For most companies, social media is all about generating awareness, building relationships and providing customer service. But for B2B businesses, social can play another important, but often overlooked role. It can help you identify and gather intelligence about your prospective customers that your sales team can use in the field.
Any good salesperson knows that learning as much as you can about a prospective customer before going into a first meeting or sales pitch improves your chances of closing the sale. Here are a couple steps that will help you do just that using social media.
1. Use social media to find your most promising prospects. If you have a list of target companies you’d like to do business with, social media can help you narrow it down so that only the most promising prospects remain. Begin by doing a quick search for your target companies on LinkedIn. From there, you’ll find a list of the company’s employees from which you should identify key decision makers you would be likely to do business with. Then it’s time to go a bit deeper. Plug the names of the decision makers you’ve identified into a social CRM program if you have one, or simply search for them on key social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and in the blogosphere using google.com/blogsearch. The goal here is to find their public social profiles so you can listen in on their conversations and determine whether they have a need for your product or service. After you’ve found their profiles, look for past comments they’ve made about a problem they are experiencing that your company can solve. For example, if your business sells enterprise-level security systems to tech companies, and someone you’re researching has tweeted, “our security system had another false alarm this morning. So frustrating,” you’ll know it’s worth pursuing their business. This might not happen all that often, but when it does, it’s like striking gold. If you aren’t having much luck with your target list, you can also do a simple search for keywords related to the problem your company solves on social networks like Twitter. Doing so might turn up prospects you didn’t even realize existed.
2. Start a conversation. After you’ve identified your most promising prospects, it’s time to start talking to them. The trick is to make sure you don’t come off as overly self-promotional in your first interaction. In the security system example above, you might start a conversation by saying “Always hate when that happens. What type of security system do you use?” Asking a question like this will position you as interested and helpful, and will open the door for more conversation. If your prospect responds, keep things going by offering ideas that will help her solve her problem, and when the time feels right, go ahead and ask if she would like to learn more about your product or service. You could follow up by sending more information, directing them to your website, or providing a video or case study.
3. Ask for the meeting. Most B2B sales still take place after an in person meeting. After you’ve built a relationship with your prospect, it’s time to make that meeting happen. Simply ask if you can send someone from your sales team (or schedule a phone call) to tell her a bit about your product or service. If you’ve put time into building a relationship, your prospect is likely to be more receptive to this ask.
4. Arm your sales team with background information on your prospect. Before you send a sales person into a meeting with your prospect, make sure you’ve used social media to help them learn everything they can about the person they will be meeting with. The conversations you’ve had since identifying your prospect are helpful, but they represent only a fraction of information available about the person you’ll be meeting with. Dig deeper into your prospect’s social profiles to learn as much as you can about her. How many children does she have? Where did she go to school? What sports teams does she root for? All this information (and much more) can be found through social media, and tidbits like these present great icebreakers for in-person meetings.
5. Deliver a customized solution. This is perhaps the most important step in the process. Your chances of closing a sale will be much greater if your sales team uses everything you’ve learned about your prospect through social media to develop a solution that is custom tailored to her needs. Does your prospect have four kids, all of whom are involved in year-round extracurricular activities? Then emphasize the timesaving nature of your product and the fact that it will give your prospect more time with her family. Do you know that your prospect is working with a tight departmental budget? Develop a payment plan that will make your product or service more affordable. It’s all about using the data you have to create an offering that is a perfect fit for your prospect.
Do you use social media to identify and gather intelligence about prospects? Tell us about it in the comments!
Featured image via: RJH Solutions
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