Social Media, Sales, And How They Work Together
By: Amber Naslund
When we as businesses start or continue the discussion around the value of social media, inevitably the question comes up about sales. Can we sell in social media? Can the value in social media be translated to the cash register or the actual bottom line?
The simple answer is yes.
The more nuanced – and more important – answer is yes…but.
Sales and social media can work together. You can find prospects, talk with prospects, provide information.
The trick is that social media is rarely, if ever, the direct sales channel itself. Social media can increase the likelihood of sales through better targeting, more consistent touchpoints and availability of information, establishing affinities and relationships and all of the things that support the eventual transaction. Those are the same things we would want to do offline to nurture our prospects, but now we have more online channels to bridge those connections in both places.
Yet we’re so impatient to take the platforms social media provides and make them the direct marketing and revenue channel. But it’s not so easy.
Take something like Dell Outlet (disclosure: they’re a customer)? That’s an oft-cited example of empirical proof that social media can be a sales channel since the company reports millions of dollars in sales through that Twitter channel alone. But here’s an important qualification for that.
Dell spent not just months but years building their reputation, addressing customer concerns, offering up feedback channels, listening, participating, and contributing long before they ever made social media channels into a sales vehicle. They invested in their social media presence for a great deal of time – likely without much in the way of easily quantifiable dollar return – and saw the value in all of that first. They not only addressed the concerns and conversations happening within their community, but they spent time shoring up their website and e-commerce experience, providing lots of channels for discussion and feedback, listening and responding, all designed to enhance the journey toward the transaction rather than trying to be the destination.
Dell Outlet works because it’s been and continues to be buttressed by countless people, resources, and information that make it a single trusted channel among an ecosystem of investment in a community. But it’s really unlikely that you can replicate that singular piece with any success until you’re willing to methodically and patiently invest in the rest.
Instead, consider social media as the supporting cast for the sales process, and a way to enhance your prospects’ experience with your company so that the eventual sale feels like a natural, even welcome culmination to the relationship. Here’s a few ideas:
Finding the Point of Need: Listening carefully for when people are asking the right kinds of questions or seeking the sort of information that you can helpfully provide, which turns you into a problem solver instead of a pitch artist. It’s the difference between having your response or comment be an ill-timed interruption or a perfectly timed contribution. Not every mention of your company or competitor is the same as an expressed need, so study the difference and handle with care.
Being Responsive: Few things raise the hackles of people as much as the feeling of being ignored. Be there when someone is asking for you, answer inquiries in a timely fashion (on the web that usually means minutes and hours, not days), and you’ll already be ahead of the game. We don’t ever scold businesses for being too responsive when we’ve asked for their attention, so it’s a worthy goal to aim for. The web moves fast, so we as businesses need to be prepared for new notions of speed.
Availability (and Ease) of Information: Take care to make your website and social destinations user friendly and a fluid experience that reflects the focused needs and attention of social consumers. Have lots of resources front and center, and easy to find, whether it’s on your website or elsewhere. Make them easy to consume, download, and share (from file formats to concise writing and simple visuals). Focus on providing the information that your prospects want and are asking for (even if you didn’t create it!) not just the information you’re wanting them to see.
Being friendly: Amazing as it may seem, politeness, enthusiasm, and manners are not as ubiquitous as we’d like them to be. Teach your front line staff how to be gracious, helpful, and friendly on the web, even in the most trying of circumstances or in the presence of criticism or competition. Help them stay approachable and accessible in the places and ways that your customers are reaching out to you. And if you can’t teach them to do that, it’s time to get different staff to work the front lines of social media. It’s that important.
Focus on the In-Between: As businesses, we’re often myopically focused on the end of the line transaction. The sale. The close. But what we forget too often is that the sale is a momentary, and temporary point in time. It’s an important one, but the sustainability of a sale and a customer is only as good as the experiences between the transactions. Before the sale and after the sale. We spend most of our time as customers in the moments outside of the sale itself, yet we often treat those moments as merely the means to an end through our business lens. Shaping and nurturing the entire customer lifecycle is important, and the interactivity and pervasiveness of social media makes it beautifully suited for the task.
So can sales and social media co exist and even work together? Absolutely. But it requires all of us to remember that a sale is a multi-faceted thing with many variables along the way. And when we start seeing our sales as living, breathing cycles instead of instances that stop and start, we can start understanding and investing in all of the moments and experiences that make a sale a success.
What’s your experience with selling and social media? How are you seeing it done well, and what turns you off? Would you buy from you and why? I’d love to hear more of your take in the comments.
Tags: customer engagement, customer experience, point of need, sales, Social Media
Great read. I use social media incessantly to fight the obesity battle and its a huge component of my business model. We still have a long road to go however before we can profit directly from this time and instead merely seek to increase awareness about the best ways to lose weight and remain constantly present in our target consumers minds.
Hi Thom, the idea of "constantly present" is an important one, and a fine balance. There's a difference between being present for your own purposes – promotion, awareness for your own business or cause, something that directly impacts you – vs. being present for the benefit of your community. I think the latter is what most businesses need to do more of.
Great article. I think the straightest line from social media to sales is "listening." So many people/companies use social media as a one way street, but never bother to turn that around. We use a variety of tools to listen (one of those being Replyz) and have had some success gaining new clients that way.
Obviously we agree that listening is key.
We're often in such a hurry to tell people what we want them to know that we don't stop long enough to hear what they're telling us they need and are looking for. Being open to input can be enlightening indeed.
Thanks for the thoughts. I think that with marketing and sales being done through TV and other one way communication mediums for the last 60 years business has forgotten about the social aspect of sales. I would rather do business with someone I like than someone I don’t know. I keep thinking back to the small village general store model of sales where if you did not practice what is mentioned in the article you were not liked and if you were not like you could not sell. Very interesting, I hope it changes the world.
