What have you achieved as a team? 

"In February 2022, we started a unique project: Colleagues worldwide were made fit for social selling on LinkedIn. Social selling is the digital development and expansion of a customer relationship as part of the sales process. The goal is to strengthen the relationship with other users through activity on social media channels and thus create sales opportunities. 

The participants from sales and marketing first learned how to create an expert profile on LinkedIn from a simple "CV profile": First, you define your target group and list your expertise and industry experience. From this, suitable strategic topic areas are identified. With this information, the profile is adapted for the target group, from the slogan and summary to the skills. Getting to know the platform as a tool for everyday work was accompanied by best practice examples from LinkedIn as well as pioneers from aerospace and Schulte. One example: the content advent calendar on the topic of track construction.

Developing, measuring and learning: These are important aspects of the agile framework. So we tested our hypotheses with the help of participant feedback. Our findings for sales: 

1. Our customers are on LinkedIn.  

2. We are noticed and can raise awareness of our products and solutions.  

3. We can also initiate customer contacts (leads) and sales directly via LinkedIn.  

At the end of the project, we have built a "Social Selling Club" Education Hub, created new LinkedIn expert profiles, published over 200 posts, made thousands of new business contacts and even won our first deals. And more importantly, we have strengthened our internal network and taken important steps together toward digitizing sales."

How did you achieve this together?  

"Our key to success? We ran an agile experiment. That means there was no classic, linear process as you know it from other projects. And we did this for an intangible product: the LinkedIn Social Selling learning journey and training.  

Specifically, we communicated with the participant groups every week and used the feedback to constantly refine the training and content. Thanks to the agile approach, we were able to react flexibly to the participants, business-specific conditions and our customers. This was all the more important because we were confronted with unknown factors and at the same time we are a mixed, international team with very different requirements. The idea was to unleash the potential of our people by creating a culture of autonomy, trust and collaboration. 

We clearly defined the goals to be achieved in advance - this is how we managed to maintain focus throughout the project, properly allocate scarce resources and make our success measurable."

What does your performance mean for thyssenkrupp?  

"This agile project stands for Engineering. Tomorrow. Together par excellence. At a time when flexibility and speed are inextricably linked to the future viability of organizations and digital skills are a valuable resource, we have created globally applicable insights and solutions as an international team. The future of sales is hybrid: our transformation project in the field of social selling helps to combine the best of both worlds efficiently and data-driven for the customer. With the LinkedIn expert profiles and strategic network building, we are ahead of the industry in materials trading and ideally positioned for new customer acquisition and digital customer management."

Congratulations to the #topteam of thyssenkrupp Material Services for this great achievement! 

Are you also part of a #topteam? Then send us an email. We look forward to celebrating your successes together!