Proposed course will merge the concept of personal brand (online) with social selling and automate the combined process on behalf of a commercial companys sales team members.

The course will teach current social media professionals (who typically work for marketing corporate marketing departments) the concepts of personal branding and professional sales that they may not have knowledge of now. Additionally, the course will provide a template and action plans to organize this activity in a centralized location (existing between both the sales and marketing organization but likely run by marketing / marcom) to operationalize the process and deliver value to the overall organization by providing benefits to the sales team. These benefits could range from time saved (opportunity cost), improved industry reputation for individual salespeople, enhanced prospecting via social selling and perhaps even provide incremental revenue that is attributable to the support tasks provided to the sales team.

Personal Branding has been a consideration for commercial sector career where it is considered to be a combination of professional reputation and now online presence. While coaches and consultants exist for executives, coaches for levels below senior executives dont exist. As branding is important for thought leaders who are also at the top of the hierarchy in their organization, there is an opportunity in the area where custom facing representatives need to improve or establish their personal brand as a function of their primary role as salespeople.

Social Selling is a newer phenomenon that has paralleled the adoption of LinkedIn. At the same time the social selling activities of sales teams lags those whose jobs are in social media marketing. This is because there isnt sufficient time for quota driven sales representatives, (those that are successful anyway) to take on additional activities (that are not an explicit part of their sales job description) that take time away from their selling day. Social selling is a lower priority activity. At the same time, there is an increased need for sales to be seen as a trusted advisor in the activity where they can potentially influence customers. This is part of current sales industry thought leadership as new selling models present statistics that support the idea that salespeople who provide insights to decision makers are more likely to get the sales when there is competition. Conversely, keeping a customer is starting to require delivering of insights that improve established process as part of the trusted vendor value added concept.

Personal Branding courses currently exist for corporate managers and senior executives. Similarly, Social Selling courses currently exist for sales representatives. Merging of the two courses into a new online course that centralizes the operation of both processes in the hands of a knowledge worker who is neither a corporate leader (who has a need for online personal brand) or a trained sales professional is a new concept. This idea moves with the momentum the following emerging trends:

While personal branding has existed, it is becoming increasing important to utilize it in the online world. As digital skills become more common, (as late Boomers and early Busters (Gen X) workers are displaced) more people will brand themselves online.

Personal branding coaches and consultants currently exist for hire for top executives. This is largely a boutique industry where executives pay high fees for the expertise. The concept is analogous to a corporate image consultant. Consistent with most trends touched by the internet, technology eventually evolves to make this available for people in beyond the traditional market.

Sales representatives, especially at the enterprise level (those who call on the largest companies in the world), have always been sought out for their expertise. That said, newer selling research indicates that salespeople who provide discrete expertise for a specific industry or company are more likely to be selected as a vendor due to (1) trust and (2) first mover status. The Challenger Sales Model maintains strong opinions on commercial insight:

https://www.challengerinc.com/blog/thought-leadership-vs-commercial-insight-the-hard-truth/Links to an external site.

The democratizing force of the online world is also elevating the best sales reps to an elite status because the potential to spread personal reputation is accelerated by the internet. Some marketers talk about making their best sales reps into (online) Rock Stars. Beyond an individuals quota performance (part of the job expectations) this additionally means elevating sales representatives social media presence and personal brand profiles to an expert level in their respective industry. This means that social marketers envision a world where social media allows certain sales representative to be sought out in a similar way as social media influencers are sought today ahead of making purchasing decisions.

The synchronic nature of the internet creates an environment where ideas are blended in new ways in an accelerated function. This example would be where typical personal branding concepts are now pushed down to a specialized professional (sales) instead of a currently general executive or the social selling model that customizes the content for social selling at the individual level by the owner of the social profile.

All technology process seems to start out as boutique, customized operations technologies are developed to automates the delivery. An example of this is Hootsuites posting tool which has been in existence for about 15 years.

While social selling can strengthen outreach effort and extend client engagement and deepen customer relationships it is underutilized due to the time required. Therefore, the results of social selling have been mixed. Differentiation efforts by individual sales representatives is therefore undertaken on a limited basis, based on factors that are unique to each individual sales representative. The environmental change as proposed would create benefit by applying a uniform process to develop social sales messaging for direct and indirect sales. By helping the sales organization leverage social media, the marketing knowledge worker will also be able to better understand prospects, engage potential customers and increase industry knowledge.

This proposed course will additionally teach people to manage the brand of salespeople guided by the challenges sales principle, (and other though leaders on social selling) in the useful function of the influencing the selling process via social activities and online presence. There will be a logical combination of managing personal brand plus managing salespeoples (professional) social media profiles; by doing so, marketers will help now be able to elevate some salespeople to Rockstar status.

An important operational consideration is that the model that supports this function (and thus the class as proposed) will require obtaining an agreement to create and post content (with prior approval by the individual sales representative) to accomplish the task. The use cases for this type of support are already in existence both with the larger concept of virtual team members supporting enterprise class sale representatives generally (since the early 90s starting at Oracle) and social media tools posting content for participants (Hootsuite etc.) and corporate marketers supplying content for reluctant or time challenged salespeople (HubSpot video library reference)..

For the sales representative, the selling points are as follows:

Approach prospects to build within market credibility for individual sales representatives

Help individual sales representatives build client relationships through social engagement

Assist in identifying relevant suspects who are not yet prospects

Differentiate the companys solution and individual representatives in the eyes of potential customers

Practical operational points currently are the following:

Cooperation with sales teams to identify target prospects and engage existing customers for cross-sell upsell. These targets would be qualified and passed to sales for definitive engagement.

The social channels would be LinkedIn and Twitter (add others ______ )

The process will be deployed via social media delivery and social listening tools (Hootsuite type)

For the target corporate student:

Mechanics of the job will dictate a need to be proficient in content management, sales messaging and the overall sales process.

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