3 Ways to Use Social Media to Increase Sales Productivity

For sales professionals, the advent of the Internet Age has been something of a mixed blessing. Certainly, online communication has presented innumerable marketing and sales opportunities, but it has also made for a shorter sales cycle. Small business owners and sales managers alike feel more pressured than ever before to generate leads, close sales, and show quantifiable results, all within a very short span of time—which can sometimes seem overwhelming! Thankfully, there are three key ways in which social media can be used to increase sales productivity.

Use Social Media to Verify Your Leads

Sometimes, the lead generation process yields only the most basic information—particularly when it comes to B2B sales. Perhaps you receive an e-mail from an interested party, but the e-mail provides you only with the name of the individual, and perhaps the company the individual works for. That’s not a lot of information to work off of, but you can use social media to obtain moreinformation, to verify your lead, and ultimately to ensure that you’re not wasting any time by talking to the wrong people or promoting the wrong products.

LinkedIn is especially useful here. If you know the company for which your prospect works, visit that company’s LinkedIn page to get some basic information about the company’s size, its territory, its niche, and so forth. Say that your company manufactures industrial valves, for instance; knowing that your prospect represents a natural gas company can help you to pinpoint exactly which of your products you should try to sell, and which are simply irrelevant to the client in question.

Your can also use LinkedIn to ensure that your prospect is, indeed, the best contact person—someone with decision-making powers and true authority within the company. This is a great way to increase sales productivity, as it can help you to determine whether or not outreach is truly worth your valuable time.

Follow Your Leads

Social media has many other uses for those wishing to increase sales productivity—again, especially when B2B sales are in view. One simple way to increase sales productivity is to actually follow your leads—quite literally—on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and so forth. Social media monitoring can provide you with invaluable, contextual information—ideal for helping you to boost your efficiencies.

Here’s an example. Say that your company sells cybersecurity products and services, and you see, on Twitter, that another company in your area has been victimized by a hacker attack or some other cyber threat. This is surely an ideal time to give them a call and make note of your efficient and cost-effective services!

And it’s not just individual companies that you can follow; you can also keep your thumb on industry trends, specifically through some strategically-implemented Google or Bing Alerts. Say that you own a market, and that you provide food to a lot of area restaurants; knowing that there is a widespread tomato shortage, or that beef prices are going up, can prove useful to you as you price and market your own offerings.

Find the Best Customers

Even beyond the realm of B2B, social networks are essential for those looking to increase sales productivity, because selling through social media allows you to identify those users who need whatever it is you are selling, right here and right now. Here’s an example: Say that your company sells wireless routers. Doing a quick Twitter search for “wireless router” is surely going to yield plenty of tweets from individuals asking for recommendations, or wondering where they might find the best deals. These are people who are really serious about buying a wireless router, as soon as possible, so reaching out to them directly can shorten your sales cycle dramatically.

And that’s one of the true perks of social media, for businesses of all kinds: It doesn’t just help you to market your products and to bring leads into the sales funnel, but it can also expedite your sales process significantly. Remember that selling through social media is all about using technology to cut to the chase—to identify the people who want or need your products and services, in the present. That’s ultimately how you use social media to increase sales productivity.

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4 Ways Social Media Can Help You Close More Sales

Social media is changing the sales game. An explosion in social activity has shifted the power to customers who are better informed and engaged, while working in more transparent organizations that require well-researched decision making. As a result, sales representatives need more than a good pitch — they need to understand a customer’s business model, channel their needs and uphold their values.

Sales can’t depend on marketing either, as they no longer have complete control of the brand. Customers have become engaged buyers, going beyond the company website to read blogs, follow Twitter handles, and spin up LinkedIn conversations to gain outside perspectives for purchase decisions. Information is so prevalent that Forrester now estimates anywhere between 50 to 70% of the buying process happens before a rep even gets involved.

While social media has allowed engaged buyers to peer through a vendor’s window, sales reps can use the same tools to help understand those buyer’s needs. Here are four simple steps for succeeding in the social-media sales era.

1. Make Sure People “Like” Your Reps

Whether in-person or over 140 characters, likability will forever separate closers from steak-knife winners. Sales reps should routinely participate in social media training.

Initially, training can start with the basics: polishing a profile, developing a unique voice, participating in blog commentary, answering customer questions and identifying niche social networks. In time, training can evolve to help reps stay on top of social media trends and learn to apply them to their tasks. When you are on the phone with a customer and they are searching for your Twitter handle and looking at your LinkedIn profile, you want them to be impressed with what they see.

2. Know Where Your Customer Goes

Potential customers are all over the web: Most have a presence on LinkedIn and Facebook, and even more are on Twitter. But have you considered niche online communities? Chances are that the big three social networks are not the only, or even the best, destinations for business research.

For example, when was the last time a Facebook friend left a status update discussing the finer points of backend quality assurance software? Probably never (and if they did, are you still friends?). In the era of social-media sales, knowing where your customers interact can help provide you with data on what motivates their buying decisions.

3. Nurture Your Top Prospects

Everyone is trying to be relevant on Twitter — including your prospects and their companies. Your company’s social media team should follow your top accounts and prospects so they can alert you to major company news and help salespeople get ahead of trends.

Beyond monitoring, the social media team should also have a role interacting with prospective brands. Have them retweet announcements and congratulate customers on key wins. At Data.com, we’ve developed a three-step social media engagement plan that can be easily replicated:

• Sales develops a top 50 prospect account list.
• Sales and social media team identify top decision makers and social media evangelists in the top 50 list.
• Social media team engages on a brand level before the sales rep gets involved.

4. Connect with Social Data Insights

Even with hours of social media research, you can still reach out to the wrong business contact. Accurate business data and social insights are necessary to understanding the most appropriate sales leads within a company’s organization chart. Instead of playing phone tag with assistants, researching business data helps reps avoid wasting time with the wrong company leads.

The key to this efficiency is the ability to manage social prospect information, including Twitter, LinkedIn and other social profiles, in a unified instance. Ideally, this social information would be tied into a CRM platform and provide a constantly evolving view of a rep’s entire prospect list. Since countless amounts of prospect information is available, finding a way to manage and consume data is a must. Without an option to help pool this information, reps could find that the amount of information available to them becomes more of a curse than a blessing.

Conclusion

Although social media has altered the way sales reps need to approach their work, it has provided the ability to learn more about prospects than ever before. Ideally, today’s sales reps will use social media platforms alongside data consumption and management tools to maximize their customer interactions. These four steps serve as a jumping off point for reps to create long-standing customer relationships based on a foundation of truly understanding and servicing customer needs.

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