In this 4th piece of our 5 part series, you'll find a lighthearted guide to enabling sales reps to close more deals through a key social media technique.
Social media has given sales reps a great way to communicate with buyers, participate in discussions, and promote their brands. When it comes to social media, closing more deals means delivering the right message to the right followers.
Having more followers doesn’t necessarily mean closing more business – it’s when you find the right followers that your chances of closing increase. If you’ve got 15,000 followers listening to your message, but none are visiting your website or buying your product, you’ve got to look for customers elsewhere.
As we’ve discussed in part 3 of the series, buyer personas are representations of our perfect customers, and when we acquire these followers, we enter into meaningful conversations with our real prospects. The focus should be on gaining followers that are interested in your messages -those that visit your blog or subscribe to your newsletter- are the ones that are likely to convert and are the ones you want to engage with.
Think of your engagement as the first step to the sales process and social media as a digital sales aid, you woudn't spend time with false prospects, nor should you be providing content for false followers.
How do we achieve this?
Keeping tabs on your competition is a good way of acquiring the right followers. Who your competitors are following and interacting with are the people you want to connect with. Take a look at Twitter. You can easily look at the Twitter profiles of your competitors, see who they are following, and who they are participating in discussions with. In turn, you can use this information to decide who you should follow.
Here’s another great tip – look at who is discussing your competition and pursue that conversation. For instance, if you see a Twitter user who says “Company XYZ's sales rep software doesn’t have a mobile sales app” and this company is your competition, perhaps this is your “in”, if your brand does offer it. You might earn a new follower or even a new customer if you appropriately respond to the conversation. This will earn you followers who will likely be happy to engage with you. Of course you don’t want to send messages to all of your competitor’s followers – it’s only through meaningful engagement that you can succeed. Don’t annoy your potential buyers with too many messages. Instead, respond to them with thoughtful and interesting answers.
Keep in-the-know about your competition
Continuously observing your competitors and learning about where they are succeeding and failing is key to improving your social media strategy. Take a look at what topics they are posting about and what times they are doing so. Look into their activities and who they are engaging with. You might want to take them as an example to attract more of your perfect customers.
No matter what, always remember that your social media engagements are an investment, they are sales enablement tools that must be used effectively, otherwise they stand to act as a barrier to success.
How effective is your social media strategy? Do you have the right followers in network?.
