How can you build a successful social selling team with diverse skills?

Having a social strategy is important for a number of reasons, defining objectives with timelines and ensuring the skill gap you need to fill is addressed effectively. But many people think about social media differently therefore an element of your strategy should include understanding he each person within your organisation thinks about social media, and how one behaves has a direct effect on achieving your defined objectives. Perception changes so measuring things that make the difference really matter, as is coaching, specifically aligned to practising and executing the behaviours to fill the skill gap across the team. Only then will you understand who to hire based on experience, mindset and the culture you’re building.

For us every exercise starts by defining the needs, the objectives and goals. This mostly is a combination of goals so the challenge is to align all these needs into a global strategy.

Maybe it is a good idea to define what you consider to be social selling. Is sales using social media to find, engage, and close deals or is it marketing filling a funnel? Only then you can define your metrics because sales metrics are different than marketing metrics.

The biggest gap to close is the gap between the business goals and the social media/selling goals. Going back to my previous comment, one of the biggest gaps for marketing is that they rarely see a client and thus don't know what is living in the field. Their learnings need to be around getting away from their desk and talking to real clients. For sales, the biggest gap is the learning gap as they continuously chase the quota, there is no time and incentive for learning new skills

For me, the best combination for a complete marketing team, with all the disciplines necessary in it is a combination between your employees and external partners/experts. Today, marketing has become a very fragmented discipline with a very wide range of necessary knowledge and skills. It is therefore no longer evident to have generalists on board who know a little about everything. That is why you need to bring external knowledge on board in the form of permanent partners. The magic is in the mix ✨

In B2B marketing, social selling plays a key role. Here are 5 things you need to do to build a team with diverse skills: 1. Clearly define the goals and objectives and align them with your sales and marketing KPIs. 2. Evaluate the skills required and map them against your team's current capabilities. Don’t forget to identify gaps and areas for improvement. 3. If needed, train your team to bridge skill gaps. Try to implement ideas/experiments shared by experts on LinkedIn and other channels. 4. Encourage collaboration between team members with different skill sets. 5. Leverage tools and technology that can enhance team’s efficiency and effectiveness.

Closing the gap between sales and marketing is best done with these tips: 1. One of the most effective ways to close the gap between sales and marketing is to encourage regular communication and collaboration between the two teams. This can be done through joint meetings, shared goals, and collaborative projects. 2. Ensure that both sales and marketing have aligned goals and metrics. They must also be aware of their mutual specific goals and common goals (or KPIs). 3. Cross-training sessions where each team member learns about the other's processes and strategies.

I agree with the suggestions made by @mic Adam and would like to propose an additional one: 4. Identify and share instances where such collaboration has yielded positive outcomes. These examples might include situations where customer interest, initially sparked by a post, was successfully leveraged by the sales team, ultimately leading to a new relationship/partnership. Joint succes paves the way for more collaboration