For most of the past year Dell has been training a select group of its salespeople on how to better take advantage of various social media outlets such as LinkedIn and Twitter to better engage customers. Now Dell is gearing up to expose a select group of its channel partners to the same training.

Once trained, Dell then certifies which sales representatives are ready to engage customers in a constructive manner, said Bryan Jones, vice president of North America marketing for Dell. For the most part, that means doing a lot of listening to the chatter being generated by customers before making suggestions about how they and Dell might be helpful addressing a specific issue or problem. What it does not mean is spamming potential customers with offers once their social media handle has been identified, he said.

Dell and many other vendors are trying to get ahead of the fact that many customers these days are already predisposed toward one product or service long before they ever get in touch with a sales representative. Most IT professionals start the acquisition process today using a search engine such as Google or Bing. From there they start to see what’s being said about a product or vendor in social media circles. If they like what they see and read, then they might reach out to the vendor.

That shift doesn’t so much eliminate the traditional sales funnel as much as it collapses the front end in terms of how awareness is generated about various products and services, said Jones. Given the complexity of any IT deal of any size, salespeople always will be involved in closing the transaction. However, rather than relying solely on marketing people to engage customers on social media networks, Dell is making a concerted effort to make salespeople more social media-savvy, Jones said.

A big reason for making this shift comes from research on the business-to-business (B2B) buying process that Dell has conducted with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), which suggests that 67 percent of a buyer’s journey now involves digital content and processes, while 97 percent of the money being spent on cold-calling customers is being wasted.

Interestingly, Jones said Dell's work thus far shows that there is no particular connection between the age of a salesperson and their social media aptitude. Those that have done best in terms of adapting to social media are the ones that focus most on making available useful information at the right time, help customers resolve a particular complaint or direct them toward the DellCaresPro Twitter account to get someone at Dell to help resolve the issue as soon as possible. Once established, it usually becomes a matter of nourishing the social media relationship to create an additional sales opportunity down the road.

Obviously, Dell isn’t the only vendor investing in the art of social selling these days. But in terms of sharing that expertise and insights with its partners, Dell very well might be much further down the road than most.