LinkedIn Sales Insights best practices and customer stories

Selling Social Selling: It Takes Leadership [Case Study]

canada-post-case-study

Despite its 253-year history as Canada’s national postal service, Canada Post faces many of the same challenges as high-growth tech startups. As the company extended its offerings to go after new opportunities like ecommerce shipping, it was clear that many of its sales reps lacked:

  • Tools to identify and reach more prospects
  • Resources to develop deep customer insights
  • Ability to multi-thread throughout the deal cycle

What’s been great about working as an Enterprise Relationship Manager at LinkedIn, though, has been seeing the way that social selling can help everyone transform the way they do business – from brand-new companies to storied institutions like Canada Post.

Once Canada Post’s VP of Sales Serge Pitre decided to augment his sales team with social selling via Sales Navigator, Margaret Thomas and her sales effectiveness team worked closely with Jordan Friedman (Enterprise Account Executive) and our team at LinkedIn to develop a plan for success. It included two key strategies:

  • Dedicating time to socializing Sales Navigator throughout the sales organization
  • Driving sustained engagement by reporting key social selling metrics

Getting the word out

To raise awareness and knowledge about Sales Navigator, Margaret Thomas and her team set up face-to-face training, weekly webinars, and regular office hours to field ongoing questions. Early stories of success were collected and shared at training sessions, which gave other reps both the powerful motivation and the specific steps they needed to take to start getting real value from Sales Navigator, right away.

Working in conjunction with sales effectiveness, the marketing team also got involved, bringing in a photographer to take professional headshots and curating third-party content for the reps to share on their networks.

Once Sales Navigator was integrated into Canada Post’s sales culture, teams quickly started to see how social selling made a difference. Jamie Briggs, Canada Post’s eCommerce Business Development Manager, offers up just one example: "There was a C-level prospect I was trying to engage,” he says. “But before he would even give me the time of day, I had to prove I had something of value to offer him. After using Sales Navigator to research his company and their specific challenges, I was able to pique his interest with news about a competitor, and then he finally said, 'Okay, you've got me,' and agreed to take the conversation to the next level."

Keeping reps motivated

With the rollout complete, Margaret Thomas’ team developed a plan to keep reps engaged.

To encourage best practices, leadership distributed reports that tracked metrics like social selling index (or SSI). In conjunction with their training efforts, reps used the reports to see how to improve their LinkedIn profiles, engage and share insights, and build their personal brand.

Today, reps keep an eye on the SSI leaderboards not only in the spirit of competition, but because a high SSI score is a key indicator that they’re doing Sales Navigator right and engaging with prospects the right way. This helps generate more leads, grow existing accounts, and ultimately, close more deals.

Seeing tangible results

When it comes to getting the most out of Sales Navigator, Canada Post is all in, having seen 58X ROI in its first year. After tracking engagement and new opportunities in its CRM,

Sales Navigator has made a powerful impression on Canada Post, becoming a model for new opportunity creation and sustained account growth in the face of a fierce competitive landscape.

So whether you’re part of a 253-year-old business or a brand-new one, you can energize your sales team and grow your business with Sales Navigator, especially when you have a solid plan and strong leadership.

Get an inside look at how Canada Post innovated the way it reached decision-makers using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Read the case study >>

Join the Buyer First Movement. Right in your inbox