Hubspot and Salesforce Showcase The B2B Social Revolution

I attended a fascinating webinar on Monday on The Social Revolution: Connecting With Today’s Customer given by George Hu (@GeorgeHuSF), EVP Marketing & Platform of Salesforce.com and Brian Halligan (@bhalligan), CEO & Co-Founder of Hubspot. For those of you who missed it, I recommend that you take a look at the recorded webinar, but I wanted to share a few of the headlines in the meantime…

You can download the webinar and slides on demand here.

The presenters made a strong case for building what they referred to as a “Social Enterprise” which establishes relationships with its employees, partners and customers using the means that are most familiar to them - which of course today increasingly involves social networking. Although many of the examples came from B2C environments, it’s clear that the lessons learned are increasingly relevant to B2B.

To support their case, they quoted research by McKinsey that established the top three benefits of the benefits of creating a social enterprise as being:

• Increased access to knowledge
• Increased marketing effectiveness
• Better information sharing

3 Steps to the Social Enterprise

So how do you build the framework for a "Social Enterprise"? The presenters went on to describe the three key steps towards of creating an effective social enterprise as being:

• Developing Social Customer profiles
• Developing an Employee Social Network
• Developing a Customer Social Network

It’s interesting to see the equal emphasis given to developing employee social networks and developing customer social networks, and I’m sure that organisations who fail to create effective internal employee social networks are not only going to miss an important opportunity to improve employee productivity, they are also unlikely to master the skills required to establish a truly effective customer social network.

TOFU Titans and MOFU Magicians

The presenters introduced two terms that were new to me - TOFU Titans and MOFU Magicians. For those of you who were unfamiliar as I was with the terms, TOFU Stands for Top of the FUnnel.

TOFU Titans create (and intelligently re-purpose) tons of remarkable content. Remarkable because, as Seth Godin pointed out, great content get talked about and shared. Great content, delivered in the way your audience prefers to consume it, and increasingly re-transmitted by them to others, is clearly the essential currency of today’s marketing.

MOFU, you’ll not be surprised to learn, stands for Middle of the FUnnel and demands that you create highly relevant and unique experiences that are tailored to the specific needs of each individual customer - rather than generic broadcast messages that are equally irrelevant to all. It also implies that you focus your content on facilitating your prospect's buying decision journey.

There’s much more than I can do justice to in this article in the webinar on the subject of becoming both a TOFU Titan and a MOFU Magician but the intelligent combination of content and context sits at the very heart of the subject.

The Old Sales Playbook is Busted

Finally, the presenters wrapped up by making a compelling case that the old sales playbook most of us grew up with (direct marketing, cold calling and spending hours on the golf course with prospects) is permanently and irretrievably broken - and suggested a number of remedies, most of which involved developing your relevance and your reach. And, of course, that requires that you discover what your audience is interested in and how they prefer to consume the information they need.

I encourage you to invest the 50 or so minutes necessary to listen to the webinar - and once you’re done, I’d be interested to learn about your impressions of the key messages from the webinar.