At the recent Linkedin Sales Connect conference in New York, Diane Demeester, VP Global Sales & Services Operations at Genesys gave a presentation on how they hacked their B2B sales strategy.

It was both the highlight of the morning sessions and the best presentation we’ve seen so far on how companies have used social selling to rapidly increase B2B sales results.

Genesys sells consumer experience and call center technology to other businesses. They’re headquartered in Daly City, California, have over $1 billion in revenues, and have over 10,000 customers in 150 countries.

They’re also an EveryoneSocial customer. And as Diane detailed in her below presentation, our platform, along with other solutions, plays a critical role in their social selling program.

Here’s how Genesys developed a B2B sales strategy that outperformed previous strategies by 165%.

Selling The Genesys Way

As a global organization, Genesys has sellers all over the globe—in fact, the majority of their organization (including their sales team) is remote.

The Genesys approach to selling starts with a simple principle: every seller is unique and creating a top-performing sales organization (especially one that spans the globe) requires harnessing and enabling their unique styles.

In 2014, they rolled out their first social selling program with LinkedIn Sales Navigator (which we also use).

Like most new tools, initial adoption was good, however, there wasn’t much follow-up on support or structure. To put it plainly, of the sellers who attained quota during that year, only 4% were actually using social selling.

This was not acceptable.

In order to get continued support for their program from the executive team, they were going to have to show how social selling lifted the pipeline and impacted revenue.

In 2015 Diane and her team developed the Genesys selling model—Selling the Genesys Way—to provide additional support and structure.

The key was weaving social selling into their entire program rather than merely including it as a component (note that there isn’t actually a component called ‘social’ anything).

In Diane’s words, “discipline has been built into everything.”

How Genesys Used ‘Social Selling’ To Close More Deals

At this point, Genesys rolled out EveryoneSocial to facilitate their content and social sharing needs, and started capturing ‘social’ as a lead source in their CRM; not something they were previously doing.

As a result, in February of 2016, Nicholas Dectis became active on social media.

Nicholas is the Global Account Manager at Genesys and he’s held sales roles for more than 30 years—even before there were computers or CRM systems in place.

As you can see in the below video (and this took some deep data digging on Genesys’ part), with social selling Nicholas was able to develop an opportunity in mid-April, which turned into a closed deal by the end of June.

Further digging on the data showed that there were more than 200 distinct social selling activities that occurred relative to this opportunity.

However, there’s more to it than simply demonstrating that social selling strategies can create and develop new opportunities.

In today’s world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get the attention of decision makers at the top of the food chain (CXO, SVP, VP, etc.). They don’t answer emails or phone calls, especially if they’re sent cold.

However, they will connect through social, especially if other mutual connections have been established by the salesperson.

The B2B Sales Tools That Won Genesys 165% Larger Deals

For Genesys, 2016 numbers were a big improvement over 2014. With a structured program and the right tools in place, they’ve seen increased usage on the part of their salespeople on a sustained basis.

Most importantly, they’ve seen that of those who attained quota, 17% are now social sellers.

Further, reps who use EveryoneSocial and Linkedin SalesNavigator as a part of their overall social selling efforts have pipelines 2.2x greater than those that don’t.

Think about that.

Further, reps who use EveryoneSocial and Linkedin SalesNavigator as a part of their social selling efforts achieve 16% higher win rates.

When combined with additional activities—researching buyers via social listening and connecting with that buyer via social media—win rates improved as much as 22% over those who weren’t using the tools.

Finally, reps who use EveryoneSocial and Linkedin SalesNavigator as a part of their social selling efforts closed deals that were 42% larger than their non-social selling peers.

And when those same reps posted content with which buyers interacted they increased their average deal size as much as 165%.

How Genesys Employees Adopted The New B2B Sales Strategy

Every seller is unique and uses social selling tools in their own way. Alice, the most successful manager in the company, uses social selling to open the door for her team.

In EMEA Julian asked if she would have access to social selling tools before she accepted the job (a common trend we’ve been seeing—social selling attracts top talent). In India, Hari uses it to connect with admins where it’s culturally unacceptable for the rep to go directly to the executive.

Bottom line: Social selling is no longer an adjunct activity, it’s a crucial part of your sales strategy that must be implemented.

Educate and train your sales team. Allow them to own it until they really become good at it.



