Leveraging Social Media in your Sales Process
Companies of all sizes are looking for ways to leverage the flood of users in online social networking sites for their marketing efforts. So it’s no surprise that in a tough economy sales professionals, especially in a business-to-business sales process, want to leverage the power of their own networks to find as much information as they can about prospective customers in order to increase the productivity of every outbound call. Then, following casual introductions or first meetings, companies are leveraging the new social norms of the online world by adding contacts to their personal network on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.
Clara Shih of Salesforce.com even built an app called Faceconnector to help sales teams integrate these practices right in to their customer relationship management process. If prospects or potential business partners accept these online relationships it becomes easier to find shared interests and keep relationships progressing. For example, you attend a business networking event and make an introduction to someone that could become a potential business partner. Following the event you send an invitation on LinkedIn or Facebook, and your new contact accepts. Now you may have access to information about where they went to school, shared contacts you may have, and possibly even their birthday. It can make initiating your next meeting or conversation that much more familiar and possibly meaningful to your bottom line.
Think this is all just a fad? Consider this, Clara’s book The Facebook Era is now a required textbook for the Global Entrepreneurial Marketing course at Stanford and social media course at Harvard Business School.
April 16th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Great work by Clara! Toucan CRM (a Salesforce partner) has also integrated Twitter with Salesforce to help customers follow your contacts and realize business value from Twitter.
Toucan is working with Clara and others at Salesforce to help spread the word. Lisa Hutt showed this video about measuring ROI from Twitter at her Campaigns to Cash session at Cloudforce London!
http://www.toucancrm.com/cloudforce/
April 17th, 2009 at 4:21 am
The suits come to Social Media. Now that’s the kiss of death!
Advertising Agencies, having all but destroyed a perfectly good Old Media are set to do the same with Social Media!
In the fickle world of online chatter, yesterday’s achingly fashionable meeting points are rapidly acquiring the appearance of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s’ headquarters.
Already Twitter, becoming bogged down with fake PR tweets as well as fake advertising tweets, so much so that already the kids dismiss it as tired! And are moving on.
As soon as the buzz of innovation starts to fade the “cool” but influential people move on quicker than you can send a tweet.
Take Commercial Television,agencies were salivating at the prospect of commercial television and couldn’t wait to get in on the act! Advertising Agencies are loath to change a medium that is to them, a money-spinner. Despite the fact that it was non-accountable.
And now Agencies are rushing onto Social Media ignoring the fact that, as in the past, people don’t want their advertising in whatever form. The difference here is that they can easily move away from advertising, you have only to look at the experience of Second Life, that was to be advertising’s salvation. That’s why the early adopters have moved on! And be warned, they still don’t know how to monitize the Internet..but we do!