We hope so too. Part of the evolution and erosion of sales in that sense is because one to one interactions don't scale well. Relationships take time to build. And both of those things run counter to business growth and being able to do things with speed and, unfortunately sometimes, in an automated way. We want to batch process, yet trust is an individual factor that's not easily sold in bulk.
This is a great article! It really sheds great light on the power that social media can bring to a salesforce.
One of the tricks, Mallory, is that today, almost everyone is in sales to some degree. If you have a touchpoint with a customer, you're likely to impact their decision to do business with you. And once businesses start to understand that yes, sales is a dedicated business function, but it's also a pervasive part of business itself. Not the sale or the close or the process, but the *intent* to deliver an experience to customers that makes them feel good about the business relationship. That's a whole different animal and goes much beyond the sales force itself.
The value of using social platforms is in the ability to talk with your customers. There is certainly a balance that can be done really well, in a conversational way. I recently evaluated 2 retailers and how they positioned their credit card programs.
Kohl's: "I bought __ during the 15/20/30% off sale with my Kohl's charge." 426 "likes" and 702 comments (at my last check), bringing awareness to a specific promotion tied to the value of having a Kohl's charge card.
Banana Republic (paraphrased): "Save 25% off this weekend…not a Cardmember…apply." The direct marketing message received151 likes and 24 comments, of which, several were very critical of having their credit card.
While both hoped to gain exposure for their credit cards, Kohl's took a softer approach and focused on why people actually use their card vs the card itself.
It is almost preferable for companies to stay off of social media channels than to have bad customer service in that arena. There have been three cases recently where I've asked a question of a brand on Twitter and gotten no answer. It was bothersome and made me wonder why they were even in that space (unless it was *really* just to have another channel to hand out coupons?). If you are there, it implies that you are there for customer service, not *just* to sell your product. You can't have one without the other.
As many have said before, Sherry, customer service *is* marketing. And sales. They're all tied together inextricably, and if you do a shoddy job at delivering on the promises you put out there, that's going to damage your credibility. Period. Customer service, responsiveness, all those things are empirical proof that you're attentive to your customers. And it's true that sometimes, being in social media without committing to the investment of time and energy can be worse than never having been present at all.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Chris Brogan, Amber Naslund, Shannon Paul, radian6, Nathan Smoyer and others. Nathan Smoyer said: what a great read about SM, lead generation and capitalizing on SM efforts. http://ow.ly/3lqSu [...]
Interested in benefiting from social media? http://www.radian6.com/blog/2010/12/social-media-…
The value of using social platforms is in the ability to talk with your customers. There is certainly a balance that can be done really well, in a conversational way. I recently evaluated 2 retailers and how they positioned their credit card programs.
Kohl's: "I bought __ during the 15/20/30% off sale with my Kohl's charge." 426 "likes" and 702 comments (at my last check), bringing awareness to a specific promotion tied to the value of having a Kohl's charge card.
Banana Republic (paraphrased): "Save 25% off this weekend…not a Cardmember…apply." The direct marketing message received151 likes and 24 comments, of which, several were very critical of having their credit card.
While both hoped to gain exposure for their credit cards, Kohl's took a softer approach and focused on why people actually use their card vs the card itself.
Trisha, that's a good example. But I'd also counter that we as businesses still do too much talking about our own stuff. Whether or not you phrase it with a "softer" approach, it's still promotional. And sales doesn't have to be driven by shouting "me! look at me! me!" all the time. In fact, as consumers, we don't like to be sold to but then we go to work and push our junk relentlessly. It's an odd balance. And I'm hoping that we can change that.
Amber, absolutely agreed. I think we are all too focused on "the sale." Instead of building the relationships, we are off creating strategies that try to force conversations into seeming like we don't care about the sale. As a consumer, I'm always asking "what are you REALLY trying to get me to say/do/buy." I liken it to a psychological game that brands try to play in order to trick us into doing what they want us to do rather than letting the sales happen naturally.
Conversely, (with my consumer hat one) if the personal one-to-one relationship has been established, I'm also less sensitive to promotion – regardless of the channel.
Love this "As businesses, we’re often myopically focused on the end of the line transaction. The sale. The close" So many business rightly look at this as a measure of success but it isn't what we should be trying to do, it's a result of the good work that goes before. If people continue to use social media in a way that is impolite there is no way on earth they will sell water to a thirsty man.
As someone said "If you spoke to peoples faces as they do to them in marketing and direct sales, you'd rightly get a slap"
Love this "As businesses, we’re often myopically focused on the end of the line transaction. The sale. The close" So many business rightly look at this as a measure of success but it isn't what we should be trying to do, it's a result of the good work that goes before. If people continue to use social media in a way that is impolite there is no way on earth they will sell water to a thirsty man.
As someone said "If you spoke to peoples faces as they do to them in marketing and direct sales, you'd rightly get a slap"
"Social Media, Sales, and How They Work Together" by DMF 2011 speaker <a rel="nofollow" href="http://twitter.com/ambercadabra" rel="nofollow">@ambercadabra http://bit.ly/dXU8ji [does she rock, or what?] #mpforum
[...] Social Media, Sales, and How They Work Together [...]
Amber, absolutely agreed. I think we are all too focused on "the sale." Instead of building the relationships, we are off creating strategies that try to force conversations into seeming like we don't care about the sale. As a consumer, I'm always asking "what are you REALLY trying to get me to say/do/buy." I liken it to a psychological game that brands try to play in order to trick us into doing what they want us to do rather than letting the sales happen naturally.
Conversely, (with my consumer hat one) if the personal one-to-one relationship has been established, I'm also less sensitive to promotion – regardless of the channel.