How Best-in-Class Sellers Use Social Relationships to Build a Better Pipeline

This document is the result of primary research performed by Aberdeen Group. Aberdeen Group's methodologies provide for objective fact-based research and represent
the best analysis available at the time of publication. Unless otherwise noted, the entire contents of this publication are copyrighted by Aberdeen Group, Inc. and may not
be reproduced, distributed, archived, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent by Aberdeen Group, Inc.
January 2014
No More Spaghetti against the Wall: How Best-
in-Class Sellers Use Social Relationships to Build
a Better Pipeline
Throughout the calendar year, and particularly near month-, quarter- and
year-end, sales professionals everywhere keep an especially watchful eye on
their end-of-cycle opportunity pipeline. In the business-to-business (B2B)
space, the stakes are especially high, with commissioned accelerators, bonuses
and President's Club qualification often on the line — not to mention job
security for the “C” players in our sales organizations. The challenge that reps
and managers alike face in these final sprints to the finish line, is that this
pipeline is frequently lacking in both quality and quantity.
For front-line sellers, it is easy to stress out when their buyers “go dark” near
the end of the selling period, and some of their high-probability deals start to
look slippery. At the management level, understanding which opportunities
have the best chance of closing is an essential ingredient in knowing where
and how to apply executive pressure, price discounting and other last-ditch
efforts to push deals over the goal line. This Research Brief examines the
value of utilizing social relationships and user-generated content to improve
the quality of B2B sales pipeline content, maximize deal closure rates, and
avoid a quota-miss at the end of the selling period.
Best-in-Class Work Smarter…and Harder
The title of this Research Brief refers to the classic, self-fulfilling prophecy that
afflicts too many enterprise sales organizations: sales leaders take a look at the
overall opportunity forecast; they harangue their team members to "put more
in the pipeline;" so reps add half-baked deals to the customer relationship
management (CRM) to shut up their bosses. However tempting it may be, the
"If you throw enough spaghetti against the wall, enough of it will stick" approach is
not an effective strategy for contemporary B2B sales success. The problem
with this quantity-over-quality approach is that the politics of sales
management get in the way of creating better, more valid opportunities that
are substantiated by more in-depth personal interactions. This, in turn
accelerates the eventual wins that, in fact, help everyone make their number
by the end of the selling period.
In Aberdeen’s Sales Effectiveness research library, a substantial body of work
speaks to the value of creating quality sales opportunities rather than a falsely
optimistic, huge pipeline of deals that are not nearly as likely to close, when
compared to prospecting relationships that have been more thoroughly
developed between buyer and seller. Recent research published in Breaking the
Laws of Physics: Shortening the Last Sales Mile through Workflow Automation (April
2013) clearly illustrates how the strongest-performing, Best-in-Class
Research Brief
Aberdeen’s Research Briefs
provide a detailed exploration of
key findings from a primary
research study, including key
performance indicators, Best-in-
Class insight, and vendor insight.

Spaghetti against the Wall: How Best-in-Class Sellers Use Social Relationships
to Build a Better Pipeline
Page 2
© 2014 Aberdeen Group. Telephone: 617 854 5200
www.aberdeen.com Fax: 617 723 7897
companies (sidebar) are able to report far more efficient pipeline management
proficiencies — Figure 1.
Figure 1: Best-in-Class Sales Success Metrics
Source: Aberdeen Group, March 2013
Much like baseball — “the only endeavor where failing two-thirds of the time
will get you into the Hall of Fame” — there are no B2B selling environments
where a rep can bat 1.000, or win all of their deals. While there is certainly no
way for research to prove that Best-in-Class sales organizations don’t work
any less hard than under-performers, the efficiency metrics represented in
Figure 1 clearly indicate that they are working smarter. With a 44% gap (52%
vs. 36%) in the overall win rate, these strongest performers must be doing
something very differently than Industry Average and Laggard firms in
managing their pipeline. They are also far more realistic when it comes to
tagging deals with a “sure thing” label that eventually fall out of the win
column. Let's take a look at the best practices and technology enablers — the
art and science of efficient pipeline management — that Best-in-Class
companies utilize to achieve these superior results.
Social Selling: Here to Stay
While it would be arrogant to assert that social media is an essential
ingredient of every conceivable B2B sales environment, Aberdeen research
published in Enterprise Social Collaboration: High-Power Teamwork for Better Sales
Results (November 2013) presents a compelling argument that user-generated
content is now a mainstream component of most successful enterprise sales
initiatives. The relatively brief, but exciting history of business-oriented social
media originally brought consumer-oriented posts, shares and tweets into
enterprise marketing organizations, prior to the idea that professional
salespeople could also benefit by using such tools. Initially, protecting a
consumer or business brand, utilizing social media monitoring technologies,
52%
19%
35%
21%
37%
30%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
Percentage of quotes
that result in orders
Percentage of sales-forecasted
"wins" that are eventually lost
Percentage
n = 159
Best-in-Class Industry Average Laggard
The Lead-to-Win Best-in-Class
From January through March 2013,
Aberdeen surveyed 165 end-user
sales organizations to understand
how the top performers among them
use bottom-of-funnel tools to
support sales effectiveness. The
performance metrics used to define
the Best-in-Class (top 20%), Industry
Average (middle 50%), and Laggard
(bottom 30%) among these sales
teams are:
√ 91% team attainment of sales
quota, compared with 56% and
22% among Industry Average and
Laggard firms.
√ 87% of sales reps achieving annual
quota, compared with 48% and
20% among Industry Average and
Laggard firms.
√ 6.5% year-over-year increase in
team attainment of sales quota vs.
1.2% for Industry Average
companies and an 8.8% decline
among Laggards.
√ 2.3% year-over-year improvement
in (reduction of) average sales
cycle; Industry Average and
Laggard companies reported a
1.2% improvement and a 3.5%
worsening (lengthening),
respectively.

