On February 7, 2012, Lauren Carlson wrote 5 Social Media Strategies for B2B Sales Success. In her post Lauren presents five ways in which B2B sales professionals can leverage social media to find and win more business. E.g.:
“[...] Try searching social media sites and tools for certain signal phrases, such as “seeking vendor recommendations,” or those that mention specific pain points your company can address. Refine your searches to social media channels your target customers use, such as by relevant industry hashtags on Twitter or industry-specific groups on LinkedIn or Facebook. This method of discovery requires minimal effort and can uncover leads that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. [...]“
From my experience I would add ifttt [can be set up to search twitter etc], socialmention, and of course Google Alerts [which can be a bit slow] as free tools that allow companies to track their brand, to identify their potential customers, or as Laura writes to “track their competition. They can see what tactics their competitors are using” and when the competition is failing at something. However, Lauren also mentions “that many C-level execs aren’t chatting it up on Twitter and LinkedIn”, but that the people, who influence them or at least have access to them, could be.
Check out Lauren’s blog post for some great examples of how B2B sales professionals can get creative with social media.
Tagged: lead generation, Sales 2.0, social, social selling, software
