A social business model is founded on discovering information, analyzing data, sharing knowledge and collaborating across your organization. It’s founded on collaborating across your customers’ organizations, too.
That doesn’t sound like fulfilling a short-term objective, does it? Especially when your customers don’t have a social business strategy – let alone a social business model – at all.
It’s an uphill climb if your only objective is to close a sale.
Should selling the true objective of a social business strategy?
The short answer to my question, does a social business model really sell, is yes. And no. Your own efforts tell you that’s not the entire answer.
Creating and maintaining a sustainable social business model involves hardwiring that philosophy into your corporate culture. That’s not an easy task, when your own business model being focused on a company’s annual calendar year and departmental silos.
Executing a social business model takes a lot more effort and involves a lot more people that you and your company socially think. It involves a throughput-focused process, one which creates horizontal momentum.
A social business model may not be the answer to making this quarter’s numbers, or even next quarter’s. In order for your own social business model to fly, it needs to sync with your customers’ social business models as well.
That’s hard to do when you are dealing with marketplaces where the majority of your customers don’t have a social business strategy in the first place.
The real potential of a social business model is that it creates and sells its own value.
Executing your social business model moves you from being part of the crowd to differentiating yourself from everyone else. You know stuff no one else knows. And you know where to continue to find it, too.
Your company’s social business model enhances the speed of cross-functional communication. It increases the number of people involved in generating the next solution, the next business outcome.
Robust yet nimble and flexible business, scientific and technical solutions were never achieved when decisions were made in a vacuum.
Yes, social business really does sell. Incorporating a social business model into your overall business model moves you from being same as towards being more than.
Creating a social business model provides another layer of depth and adds to the total breadth of what you and your company offer to your current and potential customers.
Implementing a social business model enhances the information influencing and impacting the sustainable business decisions that a company needs to make. That means including you and your company in these discussions long before an RFQ or RFP is issued.
What happens to your business development strategy when your company becomes the basis for design?
Living and breathing your social business model moves your customers from asking you “Can you do this?” towards including you in their discussion about “What do you think of this?”
Ultimately, your overall business development and sales cycles are shortened in the process.
Wasn’t that your real professional development goal, anyway? Social or otherwise?
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, is a management consultant and business coach. She catalyzes startups and remodels small-to-medium manufacturing and service companies who have difficulty with unpredictable revenue streams. Learn about how to move from “Can you do this?” to “What do you think of this? in Do YOU Mean Business? available on Amazon.com.
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