By now everyone should know that social media is a great marketing tool and helps establish consumer relationships that last and blah blah blah you get the picture! This post is going to be about how your salesmen and sales team can use social media to their advantage to close deals! And no I’m not talking about using it to send messages, connect on LinkedIn, or heck even the old fashioned Facebook poke!
I am talking about taking the information gathered through research from social media profiles and taking it offline to have ammunition when going into a sales meeting or taking a sales call. Social media can be very personal and is a place where people share more information than they realize. This is where a good sales team and social media team can come together to make….Captain Planet!!…wait no that’s not right…just wanted to see if you were paying attention…they come together to complete a total marketing and sales package.
Lets give you some examples so you’re not scratching your head after all this. I realized, as a sales person, that the more information you could gather about your potential client, then the more ammunition you have to use to state your case for why they should buy from you. The trouble is sometimes a person may not divulge everything in conversation, in comes social media to save the day! Using social media you can browse their Facebook to see pictures inside their store to advise them on how or why your product would be a great fit. Perhaps you can jump on their LinkedIn page to see what positions they have if you’re company were offering a service that they didn’t have a position for i.e. websites, SEO, social media etc. Having this information can allow a good sales person to hit these hot buttons and better their chances for closing the deal.
Another option for using social media is to provide proof. They always say a picture is worth a thousand words. So many brands have their fans and customers sharing photos of them using their products in conventional and non-conventional ways. More often than not a salesman trying to enter a new market or industry will be faced with potential clients not really buying into the usual sales pitch. Queue the world of social media photo sharing. A social media manager who is on top of their game can quickly find pictures of their products being used to fit the needs of the salesman’s pitch. This can quickly and easily adjust the potential buyers mindset. Seeing that your product actually can be used for what the salesman is saying can get a deal made pretty quickly.
Hopefully this just gets your brain thinking outside the box. Social media is a marketing tool but it is also a great sales tool and most astonishing of all … it does this offline!