Page 3
represented a mostly defensive approach that organizations took in order to
avoid publicity disasters. They soon discovered the value of lead generation
and nurturing via social channels, and before long the explosive growth of
networks such as LinkedIn allowed enterprise salespeople to join the online
conversation. As a result, organizations with strong alignment between their
marketing and sales teams — see Sales Enablement: Fulfilling the Last Frontier of
Marketing-Sales Alignment (September 2013) — have been able to both
originate and influence B2B sales deals with a measurable contribution from
social media activity, by building a better and more reliable sales pipeline.
Indeed, Figure 2 reveals, from Aberdeen research published in Social Selling:
Best-in-Class Targeting of the Right Message, at the Right Time, for the Right Person
(July 2012), that Best-in-Class firms are significantly more likely to use social
media to their advantage.
Figure 2: Sourcing and Influencing B2B Sales with Social Media, by
Best-in-Class
Source: Aberdeen Group, May 2012
There are a number of ways to define the use of social media in professional
selling, in support of these aggressive and successful selling results by Best-in-Class
companies:
• Internal collaboration: like-minded employees of any organization,
including external sales channel partners, can connect with one
another, either through formal enterprise social collaboration platforms,
or in a self-organizing fashion utilizing Facebook or LinkedIn groups.
The common thread among all these approaches is that the wisdom
of the many, gathered in a democratic and leaderless environment,
will help all participants learn from one another. It is true that 20th
century B2B salespeople were not exactly known for sharing, but
millennial-aged sellers have grown up in a far more digital-native
environment in which user-generated content is a more natural state.
• Making connections: all the metaphors about the world getting
smaller truly apply to the modern selling experience, considering how
57%
38%
19%
36%
32%
21%
24% 23%
7%
0%
15%
30%
45%
60%
Closed a deal
originated through
social media
Social media
heavily influenced
a closed deal
Social media
moderately influenced
a closed deal
PercentageofRespondents
n = 182
Aberdeen’s PACE Methodology
Aberdeen applies a methodology
to benchmark research that
evaluates the business Pressures,
Actions, Capabilities, and
Enablers (PACE) that indicate
corporate behavior in specific
business processes:
√ Pressures – external forces
that impact an organization’s
market position,
competitiveness, or business
operations.
√ Actions – the strategic
approaches that an
organization takes in response
to industry pressures.
√ Capabilities – the business
process competencies
(process, organization,
performance, and knowledge
management) required to
execute corporate strategy.
√ Enablers – the key
functionality of technology
solutions required to support
the organization’s enabling
business practices.

