Using Social Media As A Sales Tool

Most business people know that social media is a great tool for building credibility and creating and maintaining a positive brand image. You know, for marketing. Unfortunately, most people simply leave it at that. They don't take advantage of the power of social media as a sales tool, as well. According to the Brevet Group;

“...less than half of frontline salespeople are using social media for prospecting, monitoring conversations, interacting with customers or gathering intelligence.”

The majority of salespeople don't realize how social media can help them to identify more qualified prospects, and how it can help to engage those prospects more effectively.

In the days before the internet, the buying process involved multiple meetings with sales reps, reviewing volumes of information, and trying to get feedback from a firm’s existing customers. In that environment, salespeople were an essential element of the overall sales process. Now, prospective buyers can find much of the information they need about a particular product or service by doing a Google search. In fact, 77 percent of B2B purchasers performed independent research before ever speaking with a salesperson.

The internet has drastically changed the buying process. If you join the minority that already uses social media as a sales tool (and it won't be a minority for long), you'll gain a distinct advantage over those who don't use it yet.

Here's how to get started:

Create and use accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn.

There are over 284 million active users on Twitter and over 330 million members on LinkedIn. Maintaining an ongoing presence on these platforms enables you to build your own brand awareness and gives you access to a virtually unlimited number of prospects. It also allows you to become more intimately familiar with those prospects.

Monitor your social media presence.

This is where a lot of people fall short in utilizing social media effectively: they fail to actively monitor their accounts. The thought is that it takes too much time. But you can actually monitor your social media presence in as little as ten minutes a day.

Set up Google Alerts for competitor or prospect terms.

Setting up a Google alert is simple. Enter a competitor's or prospect's name in the “create an alert about” box, select the desired options, and you can monitor the internet for content on virtually any competitor or prospect.

Join industry-specific groups on LinkedIn.

Joining LinkedIn groups that are specific to your industry is a great way to connect with professionals in your industry. But you can also join groups that are of interest to your ideal prospects. Of course, great care must be taken to bring real value to any groups you join. You shouldn't join groups just to troll for prospects.

Whether you've seen them there or not, your customers and prospective customers are engaged on social media. With that in mind, you'd think that using social media as a sales tool should be “old news.” But with so few salespeople using it appropriately, it's a golden opportunity for you to rise above the competition. All you have to do is start.

What’s your take? Weigh in with a comment below, and connect with Joshua Harrell (Google+) | @JoshuaHarrell (Twitter).