Your guide to prospecting, collaborating, and closing deals faster with enterprise social.

1. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR SALES
How to Work Like a Network:
For the Sales Professional
Your Guide to Prospecting, Collaborating, and
Closing Deals Faster with Enterprise Social
ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR SALES
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

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Introduction
Part One:
A Sales World Turned Upside Down
Part Two:
Enter the Enterprise Social Play
Part Three:
Change the Way You Sell
Table of
Contents
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Enterprise Social describes a new way of working that taps into the power of human networks. It’s an approach that brings the essence of consumer social
networks—connecting with others, rapid information sharing, and easy discovery—to the enterprise. By connecting individuals to a dynamic network of
people and information, Enterprise Social enables employees to respond faster, accomplish more, and keep your business moving forward together.
The Microsoft vision for Enterprise Social is to empower organizations to work like a network by delivering seamless social experiences across familiar
applications people already use, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Yammer, SharePoint Online, Lync, and virtually any other
application or service that matters to your company.

3. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR SALES
The saturation of social networking, review sites, and
online forums has changed the game for salespeople.
In a world where customers can nimbly discover what
they want and need—and a few unhappy customers
can unravel years of good marketing—salespeople
need in-time information about what their peers and
customers are doing and talking about.
In a hyper-connected landscape, people can find a wealth of product and
service information on their own, and bypass the salesperson. The web
makes product descriptions, customer reviews, and competitive comparisons
universally available. Buyers form opinions and narrow their choices long
before engaging with vendors. When they do engage with a salesperson, they
expect a fast response tailored to their needs. And they deserve that.
It’s time to go straight to the goal of delighting and satisfying customers with
your products and services.
“By tapping into the
human networks that
make a business tick,
companies can listen to
the conversations that
matter most, adapt to
an increasingly volatile
market, and grow in ways
never before possible.”
—Jared Spataro, General Manager,
Enterprise Social at Microsoft
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This e-book’s objective is to show you how to optimize your sales organization
to do just that, by adopting Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies. It describes
these Enterprise Social tools and the value of these solutions for your sales team. It
presents three common sales situations—prospecting, collaborating, and closing—
and demonstrates how you can improve your sales processes with Enterprise Social.
Finally, it shows you and your team how to get started with strengthening
relationships and closing more deals.
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A Sales World Turned Upside Down
Part One:

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To adapt to the changing sales
landscape, Microsoft has woven
Enterprise Social tools into core
capabilities that can unify and
ignite your sales team to close
deals faster and better engage
with customers.
Its integrated technology solutions enable sellers
to thrive in a sales world turned upside down. On
the one hand, selling is more difficult because
customers do their own research and make
buying decisions based on what they find. On
the other hand, Enterprise Social technologies
can accelerate the sales process by removing
roadblocks that can hamper progress—making it
more efficient than ever before.
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With Enterprise Social technologies, you can listen to conversations within your company over Yammer, an Enterprise
Social network, and conversations outside your company with Microsoft Social Listening; you can adapt to changes and
customer needs quickly by working together and by using Microsoft Office 365 productivity tools; and you can grow
your business impact by using Microsoft Dynamics CRM to integrate marketing and sales campaigns to drive leads and
close opportunities.
“Enterprise Social allows me as a seller to be constantly connected and agile enough to deliver the most targeted
solutions for my customers’ needs,” says Lindsay Gardner, sales enablement manager at Microsoft. “The tools allow me
to be more efficient in terms of operations, including customer relationship management (CRM) targeting and pipeline
management. More powerfully, Enterprise Social helps me grow as a seller, crowd source remedies to obstacles, tailor
discussions, learn from my peers, and achieve success with my accounts.”
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8. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR SALES
Delve, a newer cloud
application within Office 365,
surfaces your contacts and
documents, including recently
viewed, created, or sent
presentations—in an easy-to-
view card sorter. Delve uses
machine learning from the Office
Graph, smartly mapping all
relationships, conversations, and
documents. For example, before
an important client meeting,
you can review past meeting
presentations and documents by
clicking the Presented to me tab.
Delve saves sales professionals
time and eliminates the hassle of
lengthy and sometimes dead-end
document searches.
With Microsoft
Dynamics CRM,
now integrated with social
profiles, you can easily
view your most relevant
prospects. By using Microsoft
Social Listening—a part of
Microsoft Dynamics CRM
that keeps track of the latest
social media news regarding
your brands, products, and
services—you can gain a
clearer understanding of your
customers and the topics that
matter most to them.
Microsoft has adapted to the changing sales landscape by weaving Enterprise Social into the following core applications:
Microsoft Office 365, which includes SharePoint Online, Yammer Enterprise, OneDrive for Business, and Lync Online;
and Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Social Listening.
Tools for the New Rules of Selling
Today’s effective sales professional can take advantage of a variety of Microsoft social selling features that are integrated
into many of the familiar Office tools that salespeople use every day. You can build richer user profiles, collaborate with
colleagues on developing sales collateral stored by using SharePoint Online or Microsoft OneDrive for Business, and
create Office 365 Groups that facilitate structured and intuitive decision making across disciplines.
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Enter the Enterprise Social Play
Part Two:

