The Challenge

Take an increasingly competitive and pressurized global market for technology products, add constantly evolving buyer behavior and then factor in social media’s growing influence on buying decisions. These trends represent remarkable opportunities… provided you have the right tools and insights.

A leading international technology corporation selected Harte Hanks to develop and implement a visionary social selling model to help seize these opportunities – to better interact with buyers across online channels in order to drive lead-generation. The challenges:

  • Find a truly innovative way to help sales teams identify and establish enduring relationships with a tech-savvy audience.
  • Allow sales teams to interact socially with B2B audiences in more targeted and meaningful ways, and at those crucial early stages in the sales cycle.
  • Measure success in terms of an increase in the number of warm leads generated, and the resulting conversion rates.

Our Approach

For one of the world’s leading technology corporations, Harte Hanks developed a social program specifically to help sellers identify buyer signals across social media:

  • The program’s response model combines real-time social monitoring, with predictive analytics and ‘cognitive computing’.
  • Its continued impact relies on a refined and targeted listening model that quickly identifies conversational topics across social channels.
  • This provides a clear and detailed understanding of the target audience – which means social content addresses their specific business needs.
  • Our social listening experts then built a model to identify, rank and prioritize leads, providing actionable insights for sales teams to follow up.

The Results

Harte Hanks helped this market-leading technology business grow the top of its sales funnel by providing its Digital Sales team with rich and expedient consumer intelligence, and actionable insights. Social listening identified 6,800 contact opportunities. Our real-time, robust and effective approach helped the sales team plan and build relationships that are far more likely to be enduring and mutually advantageous.

The program resulted in:

164% increase

Relevant social posts

289% increase

New buyers

185% increase

Leads within a financial year

97% increase

Win revenue

”This is a progressive social media strategy that has led to better cohesion between our sales and marketing efforts. It enables our sales reps to build stronger personal networks with their peers, prospects and clients and has transformed them into social media savants. Most importantly, this is leading to a tangible increase in sales that can be directly attributed to social media conversations.

Senior Marketing ManagerChannel Marketing Cloud Computing