Conversational selling keeps B Squared Media on a growth track
- Summary:
- A small social media management and advertising agency shares how its sales organization of one succeeds by having a tool that supports conversational sales.
Occasionally we talk to a small business to discover lessons that can be applied to the larger enterprise. Recently, I spoke with Brooke B. Sellas CEO and founder of B Squared Media, a social media management and advertising agency she founded six years ago but which can count a broad range of clients like Wolter Kluwers, Rutgers and Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Greater NY Chapter among its portfolio.
The firm uses Sprout Social for social media management which allows them to connect all their clients and their accounts in one place. B Squared Media supports its customers according to their needs which might include chatbots, social listening, creative outreach. But as Ms Sellas explains:
It's really not about the tool although the tool helps us get the job done and keeps us organized. It's really about our one on one relationship with the client and their person or persons. When they get paired up with an account manager they get a whole team of people who complete certain tasks. So for instance, a community manager who essentially monitors the page and looks for any questions, responds to those questions and then works through any escalating type of problem, question or concern, passing it back internally to the appropriate people.
From listening to Ms Sellas, it was apparent that conversations which speak in the voice of the customer's customer lie at the heart of the firm's business model since that allows the agency to offer services that provide a sense of authenticity that is crucial to social media success. With that in mind, I turned my attention to the other end of the business; the sales pipeline.
I was surprised to learn that Ms Sellas is the only salesperson out of a team of 13. That's unusual but she says that using Nimble allows her to run the entire sales operation from prospecting to client adds.
I attend a lot of conferences and speak at certain events, so there's always a big card collection thing that goes on there. I can scan those cards right into Nimble with my phone and tag them with the conference. When I go through and deal with follow-ups all I have to do is pull up that tag and then send communications to set follow up meetings or a free consultation as appropriate.
Ms Sellas takes a pragmatic approach to understand pipeline that fits more closely with the stages she recognizes as part of the sales process i.e. prospecting, free consultation, proposal sent, follow up, holding pattern for early-stage businesses and deal close. In order to keep track of what's going on, Ms Sellas keeps notes inside Nimble which, in turn, integrates with Office365, the firm's standard productivity toolset. As prospects go through the pipeline, Nimble allows her to forecast based on the activity she is seeing in those prospect records.
I wondered how Ms Sellas discovered Nimble. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it came through social media.
I've found out about a lot of new tools on Twitter and that is how I heard about a webinar Nimble was planning. I liked what I saw and did their 30 days free trial. I was also testing other CRMs at the time and as a small business owner, I had a lot of questions. They were always so great about answering my questions and making sure that they answered in a way that was really helpful to me. The customer service I would say is number one, but number two, they were really cost effective.
Cost is always a gating factor for small businesses and I wondered how Ms Sellas felt about competitive solutions. She said that in the past, she'd used Infusionsoft but found that Nimble offered comparable functionality at a fraction of the price.
Infusionsoft's drag and drop campaign builder isn't there in Nimble but Nimble's email integration removes the need for that and simplifies how I work. For instance, I create different templates for each event I attend depending on whether I'm speaking or in the crowd. All I have to do is pull up the tag that I popped in when I scanned those business cards in or once I placed those contacts in and then I can send communications straight through Nimble using a template, changing whatever I might need. Nimble will show me who opened it, I'll see who responded. Obviously, I try to have a call to action in every single one of those. Having that open notification then means I can resend as needed.
So pragmatism wins?
I think a lot of times we get caught up in the shiny object syndrome because it looks pretty and the drag and drop builder looks super amazing and awesome, but at the end of the day I just need relatively simple functionality I can readily follow. It may not work for everyone but then I like to follow a Keep It Simple, Stupid way of working.
I asked whether Ms Sellas had considered tying Nimble to LinkedIn sales prospecting capability. While she's not dismissing LinkedIn entirely, Ms Sellas had a poor experience with outsourcing LinkedIn prospecting.
I'm not pushy and I feel like a lot of those LinkedIn campaigns are pushy. When I log into Linkedin and I get these emails, "Hey, Brooke, I see we have a lot of people in common. Let's connect." And I connect and then the next email I get is, "I'd like to sell you this service" And then I'm like, "Man, I'm not into that." Sure I need to sell but I want to build my network as the way to success.
Like all software, Nimble has its shortcoming and here, Ms Sellas said she'd like to have the ability to export data for use in meetings with her CFO as a way to better understand the sales forecast or alternatively have comparative reports. And despite loving the card scanner tool, would like to see some improvements in its accuracy.
Quantifying benefits in these types of system is often difficult to pin down to financial metrics but as a single salesperson organization, Ms Sellas is convinced that Nimble saves her time which she characterizes as money earned.
It's definitely helped process efficiency, quickly putting more leads into the pipeline and then also being more effective at closing down non-qualified partnerships has helped me focus on closing more qualified partnerships. It's a virtuous circle.
As we concluded our conversation I was reminded of the things that seem to win out in case studies time and again: efficiency - however that's measured - coupled with good enough functionality at a sensible price point but with attention to service and the needs of the customer taking on increasing importance.