Customers and prospects are sharing their personal and professional lives on social media, and also companies are constantly posting information.
Therefore, as salesperson we need this input to do our job better. My impression is that we have to move from be a listener to become an active member of the media(s) that we consider relevant. Taken a pragmatic approach: since the buying journey of the customers has changed, we must realize that we need to jump in its branched route, when early is the best.
I have been using Twitter @pedro__romero as a part of my social media approach to the B2B market during the last year, however besides the benefits of professional branding and being able to share and promote content, the results of creating real business opportunities in my case has been quite limited. In my opinion, to be able to proper leverage your network using Twitter you need to have a well recognize professional brand (I have only 2000 followers in Twitter) and followers geolocated in the market that you are targeting . Then from my perspective as B2B seller, I value Twitter more for the professional branding side than for enabling conversations with potential customers.
How I am moving forward to be more effective as social seller through Twitter?
In this stage, I am started to use Twitter’s List to monitor specific accounts, and Microsoft Flow that enable me to receive alarms from Tweets that comply with several conditions, filtering those that were originated in my market of interest. Basically, adding geolocation “intelligence” to facilitate future conversations.
Besides Twitter, I used to have a Premium account in myopportunity.com, it worked excellent the first two months, because you can go direct to the point with prospects, but due to the limited universe of active users, it become useless. Isn’t enough to have a good concept for a network when there is little member participation.
Social Selling: Global View
To fill the gaps of my social selling approach, from the perspective of an individual working in B2B sales, I relied heavily in LinkedIn Sales Navigator for prospecting and start defining how can be the approach to contact potential customers. Definitely for me has being an effective way to determine who are the ideal prospects in a particular market, to target:
- The most common industries
- Business Decision Makers
Wrapping up: Playing the Game and Learning
I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to determine potentials prospect to be targeted, then depending in which media those persons has active participation (is any), I select the adequate channel (or mix of) for further communication, the advantage now is that I use to have a better insight and be relevant, when I have the chance to open the communication channel with a prospect through a Phone Call, Email, LinkedIn and/or Twitter.
The challenge from here in the qualification process, is to have relevant content to move forward and convert a Lead into a real Opportunity.
Dublin Random Notes 