Page 4
easy it now is to uncover the professional history and personal
attributes of the people with whom we hope to do business. Savvy
sellers check out their prospects, companies and territories not only
through the official content portrayed on corporate websites, but also
by digging up self-published details about their targets. Buyers, in turn,
will take advantage of the hidden sales cycle to evaluate a sales rep
who has contacted them, prior to engaging.
• Participating in the Conversation: who is more likely to win a
competitive enterprise sales deal: an often-quoted and re-tweeted
thought leader, or a digitally invisible sales rep with no obvious subject
matter expertise? Aberdeen strongly advises against using social media
to blatantly trumpet product features, advantages and benefits — see
the Social Selling research noted above. That said, the enormous
opportunity to define oneself as more than a commissioned
salesperson is no greater than in the realm of social conversation.
Often-used metaphors for adding value to the customer experience –
becoming a business partner, consultative selling, solution selling all
are substantiated by savvy business developers who contribute to
LinkedIn group conversations, curate the user-generated content of
other thought leaders, and subtly show their potential buyers that
they really do know their stuff. Simply put, people want to buy from
trusted advisors, and social conversation makes it exceedingly easy to
create more valuable pipelined deals, supported by robust online
conversations that showcase the seller’s capabilities and eventual
ability to service their customer effectively.
No More Generic Selling!
It is not difficult to argue that a more knowledgeable account manager,
interacting with their prospect or customer with an awareness of their
specific likes, dislikes and needs, will build a better and more efficient sales
pipeline. To this point, Aberdeen data published in Eliminating the Noise: Best
Practices for the Five W’s of Sales Intelligence (August 2013) helps to showcase
how Best-in-Class companies place an enormous premium on what Louis
Pasteur referred to: "chance favors the prepared mind."
In Figure 3, we look at the top business goals reported by Best-in-Class
companies. These focus on the need to strategically and more efficiently
create product value and legitimate pipeline content with more likelihood of
closing in an identifiable sales cycle. More than half of these top performers
nominated “more meaningful sales conversations” as a top-three strategy
focus on overall sales effectiveness, and nearly as many echoed the findings of
Train, Coach, Reinforce: Best Practices in Maximizing Sales Productivity (October
2012) in supporting their front-line sellers with better skills and knowledge.
Sector Definition: Social Selling
For the purposes of Aberdeen
research, “social selling” refers to
explore Best-in-Class adoption
of: (1) internal collaborative
social tools used by sales
professionals to benefit team-
based selling; (2) how sales teams
“listen” to external social content
pertaining to their customers,
accounts and target markets; and
(3) active use of posts, tweets or
wikis by sales reps who
contribute to the online
conversations, in order to more
effectively impact eventual buying
decisions.

Page 5
Figure 3: Top Sales Strategies Geared Toward Better Sales
Engagement
Source: Aberdeen Group, October 2012
Indeed, Best-in-Class companies in this research data set formally promoted
the use of external social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn by their team
members at a 69% rate, compared with 58% and 47%, respectively, among
Industry Average and Laggard firms. Eighty-six percent (86%) of these leaders
also confirm that “There is significant value in ‘social learning,’ i.e. sales reps /
managers sharing their best practices or tips / tricks on closing deals.” This
phrase pertains both to internal collaboration activities, behind the firewall,
and also to self-organized groups on LinkedIn and other professional
networks.
Figure 4: Best-in-Class Enterprises More Effectively Share "Tribal
Knowledge"
Source: Aberdeen Group, October 2013
53%
47%
28%
26%
23%
21%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
Create more
meaningful sales
conversations
that address
buyer’s overall
business needs
Enhance sales
prospecting,
nurturing,
negotiating,
closing and
executing skills
Increase deal
size and/or close
ratio
Adopt better
understanding
of buyers’
changing
behavior
Standardize
messaging and
sales process
Replicate “A
Players” within
sales team
n = 310
Best-in-Class
7%
15%
11%
52%
15%
12%
30%
24%
29%
6%
0%
15%
30%
45%
60%
No
collaboration
Passive
collaboration
Neutral Active
collaboration
Highly active
collaboration
n = 133
Best-in-Class All Others
Social Selling: Technology Best
Practices
The technology enablers
associated with Best-in-Class
social selling performance
include:
√ 100% Remote or mobile sales
team members have full
access to social media tools,
vs. 60% among Industry
Average companies and 0% of
Laggards
√ 80% Social bookmarketing
tool (record favorite user-
curated content in browser);
vs. 57% and 33% among
Industry Average and Laggard
companies
√ 57% Social business platforms
(combines contacts,
calendars, communications,
social stream); 57% and 20%
respectively of Average and
Laggard companies do the
same
√ 56% Social media sharing
tools (e.g., allow site visitors
to share content with social
networks), compared with
50% and 17% respectively
among the Industry Average
and Laggard groups