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Competitive disruption is a
term for when your customers’
needs exceed or deviate from
what you can deliver; when
that happens, your customers
find a company that can meet
their needs.
Isn’t that a fancy way of saying somebody
else got the business? Is the customer always
right, as he was in 1971? Is it what Omar Little
said to the police detail on the television
series The Wire? “The game is out there, and
it’s either play or be played.”
The game is out there, and there is an
opportunity. The modern sales force is a
collaborative one in which Enterprise Social
gives salespeople more control over an
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opportunity and its advancement, and promotes agility and responsiveness
in the face of challenges. With Enterprise Social, the sales process is
smoother and more structured. Customers come to understand that best
practices are in place in your organization and that your sales team is
working in tandem with other disciplines companywide to serve them—
from awareness and research to closing and adoption.
“Closing can be the trickiest stage of the sales cycle—the most challenging
and unpredictable,” says Gardner. “With Enterprise Social, our team is fully
supported with tools that help us be prepared, agile, and responsive to
customers at the right time. It’s a monumental shift in approach.” Microsoft
Enterprise Social hands you these modern sales capabilities, and here’s how.
Prospecting
Sales leaders have reason to celebrate. It’s never been easier to provide
customized service with exquisite timing. With Enterprise Social tools, you
can see in every direction. With a highly functioning sales team, important
news, messages, and data are funneled at once to the front-line sales
representatives. With the right technology, you are well positioned to serve
existing customers and bring aboard new ones.
Twitter reported in September 2013 that 200 million users send more than
400 million tweets daily. Social media could unleash $1.3 trillion in value to
“It’s all about integration.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM
caps the stack, but behind
the scenes we make sure
that Yammer drives the
conversations within
the business; we use
SharePoint to drive our
knowledge-management
systems; we use Lync to
surface the presence of
our colleagues—Office
365 is the backbone of our
office infrastructure.”
—Paul Marriott-Clarke,
Commercial Director, Metro Bank
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Listen Up
By using Microsoft Social Listening, a sales team tracks social networks and gets alerts
to any mentions of their products and services. Researchers on the sales team can set
parameters, such as hashtag searches and @ mentions, for listening to Twitter.
Get in There
The sales team can work without interruption in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which
features InsideView, a tool that pulls information from 30,000 sources, including
LinkedIn. Prospects’ social information is available without ever having to leave the
CRM application.
Build Trust
Salespeople make face-to-face connections with buyers, build stronger relationships,
and encourage trust by using Microsoft Lync, or Lync Online with Office 365, to
communicate with chat or video. Organizations avoid travel costs, too.
Be Productive
Connecting is made easy with an in-the-cloud Yammer network available with
Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and with SharePoint Online, a part of Office 365. Yammer
Enterprise is social software that organizations use for private and public internal
communications. Office 365 also includes productivity tools—including Microsoft
Word Online, Excel Online, and PowerPoint Online—that enable you to co-author
documents and institute version control.
Collaborate Seamlessly
Organizations of any size can securely store, sync, share, and easily collaborate on
files through a cloud-based storage service by adopting OneDrive for Business. With
this easy-access storage in the cloud, salespeople in the field can work together on a
contract, for example, with colleagues in the office.
Ways Enterprise Social Can
Improve Your Prospecting Process
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the economy, according to a study
from the research arm of business
consulting giant McKinsey. The
report says value will come from
added productivity, improved
customer focus, and better-
functioning teams—among other
benefits. Millions of messages daily,
and with Enterprise Social, you have
the technology to make sense of it.
Microsoft Social Listening
With Microsoft Social Listening—a
part of Microsoft Dynamics
CRM—your sales, service, and
marketing teams can understand
the customer better and deliver
personalized customer experiences.
They are empowered to monitor
social networks such as Twitter for
information about your brand or
competition, and analyze sentiment
and engagement.
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Even learning about negative statements related to your competitors helps you focus your efforts. Microsoft Social
Listening alerts you to trends so you can stay on top of the topics that matter the most to your market, and preempts
loss by addressing buyers’ concerns immediately and on target. “One tweet we found uncovered a company that didn’t
understand the point of a competitor’s software,” says Gardner. “We reached out and explained the business value, roles,
and responsibilities. And we also drew their interest away from this competitor.”
Microsoft Social Listening is extremely powerful. By strategically listening to customers’ mentions of keywords related
to your particular industry, you get a better understanding of what’s important to them and can tailor your pitch
accordingly.
“Sometimes we have tapped into key words so early that our prospects have not even begun an evaluation. Our team
is the first one to the account,” says Gardner. “In this modern era, when your customers have so much influence, if you’re
the first to the conversation, there’s more trust, control, and momentum.”
Social sellers are 51 percent more likely to
reach their quotas than non-social sellers.
—Aberdeen Research
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51%

