B2B Early Adopters Move on Social Business in 2012

B2B Early Adopters Move on Social Business in 2012B2B Early Adopters Move on Social Business in 2012 predicts that 2012 will see significant movement toward social business among B2B pioneers. This prediction is based on CSRA’s recent research as well as my twenty-five years experience with guiding B2Bs’ adoption of disruptive technology. First, a critical mass of B2B executive leaders are familiar enough with social technologies to consider them for the first time. Second, the business driver will be the economy. During the past 4-5 years, enterprises have continue to cut costs wherever they could, but few are performing at the level they want to be. B2B marketing and sales are under more pressure to perform very efficiently than ever, and some leaders will enlist social business because they have tried everything else.

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Evolving National & Global Recruiting and Sales with Social Business

Evolving National-Global Recruiting and Sales with Social Business shows how firms can increase quality of recruits and sales leads while cutting costs.

Evolving National-Global Recruiting and Sales with Social BusinessSocial networks can help organizations, whether commercial, nonprofit or government, to significantly improve their efficiency in business processes like recruiting, sales and service. This is what we call “Enterprise Process Innovation” because, by using social networks to create and nurture relationships with alumni, your employees can diminish the time required to accomplish tasks within these processes. It’s well known that most alumni, former employees, move to firms that are related to your business (adjacent in the value chain) or complementary in some way. Yes, some move to competitors, but they are usually in the minority. Social networks, by significantly reducing the cost of having relevant, quality conversations, make robust employee-alumni networks actionable as never before.

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B2B Customers Getting More Social Fast: How Marketing and Sales Can Evolve

B2B Customers Getting Social Fast: How Marketing and Sales Can Evolve explains how clients/customers are smarter and want a new kind of relationship | The new economics of business reputation

B2B Customers Getting Social Fast: How Marketing and Sales Can Evolve: evolutionWhile preparing to launch Social Business Services for B2B Sales in January 2012, I have been engaged in its Ecosystem Audit. I have plumbed online conversations about B2B Sales and Marketing adoption of social business (erstwhile social media). I have been struck by a recurring realization: a large part of Marketing and Sales as we know them is significantly out of alignment with B2B customers. Social business is permeating customer networks throughout the economy and changing customer behavior and expectations. This has created a rare opportunity for B2B marketing and sales people who understand and respond ahead of the market. If I’m right, this could be one of the most important posts you read this year.

Two quick examples of misalignment: one of Marketing’s underlying assumptions is that it is not economically feasible to have large-scale one-on-one customer conversations, so marketing must […]

How LinkedIn Changes the Economics of Cross-border Relationships

Summary of how LinkedIn will transform the economics of cross-border deal making.. and opportunities and threats for professionals […]

How Social Networks Make Markets More Efficient for Buyers and Sellers

How Social Networks Boost Market Efficiency for B2B Buyers and Sellers explains how to use LinkedIn to change the rules of business development

How Social Networks Boost Market Efficiency for B2B Buyers and SellersSince the early 2000s, everyone has struggled to develop measurable economic models for social media and Web 2.0, mostly with little success. During 2007 and 2008, CSRA has worked with clients on several levels hammering out models to pass enterprise muster, and here I will briefly share one that shows considerable promise for its practicality and utility to businesses. The immediate context is B2B business development and sales, but it is applicable to numerous other enterprise processes as well.

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How Social Networks Change the Rules of Business Development and Profit

How you can use LinkedIn to maximize the number of clients in your portfolio that map to your firm’s unique selling proposition—boosting profitability […]

LinkedIn Case Study and ROI: Business Development in Professional Services

Emerging LinkedIn case studies; here is one in which a LinkedIn member generated a quarter of a million dollars through LinkedIn – plus he landed an SVP job […]