Page 6
This concept of self-organization is effectively validated by the Enterprise Social
Collaboration research referenced above. In Figure 4, we look at how Best-in-
Class companies diverge from under-performing firms in the context of the
degree to which these organizations promote and extrapolate value from
social collaboration initiatives. The upside-down “V” shape of these results —
contrasting a 67% somewhat / active Best-in-Class level of activity with only
35% of All Others — directly correlates measurable business results with the
incredible amount of helpful sales knowledge associated with access to B2B
user-generated content.
21st-Century Networking Defined
Now that we have determined the measurable value of supporting more
personalized and effective sales conversations — and pipeline building —
through the collaborative and data-rich sources of user-generated content,
let's take a look at some of the specific mechanisms that Best-in-Class sellers
deployed.
Figure 5: Bringing Home the Bacon with Fewer Degrees of
Separation
Source: Aberdeen Group, May 2012
In Figure 5, we see the dramatic differential in sales performance results,
comparing users of social graphs with companies not leveraging this
increasingly popular approach. Social graphs are essentially the modern-day
equivalent of spending plenty of time at the water cooler, or in the company
lunchroom. As a formally deployed technology enabler, they are generally
included in both freemium and paid enterprise collaboration tools, providing
participants with visual layouts of their degrees of separation and search
results as they attempt to extend their business network, often in pursuit of a
specific sale.
94%
87%
82%
74%
61%
50%
40%
53%
25%
40%
55%
70%
85%
100%
Team
attainment
of quota
Sales
forecast
accuracy
Reps
achieving
quota
Customer
retention
rate
PercentageofAttainment
n = 182
Users of social graphs Non-users
The Enterprise Social
Collaboration Best-in-Class
In August through October 2013,
Aberdeen surveyed 629
organizations to understand their
collaboration best practices.
Among the 133 respondents
actively deploying ESC initiatives,
the performance metrics used to
define the Best-in-Class (top
20%), Industry Average (middle
50%), and Laggard (bottom 30%)
among these sales teams are:
√ 94% time-to-information
(access to business information
within published internal
expectations) for Best-in-Class,
vs. 78% among Industry
Average firms and 51% for
Laggards.
√ 86% organizational
operational efficiency
(percentage of the
organization’s maximum
potential productivity that is
actually achieved) for Best-in-
Class, vs. 73% for the Industry
Average and 56% among
Laggard respondents
√ 16.8% year-over-year
improvement (reduction)
in response time to
customer inquiries for Best-
in-Class, vs. 8.7% and 4.8%
improvements for Industry
Average and Laggard
respondents, respectively
Note: “All Others” refers to the
combination of Industry Average
and Laggard firms, e.g., all survey
respondents outside of the Best-
in-Class.

Page 7
For example, an enterprise software account manager, seeking to land and
expand in one of her larger customers, will often turn to social networking
tools in an attempt to learn as much as possible about the specific buyer(s)
with whom she is interacting for a new or renewal sale. She recognizes,
however, that there are probably additional influencers, decision-makers or
champions within the account, who are not in her direct-connection universe,
but sit two or three connections away. If the rep senses that these individuals’
professional backgrounds, areas of expertise or shared connections can
positively contribute to her own chances of closing the deal, she certainly will
want to connect directly with these additional contacts. Using the invitation
tools baked into the networking solution, or an enterprise-grade iteration of
the social connection tool, the rep may well have a better chance of creating
demand for, and ultimately selling more of, her company’s solution.
Figure 6: Sales in a 24/7 World: Trigger Events Can Make the
Difference
Source: Aberdeen Group, July 2013
An additional social selling tool is supported by the Sales Intelligence research
referenced above: the use of trigger event data to better tune into and
leverage the real-time activities of our prospects and customers. Figure 6
demonstrates, once again, how users of a specific sales effectiveness tool out-
perform non-adopters, in this case, companies who formalize the flow of
trigger event data to their front-line sellers. This kind of information
represents a wide variety of actionable intelligence, and can arrive in multiple
form factors. Major business stories such as mergers / acquisitions, senior
executive changes, product releases, and even legislative developments can
have an immediate impact – both positive and negative – on B2B sales deals
that are in process. Similarly, events taking place out of the control of both
buyer and seller can suddenly alter the landscape of established account
relationships. Being in the know before the competition easily impacts how a
professional enterprise seller fares in the hours and days after significant
business news breaks. As a result, 63% of Best-in-Class companies from the
66%
53%
48%
64%
49%
40%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
Customer
retention
rate
Sales
forecast
accuracy
Reps
achieving
quota
PercentageofAttainment
n = 206
Users of Trigger Events All Others
Enterprise Social Collaboration
Defined
For the purposes of
Aberdeen research, the phrase
“enterprise social collaboration”
refers to employees or partners
working together to accomplish
business-related tasks, via user-
generated (social) content
creation and sharing.