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Collaborating Internally
As a sales leader, you need a tight, top-notch sales team who can find out exactly what’s happening in the minds
of customers and collaborate with one another to drive success. In most cases, salespeople can no longer operate
individually. Marketing and sales are more tightly aligned than ever before, with more accurate analytics, delicate lead
nurturing, and precise handoffs. Sales teams need to get more work done more efficiently, and put their minds together
as a team to capture and carry out the best ideas.
Sales needs the right collaboration and communication tools to stay connected with the rest of the business. The range
of Microsoft Enterprise Social solutions makes it easier for internal teams to share knowledge, work together, and make
real-time decisions. Lync, Skype, Yammer, and SharePoint are integrated to enable teamwork from within the CRM
application. And because the world is mobile, so are all Enterprise Social tools.
“I use Lync to conduct all my meetings and screen-sharing
presentations. With Lync, we have voice, screen sharing,
the ability to upload attachments, and referenceable
documents. It is very powerful.”
—Lindsay Gardner, Sales Enablement Manager at Microsoft
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Ways Enterprise Social Makes
Knowledge Sharing, Teamwork,
and Decision Making Easier
Open a Dialogue
Gather the information you need from the right people at the right time. Tap into your
company’s organizational knowledge from any location with Yammer’s centralized
communication and document repository. Conversations can also occur within
contact, account, lead, or opportunity records inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Keep It Together
Team members working on presentations, proposals, or RFPs will be able to use the
powerful co-authoring and version control capabilities with Microsoft SharePoint
working directly within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Know Your Experts
Quickly identify subject matter experts with your company or decision makers, and
make use of their insights to close deals. Lync and Skype provide a powerful and
simple way to interact with colleagues, partners, and contacts. Presence icons within
Microsoft Dynamics CRM facilitate one-click interaction.
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“We established a Yammer
Group within our sales team,”
says Gardner. “We shared
best practices and successful
pitches. When you’re reaching
out to a CEO, you need to
know what unique approach
to take and what tactics will
work best. There was one
particular methodology that
worked really well.
When you’re collaborating
around different approaches
to the C-level suite, you can
also collaborate around key
talking points for different
industry verticals—talking
points that really drive
the ‘why you, why now?’
conversation with prospects.”
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16. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR SALES
Closing (aka “Winning”)
Closing faster means creating personal, targeted experiences with prospects. Salespeople must be constantly
connected. They must be incredibly agile. The stakes are high, and there are no excuses. If you want an Enterprise Social
play in the game, and if you want to win, there are three must-have tools you’re going to need:
Gain Access to
Prospects’ Social
Information
By using Microsoft Dynamics CRM
integrated with solutions by InsideView,
connecting to prospects though social
networks helps generate warm leads. For
example, you can access your LinkedIn
contacts without having to leave the
Microsoft Dynamics CRM app.
Get to Know the
Person Behind the
Contact Data
With Microsoft Dynamics CRM with
360-Degree View, you can get real-time
professional and contact information
from 30,000 business and social sources.
Available profiles provide account, lead,
and contact updates.
Employ and
Customize Expert
Process Flows
Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers a
guided sales experience with built-in
sales best practices and customized
process flows designed by industry
experts. Your team can drive toward
successful outcomes, ensure consistency,
and easily adapt to change. The point-
and-click process designer makes even
the most complex business processes
manageable.
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A message sent by LinkedIn InMail that uses a second-degree
connection has a whopping 67 percent response rate.
—Neural Selling
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Change the Way You Sell
Part Three:

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People have changed the
way they buy, so you need
to change the way you sell.
Enterprise Social solutions include
intuitive features that help ensure
rapid, widespread adoption by sales
professionals. Ramp-up time is fast, and
training costs are low. You can reduce
risk while expanding capacity with
world-class Enterprise Social tools from
Microsoft, a longtime productivity leader
and trusted IT vendor.
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“[Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM business processes]
we have observed an increase in revenues by improving
the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate by more than
75 percent and closing more sales.”
—Ashish Pandey,
All India Sales Head, Godrej Infotech Ltd.
But those benefits are trivial compared to the insights and timing that will justify your investment in your sales networking
environment: better prospecting, improved team collaboration and information sharing, and stronger personal
relationships.
To work like a network and learn about sales productivity solutions that help you
close deals faster, contact Microsoft Enterprise Social at www.enterprisesocial.com.
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www.enterprisesocial.com