism: grant a bonus of points (x2 for example) over the period of the sales to encourage salespeople to outdo themselves. To involve the whole team and not just the top performers, it may be useful to set up collective challenges and sub-challenges: thus, everyone will have a chance to succeed and to feel recognized for their efforts. To be effective, the animation of these challenges must be regular and go through a platform accessible easily, from any medium. Incentive proposes a commercial management interface that allows each user to realize their performances in real time. Our tool also creates, with a team of experts, engaging challenges that reinvent your motivational mechanics.

Adapting Discourse and Commercial Offerings

Beyond the confidence and motivation of the seller, it is necessary to seduce the buyer with offers and a speech adapted to this period. During sales, your sales representatives should not hesitate to offer their interlocutor exceptional commercial gestures. At the time of the balances, the bargains are not only in store, and your prospect has the will to take advantage of the best offers everywhere: even in his professional daily and therefore from his suppliers.

You can then take advantage of special promotions in terms of price, such as an exclusive reduction percentage usually between 10% and 50%. But it is also possible to give him more for the initial price: it is then to make him exceptionally benefit from an additional service or product, usually requiring an additional cost. This gives you added value to your offer, which should please your buyer and convince him to sign up faster to enjoy the benefits of this period.

To effectively communicate these “B2B balances” to your future clients, the role of the sales manager is paramount: you need to help your sales force build a discourse adapted to sales. This commercial argument must make prospects understand that this is the ideal time to sign because they will be able to get exceptional offers that they would not be able to enjoy the rest of the year. You can also take up some of the arguments often used at the end of the year, adapting it to the period of sales, such as the punctual and ephemeral aspect of the offer (without putting pressure on the interlocutor).

If the prospect seems interested but the contract does not conclude despite their efforts, then suggest to your salesmen to propose even more aggressive prices on the last week of sales! The idea is, in short, to reproduce the promotional strategies that your future customers find in their daily life and that allow them to do good business, but in your B2B business sector.