Page 8
Sales Intelligence research data set formally provide alerts and feeds to their
team, compared with 52% of Industry Average and 45% among Laggard firms.
These top performers are better aware of the consequences of, for instance,
unexpected job changes by decision-making personnel in a buying
organization, and establish automated data feeds for their reps to stay on top
of the ever-changing landscape in which they are selling.
Conclusion and Takeaways: Leveraging Social Intelligence
for Better Business Connections and Sales Results
Building a healthy enterprise sales pipeline requires a wide variety of skills, and
a great deal of institutional support, as evidenced by the data presented in this
Research Brief. Considering the many factors that need to fall into place in
order to effectively source, nurture and close today’s B2B sales deals,
following the lead of Best-in-Class sales teams around leveraging social
content for better pipeline management is clearly essential. Even when all the
stars align, no one wins every opportunity, however, but the top performers
are far more adept at doing their homework to ensure closure, whether a win
or a loss, for the deals in their forecast — Figure 7.
Figure 7: The Ultimate Results: Best-in-Class Sales Pipeline
Management Defined
Source: Aberdeen Group, March 2013
Here, we see that fully 75% of the worst-performing sales organizations
report neutral or worse skills in avoiding the dreaded “no decision” result of
their sales endeavors, while 60% of Best-in-Class companies indicate a high
degree of skill in achieving this kind of closure. When it comes to pipeline
management excellence, it is easy to talk about the sales cycle, and recognize
how important it is to control or shrink it, but thinking about time-to-lose and
deal slippage friction is just as important. In utilizing the power of social
networks to source more accurate B2B sales leads, learning about game-
60%
45%
25%
0%
15%
30%
45%
60%
75%
Skill at avoiding
"no decision"
sales losses
Percentindicating4/5on1-5scale
n = 159
Fast Facts: Best-in-Class
Enterprise Social Collaboration
Metrics
In addition to the metrics used to
determine Best-in-Class
companies (page 6), these top
performers also reported average
annualized achievements of:
√ 12.9% improvement
(reduction) in on-time project
delivery, vs. 7.3% and 5.4%
respectively for Industry
Average and Laggard firms.
√ 12.1% improvement
(reduction) in time-to-
information, vs. 9.5% and 4.5%
√ 6.8% improvement in customer
retention, vs. 3.6% and 1.8%

Page 9
changing events in real-time, and collaborating with fellow sellers to close
bigger deals faster, all organizations can benefit from these Best-in-Class sales
techniques.
For more information on this or other research topics, please visit
www.aberdeen.com.
Related Research
Sales Enablement: Fulfilling the Last
Frontier of Marketing-Sales Alignment;
September 2013
Eliminating the Noise: Best Practices for
the Five W’s of Sales Intelligence; August,
2013
Reducing Friction in the Sales Cycle: Best
Practices in Sales Contract Management;
October 2013
Breaking the Laws of Physics: Shortening
the Last Sales Mile Through Workflow
Automation; April 2013
Motivate, Incent, Compensate, Enable:
Sales Performance Management Best
Practices; January 2013
Collaborate, Listen, Contribute: How Best-
in-Class Sales Teams Leverage Social
Selling; November 2012
Social Selling: Best-in-Class Targeting of the
Right Message, at the Right Time, for the
Right Person; July 2012
Train, Coach, Reinforce: Best Practices in
Maximizing Sales Productivity; October
2012
Sales Intelligence: What B2B Sellers Need
To Know Before the Call; June 2012
Author: Peter Ostrow, Vice President and Research Group Director; Customer
Management, Sales Effectiveness
(peter.ostrow@aberdeen.com) LinkedIn Twitter
For more than two decades, Aberdeen's research has been helping corporations worldwide become Best-in-Class.
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(800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com.
This document is the result of primary research performed by Aberdeen Group. Aberdeen Group's methodologies
provide for objective fact-based research and represent the best analysis available at the time of publication. Unless
otherwise noted, the entire contents of this publication are copyrighted by Aberdeen Group, Inc. and may not be
reproduced, distributed, archived, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent by Aberdeen
Group, Inc. (2013a)

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