IBM's Social Selling: The Computer Giant Finds B2B Leads in Social Media

For almost a century, IBM  has made the computing tools that solved some of the world's big problems. IBM punch cards powered Eniac, the first big programmable computer in 1946. Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997—after losing the first round. And of course Watson won Final Jeopardy —and $77,000 for charity—over two human opponents last year.

But some problems require a human touch. In B2B marketing, one of the toughest is this: How do you make social media an efficient, cost-effective channel for finding new customers and selling to business clients? It's hard to automate messaging in social media; the channel values nuanced personal content over marketing pitches. And it requires a lot of that content, a labor-intensive creative task that most sales teams don't have interest in adding to their daily chores.

In IBM's case, the specific problem was that the effective traditional ways of finding B2B customers for hardware and software products—telemarketing and email—were not producing the same results when applied to selling web-based services such as cloud computing and data security.

A buyer preference study commissioned by IBM revealed that one-third of its B2B buyers were already using social media of various kinds (Twitter, blogs, online forums) to engage with vendors and learn about products. Buyers who were not necessarily the decision-makers but a level or two below that, under 40 and in a position to influence a decision, were even more likely to be using social media to collect product information. And a full 75% of respondents to the survey said they were likely to use social media in the future as part of their purchasing decision.

"That led us to say we need to integrate social selling into the way we do business," says Douglas Hannan, the business unit executive for inside sales marketing at IBM North America. He leads a team of 38 marketing managers and 1,700 reps who handle inside sales for all the product divisions IBM sells on this continent; and the research convinced him that the company needed to take its outbound sales force—which relied mostly on telemarketing and email—and add a large dose of inbound pull marketing through an integration with social media.