How Ûpstack's social selling
team generates millions in
ARR with Awario

We think this interview-styled case study highlights a few interesting insights — not the least of which being:

• Awario can help any business, or any member of your team regardless of experience — whether, as you'll read, they're brand new to the social listening and selling space, or consider themselves an old pro.
• For the so-called "old pros" in this space, there's still room to engage and delight, with intuitive and easy to use tools that still pack the power to drive business forward, meaningfully.
• We've heard it from Ûpstack, but they're not alone — social listening and social selling, far from a fad, are here to stay. Modern business leaders & executives will need to get skilled up quickly, with leading recruiting firms indicating a 250% YoY increase in "Social Listening" and "Social Selling" as either "desired" or "required" skills for new hires in the sales space, whether front-line or senior/tenured.

Stick around to the end for a special offer (or cheat and scroll to the end to claim it now — we're glad you're here, regardless)!

So, with that…

At Ûpstack, we are lucky to work with expressive, creative, and brilliant people all over the world. That means we have to be at the top of our game when it comes to how we speak, and how we listen.

Our VP of Sales and Strategy, Graham Seymour, and our Global Head of Talent & Marketing, Evelina Achitei, had it down and pat on the SMM side: they've both been long-time Sprout Social and Hootsuite users. They landed on using Hootsuite, and we planned to set up some listening and selling capabilities in the tool.

Earlier in its life, Hootsuite natively & easily allowed fairly powerful social listening functionality — whether within the core tool, or using third party plugins like TrendSpottr. Over time, the UI has become more cluttered and more complex, which distracted us from the actual function of social listening. Hootsuite is a world class SMM tool, it does some things very well.

But it is social listening that we were certain would be a successful venture for us at Ûpstack, knowing our customers.

Another issue with these SMM solutions — they didn't allow the social listening & selling capabilities we wanted to "live in sales" — we didn't want a tool to analyze our Twitter reach, nor schedule our LinkedIn posts… we wanted to sell!

This year, we made many changes in the Revenue Team (comprised of the teams handling Sales, BD, Analytics, CSM) at Ûpstack. We decided to modernize and streamline the sales stack for efficacy and make some key strategic decisions about monthly SaaS spend, what we leverage, how we integrate technologies like AI, automation….

We were unable to get social listening working the way we wanted it to inside of these — otherwise lovely — SMM tools; it became clear that there were things we wanted that simply weren't offered in other solutions — or at least, if they were, we didn't have time to tweak and build to get what we needed.

We started looking for alternatives, and came across Awario. We were pleasantly shocked to see that this flexible, intuitive, yet powerful offering was not only highly affordable, but was priced for scale. When we had to decide between days or weeks of tinkering around with broader SMM options — it became clear:

We continue to use Hootsuite — the brand monitoring functionality in there is excellent, as is the post scheduling, and reporting. We also have a robust SEMrush deployment in place set up for brand monitoring. But there are other important things.

One, we needed a suite of easy-to-understand but in depth & adjustable analytics. Specifically, to see how Ûpstack team efforts would affect mind share, visibility, and sentiment - so as we can see how we appear compared to competitors over time.

A new, effective sales channel

Previously, the whole concept of social selling we were used to involved selling via phone calls, via email, looking at job boards. Don't get us wrong though: we've always had sprinklings of innovation throughout the sales process, and that's precisely what we wanted to find in a tool to serve this need for us.

Jumping into social selling with Awario, we were able to see personal interaction. For instance, we could see people posting on Twitter — it's more personal than responding to a job board or reaching out via email.

We were able to connect with these leads and see pictures of them, to see what they've been posting about. So it really helps us find the people we might not have found otherwise. These people didn't post a job ad but were looking for help.

We seamlessly connect with them now on a daily basis. Awario is a tool that lets us connect with the people who might not know where to look for the elite, world-class engineering talent that they need — and that Ûpstack offers.

What I've learned from Awario and social selling in general is: I can go to a thousand job board postings every day, but sometimes people just want to post a personal message to try to find someone who would work for their company perfectly.

Think of how many times you've turned to your network, your friends and trusted advisors, for suggestions or advice, whether that's regarding products, services, or people. Now imagine being able to immediately, presciently, and reliably present yourself as that trusted advisor — an informed and knowledgeable expert you can count on.

That's what we do every day at Ûpstack — serving as trusted advisors to the world's technologists, makers, dreamers — and on social, we could only do it with Awario. Finding these people via Awario allows us to develop clients that we work harmoniously with in the long run.

Graham G. Seymour,

VP Sales & Strategy at Ûpstack