Integrating Social Media Listening Into The Sales Process
Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Christine Rochelle, Integrated Marketing Manager at lotus823.
Each and every work week at lotus823 is kicked off by a roundtable staff meeting and of course plenty of Diet Coke to go around.
Once our co-founder David Hernandez is able to bring the buzz of the room down, he walks us through each of our current business development opportunities for the agency.
Instead of jumping to discussing brand strategy or services, David always gears the conversation into a discussion about our personal relationship with the potential client contacts and what they would like to accomplish for their team and for the brand.
The focus is on building a relationship, not rushing to close down a lead.
“People like doing business with people,� David reminded us at the meeting.
Every sales professional understands that listening to your customer and building genuine relationships is the key to business development. Despite carrying out traditional methods of communication to maintain these relationships, it can be tough to keep up.
That’s where your social media marketing team steps in.
Integrating your business development goals with your social media marketing team is crucial to maintaining your relationships both offline and online.
3 Steps to Social Listening in the Sales Process
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Google Alerts – Marketing pros have these free search alerts set up to monitor their brand name, products, and client-facing personnel. Stay updated with the latest news releases, product announcements, and staff changes by setting up the free alerts for all your inside sales prospects. Bonus tip? Set them up for their top competitors as well and offer real-time strategy tips as soon as any competitive news is posted.
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Influencer Outreach - Share the inside sales prospect list as well as the media outreach list with your social media marketing team. They should be following each of those brands and influencers on all of your company’s social media channels and engaging with their content. Shares, likes, and follows are social media currency, and it does not go unnoticed. Pay special attention to Twitter chats and LinkedIn groups.
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Visitor Intelligence Software – Often, our marketing goals and sales goals aren’t always aligned. The marketing team is focused on big picture branding, while the sales team wants to drill down to the hot leads. Integrate the two through visitor intelligence software such as Optify. Both teams can receive daily emails with information on which inside sales reps’ prospects visited their website through a reverse IP lookup that offers full firmographic data plus that specific visitor’s history within your website. Take it a step further by putting certain prospects on a watch list so when they do come to your website you receive an alert.
These social media listening tips don’t just aid the sales team in online monitoring of their prospects, but it also integrates their process with the marketing team’s current goals and data usage. Syncing these two powerhouses not only creates a spark for your internal staff, but it also presents to the client a unified team that is paying attention from the start.
We call that integrated bliss.
Christine Rochelle is a blogger and social media consultant who resides at the Jersey Shore as an Integrated Marketing Manager at lotus823. Previously, Christine has worked for Star Magazine, HRP, MTV.com, LifeStyler, Eatontown Patch and AOL.com. Her numerous projects have been featured in The New York Post, Crushable, Get Busy Media, DrivingSales, Wanderlust & Lipstick, and Daily Single. Additionally, Christine is a national speaker and trainer on content and social media marketing. Follow Christine on Twitter @CLRochelle.
