Use Social Selling To Drive Multiple Positionings

One of the significant challenges for CMOs and Heads of Brand for many B2B organisations with multiple segments is corporate positioning. Organisations may opt for a single, strong company ‘super-positioning’. For others positioning may need to be far more granular. In the latter case, to optimise sales results there may need to be niche corporate positioning strategies which align with each segment and the product set.

One of the significant challenges for CMOs and Heads of Brand is how to deliver these niche positioning strategies in a way which does not dilute or confuse the corporate brand positioning and continues to assist sales, inside sales and account management teams. This brief article will outline how Social Selling can help overcome this challenge to allow you to drive more targeted and impactful marketing activity.

Social Selling Helps Deliver Positioning With Surgical Precision

We believe Social Selling is one of the key tools at the disposal of CMOs and CROs which can meet this challenge and solve it in a significant way, if not entirely. 

A comprehensive Social Selling strategy will enable selling teams to use social platforms to build their profiles and provide relevant, timely and compelling content around their product or segment portfolio.

In doing so, your teams are acting as an additional distribution channel for your desired positioning. Each sales team can effectively build its own pin-point positioning at a one-to-one level (and both above and below the line) for each segment and product, without fear of confusing or diluting corporate positioning.

With Social Selling, each sales team can effectively build its own pin-point positioning at a one-to-one level for each segment and product, without fear of confusing or diluting corporate positioning.

Indeed, this can also be done one-to-many, yet still in a very targeted manner, which is where the full power of Social Selling is unlocked.

Multiple Positionings Can Be Powerful But Alignment is Key

Having the flexibility to adopt multiple positionings can be a powerful boost to your selling teams. However, the key to successfully delivering niche positioning at a product or segment level is, as always, alignment. By working closely with Head of Brand, Product Marketing and other stakeholders within Marketing, any tension which might exist between the sellers desire to optimise positioning for their segment or product and the over-arching corporate positioning can be alleviated or minimised, to the point where it never becomes a reason for a prospect not to buy.

This approach offers an excellent opportunity for Sales and Marketing to be better aligned and for distinct objectives to co-exist harmoniously.

As an example, a multinational organisation serving a large number of segments with specific product offerings may be positioned as an enterprise solution. That organisation may see opportunity in the mid-market but their corporate positioning could present a barrier to consideration of those offerings by that segment.

Using Social Selling approaches, the organisations’ selling team can connect with relevant mid-market prospects and customers and start to build relationships one to one. They can achieve this through providing relevant insights and short-form content along with examples of client successes which drive the desired positioning.

Why Use Social Selling As Part Of Your Positioning Strategy?

Using Social Selling in this way helps Marketers avoid having to use limited marketing time and resources on making adjustments to corporate positioning. In addition, it delivers selling teams with greater flexibility to optimise their positioning to specific segments and increase their selling effectiveness.

As a related point, when using Social Selling prospects and customers can see both the corporate and segment-level positioning. This works symbiotically, with corporate positioning supporting segment-level positioning and vice versa. This means buyers feel comfortable about engaging the organisation as they are interacting with sellers and segment marketers who are delivering the necessary credentials for that segment, but at the same time under the umbrella of a corporate positioning..

If you would like more information on how Social Selling can deliver and support positioning please contact us.