B2B Social Media Best Practices: SAP Best Performance for Partners Program
Over the past several months, we’ve been helping SAP’s Partner Enablement team to understand how to use social media to further their goals of increasing partner sales and adding new partners to sell SAP software to the small and midsize enterprise (SME) market. Because there is a lot of confusion over using social media in a B2B setting, we’ve built a training methodology which takes the best practices from our ten years of experience in B2B social media and community work to simplify and help SAP’s partners.
The methodology is built around a very simple, yet powerful concept: Restaurant menus. Our training workshops provide teams with the questions that they must answer to successfully utilize social media. The goal is to clearly identify your strategy and objectives, then build a menu of tactics to support your effort.
So, are you a Pizzeria or a Fine Dining restaurant? Do you have a limited menu or an expansive menu with ever changing offerings (think of daily specials)? Does your audience have the time for a five course meal or do they want take out? Do you have multiple chefs or is there one person making your pizza?
By answering these and other questions, B2B teams begin to gain clarity in their objectives, audience, content strategy, and measurement requirements. Once we complete this session, we move into the tactical way to utilize social media in order to build out the menu of offerings.
Not all tactics are appropriate, nor does B2C social media strategy always deliver the intended results. By understanding how B2B social media tactics differ from B2C and work together to deliver results, our client SAP has generated significant results. In terms of helping partners succeed in a tough economy, it’s Best Performance for Partners social media program delivers training and information efficiently to help each partner organization succeed in meeting its revenue and lead generation objectives. For SAP, the partners who are participating are learning better ways of marketing and selling which benefits SAP directly in the form of revenue achievement.
For SAP, the Best Performance Challenge is an innovative way to build its partner channel competency each year. The Best Performance Circle, composed of the top partner organizations in EMEA and India, reinforces SAP’s commitment to its partners by using an online community to strengthen its relationship with a key part of its sales ecosystem.
The video below by Raimund Mollenhauer, Head of Enablement & Talent Net for SAP Partners, SME EMEA & Global describes how SAP is using Impact Interactions’ methodology today to deliver results:
The innovation continues at SAP with future roll-outs of additional Best Performance initiatives. Their use of social media not only speeds the adoption of these initiatives, but also delivers value to the partner channel in a cost effective manner.
To learn more about B2B social media best practices, our workshops, or social media for channel management, please contact us or ask a question here on this blog.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 10:38 am and is filed under Best Practices, Impact Interactions clients. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Responses to “B2B Social Media Best Practices: SAP Best Performance for Partners Program”
You can realize ROI using social media, but you must actually relate to people, too!
http://impactinteractions.com/best-practices/b2b-social-media-best-practices-sap-best-performance-for-partners-program/1074#
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