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Seven Ways Social Media is Changing Sales
April 1, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Big Data
Social media use generates tons of data. Companies must figure out which statistics and which trends are meaningful and how different statistics correlate with each other. Companies with the ability to interpret the data and alter direction accordingly will be the winners.
Let’s use a real world example. You have an e-mail newsletter. It goes to 1,000 people who are potential customers for your product or service. How do you analyze all the interactions you have had with each of those people in the past two years to tell your sales team who are the best 20 prospects to go after now?
Data wranglers will become key components of the sales team as they interpret mounds of data to find the prospects with the best fit.
Openness
Customers are used to learning about prospective suppliers by looking at more informative websites, newsletters, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and LinkedIn profiles. Companies that remain secretive are starting to raise questions: What are they trying to hide?
Prospective buyers want to check you out. Not interested in posting who your biggest customers are? That’s a sign of fear, not confidence.
The Cold Call is Dead
Cold calling is for dinosaurs. Sales people are now make “warm calls.” Every prospective customer’s company and the contacts at those companies can be reviewed using Google search, websites, and social media. Salespeople can get a feel for what the prospect’s problems are before they contact them, find people in common to bestow credibility, and be prepared to offer concrete assistance at the first contact.
Cold callers are an annoyance; warm callers are a resource.
Inter-departmental Food Fights
The requirement for social media will force people from different departments to work closely together. Who manages different social networks? Who writes what content? Who responds to complaints on social media? Who leads discussions on each of the different social networks? Who creates offers? Who runs the lead scoring system? What’s the role of IT versus marketing,and marketing versus sales?
And all these people have to mesh tightly together. A customer complaint can’t sit on a Facebook page unanswered for three days while everyone fights over which group is responsible for responding.
Social Media Shrinks the Sales Cycle
Etratech (a contract manufacturer) says their manufacturing facility is one of their most valuable selling points, yet many prospects don’t see it until well into the sales cycle. This is very common in B2B selling cycles. Using YouTube videos to deliver virtual tours of their manufacturing facility has helped to speed things up. Etratech says sales cycles that took six to eight months are being compressed to as little as six to eight weeks (“B2B Marketers Need to Get Real About Social Media and Customer Engagement," Mark Columbus, Forbes online blog).
Crowd-sourcing
Relationships with prospective customers are being been turned upside down by social media. In the old days--three years ago--companies controlled the flow of information about their company and products. They could send the message that they wanted. Now the prospective customer is in control. Using social media, the prospect can talk to other users and prospective users about possible suppliers to see what they think and then form their own opinions, often before they ever contact possible vendors. The control is in the customers hands. They decide whether companies are worth engaging at all. And they will decide under what terms and where, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, that they will engage them. I am starting to see this happen a lot on LinkedIn: A person will raise their hand in a LinkedIn group and ask for suggestions as who they should contact. Many companies aren’t aware that these contests are going on and that each one represents a lost opportunity.
Content Market: From the Unheard to Critical Success Factor
Five or 10 years ago there was no such thing as content marketing. It consisted of writing the occasional magazine article or item for the company newsletter. But content is critical to social media. Without a steady stream of fresh relevant content, any social media program will fail.
If the content isn’t relevant, no one will read it. Content needs to be, at worst, entertaining and, at best, informative or instructional with respect to helping a prospective customer at his or her job.
If the content isn’t fresh, if there isn’t a constant stream of it, readers won’t come back.
Summary
Social media is changing sales. But that’s okay, technology has changed sales before. When I started in sales in the 80s we were wrestling with how to use personal computers (remember WordStar? Lotus 1-2-3? Dbase?) to help our sales efforts. In the 90s it was e-mail and in the 00s smart phones. Now we have social media. It’s just evolution. But, if you refuse to evolve...Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media. He has over 25 years' experience in high-tech sales and management, most recently as general manager of a PCB manufacturer. He can be reached through his website www.practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.