As a salesperson, you often rely on marketing and your own hard work to generate prospects and leads. But what if you could turn the tables and get more leads coming right to you? By leveraging social media and other simple tools, you can shift from hunting for leads and taking what marketing hands you to building an individual demand pipeline. In this session, learn how to build your brand as an individual thought leadership and create your own inbound lead machine to help you crush your quota.
13. 1. Twitter.com – Create your Account
2. HootSuite.com – Post Everywhere
3. Paper.li – Start Thought Leadership
4. Hootsuite & Sugar – Turn Leads into Sales
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Sugar works with thousands of companies who are at various levels of commitment to being a custsomer-centric organization. There are 3 critical success factors that we see the best employ:1)Infuse a corporate culture where every employee is laser-focused on each individual customer success, not just their job function. 2) Create a consistent context of the customer for every individual in your organization who interacts with the customer.3) Communicate with your customers the way they want to interact.
Let’s put it more simply. Jeffrey already said it just a few minutes ago. Rule #20 says that you MUST attract, engage and connect socially. OK, great. But Why? Let’s take it back to Rule #5. You need to be relevant to your customers. You need to have your own brand. Your social profile, your social postings…that’s your brand. And with a vibrant brand, customers will want to talk with you. With a vibrant brand, you can generate your own LEADS. Who here relies solely on Marketing for leads? Yeah, that’s right. If you’re not prospecting, you’re dying out there. Social media is your avenue to creating more new leads.
Before we get started though, many people ask the question “How does social media help my business?” A useful framework for answering that question is by putting social media within the context that you know already today. Customer facing organizations focused on sales, marketing and customer support. We often think of social media as how our customers escalate support issues via Twitter or how our marketing department protects the company’s brand.But another way I want you think about social media is as your platform for thought leadership.
Your customers and prospects only want to buy from you if you are interesting and knowledgeable about your field of expertise. They don’t want to buy from lazy order takers! They want to buy from experts who can deliver answers. How do you promote yourself as an expert?
By being a thought leader. By discussing and engaging in public dialogue about your industry, your company, your products and most importantly, how you solve your customer’s problems.
Because when you engage with your customers and prospects in the venues they use to research you (that’s LinkedIn, that’s Twitter, that’s Facebook), then your going to build all these great things listed above.
We’ve talked today about the importance of getting started with your social engagement strategy. But how do you actually get started with social? That’s what we’re going to spend the next 10 minutes talking about.
OK, now let’s talk specifics. Let’s talk about how you actually DO this thing. First, build your LinkedIn profile. Second, create your Twitter profile. Got it. Jeffrey walked us through that. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to do that. Just go to the websites and sign up.
Now for some helpful advice. What tools do you use to help you listen, engage and direct the dialogue around answering your customer’s questions? Hootsuite is an awesome tool for helping you post. With Hootsuite, you can easily publish your 140 characters to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook with one click. You could quickly take a picture of yourself and Jeffrey at this event and post it, showing your audience how serious you are about being a great seller. You can easily monitor multiple social channels and forward on or retweet interesting articles in your industry.But most important, you can quickly share links to interesting and useful content on your website that has a Lead Capture form. You’re part of your company’s lead generation machine and you are promoting your brand as a helpful sales person.What happens after your prospects and customers come to your website? They fill out a lead capture form that sends that lead into your SugarCRM system. The lead is added to your queue and you follow up with, qualify, and sell to your prospects leveraging your favorite CRM system, Sugar.
Once you’re activated with your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and have ability to post, you need to start publishing content every day. Here are two great ways to do that. Have your marketing department send out everyday to every employee the interesting Tweet of the Day. This gives you the company relevant content that you need to help your prospects learn more about your company. In addition, paper.li (pronounced “paperly”) is a fantastic tool for creating daily ezine that contains all of the industry relevant information that you find interesting. You put in your search criteria and then paper.li finds the articles published on Twitter that you would find interesting. By sending out this ezine, you expand your social network through sharing of content. By retweeting content of people you find interesting, they will then follow you and give you an even wider audience. This is how you build an audience, a following if you will.
And of course, every one in five tweets or LinkedIn posts you make should point back to your website. This is a good ratio of “thought leadership” posts vs “demand generation” posts. And with Sugar, you can easily publish lead capture forms that send those leads directly into your Sugar lead queue. With Sugar, you’ll then qualify those leads and work with them through every stage of your sales process.
Now to pull all this together in one package. When you leave here today, you have four easy actions to follow-up on. I’m sure you all have a LinkedIn account. But go create that Twitter account. Then download Hootsuite to monitor and read your favorite industry social channels. Then start your paper.liezine and promote your thought leadership to your audience. Finally, use those tools to bring leads to your website and capture them with Sugar.Four easy steps to turning social into sales!