Social media changes the deal closing process

‘How the social media changes the deal closing process’ by Pat Kitano (@pkitano) from mediatransparent.com, on March 2, 2010.

“The definition of online presence for a business is changing. Until recently, the online mission has been to drive traffic to the website. Search engines, along with specialty destination sites like Craigslist and eBay have been the hubs in the game of connecting two parties to a transaction. Businesses, local and corporate, developed blogs to attract this Google induced traffic. Engagement is logical, linear and direct – search, find, read, buy. An effective web/blog site, often a fast hard pitch, closes the deal.

The social media of course changes the way people search for business opportunity. The social media are essentially a set of  ”cloud” applications where engagement – the meeting of two parties to a transaction – starts with checking each other out through their online profile(s). The protocol of social media engagement is beginning to rule out the fast hard pitch, much to the chagrin of the hard sellers. Even the normal practice of pushing traffic to your web/blog site starts becoming obnoxious to those who find you on the social media but are not yet “in the market”.

Businesses now need to develop two-step online strategy to facilitate the eventual deal close. Opportunities will be increasingly sourced from the “cloud” of social media, particularly as Google and the search engines place more focus on real time search of Twitter (Yahoo/Twitter partnership) and Facebook feeds (Google indexing FB business pages). Once opportunities are identified, that’s when business parties focus on the blogs and websites, even LinkedIn, to study the marketing pitch and confirm the decision to do business.

All that promotional collateral that was once the marketing showcase providing the first interaction with a customer is now being scrutinized towards the end of the transaction decision process. Why? Social media engagement with the customer is becoming the criteria for the deal close. Once that test is passed, a cursory check of the website or blog is just due diligence.

I think this is why businesses are slowly weaning away from daily blog article writing. It’s more important for a business blog or website to be substantive and deliver a confident message that seals the deal. Quality becomes more impressive than quantity.

Besides being busy, this is one reason why I allocate more time developing opportunities on the cloud of social media over blog writing. And when I write a blog article now, I’m making sure it says something.”

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