Social Selling to an Audience of IT Executives: The NetApp Case Study

How NetApp communicates with IT executives from target companies through networking and building a personal brand on social media.

The NetApp sales team focuses primarily on working with current clients and scaling their business. However, the company is growing and expanding its solutions portfolio. So, it's important to start communicating with new positions (Big Data, AI, DevOps, Cloud Professionals) and bring in new clients.

NetApp sells complex and expensive data management solutions with a long sales cycle. To expedite whether or not to buy, the company needs to build trust with potential clients. Social Selling is well suited for networking with large B2B customers, building relationships, and demonstrating expertise.

When we met Irina Chernova three years ago, she was launching an Account-Based Marketing program, and she needed a partner to help her with Social Selling.

Irina gradually implemented Social Selling into NetApp's regional marketing strategy, starting with a personal example - developing her own social media profile.

The ModumUp team started Social Selling by attracting potential clients to a large offline NetApp Insight conference.

To achieve this goal, we developed Irina's personal brand on social media. In addition, we used Social Selling mechanics to unobtrusively reach out to IT decision-makers and invite them to the event.

We divided all activities into three categories: before, during, and after the event:

Before the event, Irina published announcements and shared her opinions from an organizer's point of view. During the event, she wrote short situational posts, and after the conference, she talked about insights and sent conference materials to those who could not attend.

During the project's first stage, Irina connected with 473 IT professionals on social media. Two hundred and ten people regularly interacted with her content about the conference and then received the event materials. Twenty-five people visited the event in person.

Despite a good connection with potential clients, only a few people out of over 800 who connected through Social Selling activities attended the offline event. A small number of participants confirms that Social Selling is unsuitable for attracting participants to large-scale events. However, it works well when building long-term relationships within a narrow audience, leading them into a substantive conversation.

Lead generation mechanics have been another way of attracting new customers at NetApp. Social Selling involves neat and unobtrusive lead generation. In Irina's case, we offered valuable content to the audience using short texts with a bright background. These posts attract attention and usually get a high response rate.

Seventy-nine people responded to the post, 44 of whom were part of the target companies. Irina handed eight leads to the sales team. The conversion from targeted responses to potential customers was 18%, which is relatively high for mechanics that deal with exclusive content.

Irina continues to develop her brand on social media. Top managers of target companies reach out to her, ask questions and interact with the content. She proved that Social Selling works and, just six months later, encouraged her colleague Tatiana Bocharnikova, a Regional Director at NetApp, to develop her social media profile.

We proposed a format for developing Tatyana's profile without active lead generation, as Tatyana is a high-level executive, and active sales aren't her direct responsibility. However, it was vital for her to build visibility in IT, network with potential clients, and develop a personal brand as a technology and data visionary. This would help her promote NetApp as a market leader and attract potential clients.

What we did:

• We defined goals and objectives of personal social media profile development
• We divided the target audience into mid-sized and large data-intensive companies, system integrators, government organizations, and business media
• We analyzed current activity on their personal social media profiles
• We completed the three stages of preparation for Social Selling: positioning, content plan, and target audience growth
• And we initiated consulting support for Tatiana

Tatiana's key message is "I am a visionary, who shares cutting-edge IT trends. I am an open-minded, pleasant and positive person".

Tatiana originally had 800 connections on social media; she now has 5,000. About 4,200 are target audience representatives: top managers and IT directors of medium and large companies, editors-in-chief from industry media resources and journalists.

At the beginning of the project, the average post would reach 34 reactions and ten comments. Recently, we reached the maximum in average activity per post with 85 reactions and 31 comments. This increase in interactions proves that the audience likes the content and is willing to engage.

Svetlana and George's stories are similar. They followed Tatyana's example and joined the Social Selling project four months after she did.

Svetlana attracts target clients from energy companies, while George's goal is to build trusting relationships with the employees of large banks and their subsidiaries.

We showed examples of content best practices, made a content plan together, generated social media post ideas, and made a list of relevant articles. We trained Svetlana and George on how to use different methods of finding target audience representatives on social media and how to communicate with them.

Also, we regularly compiled the lists of target audience representatives for TA growth and prepared content based on interviews with Svetlana and George.

Social Selling requires the client's time and resources. Therefore, it's essential to be ready to spend 1-2 hours a week in a format of social media profile management by the agency team, or 4-5 hours a week working independently with consulting support. In this case, Social Selling will bring you many valuable connections and deliver your expertise to your target audience.

NetApp uses Social Selling and builds a personal social media brand to reach new audiences and develop long-term relationships with IT executives from target companies.