Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Using Social Media to Increase Sales

Pat Mason, Simple Sales

The following three-step process will help you decide how to use social technologies to increase sales. Selling today is less about the “buyer/seller” relationship, and more about connections in your broader community such as your staff, suppliers, clients, and so on.

Before you start, ask yourself:

1. Who is in my community?

2. Can they participate online?

3. Are resources available to create and support my community over the long term?

If you can answer yes to these questions you are ready to begin. The process has three steps.

Step 1:

Define your community into two categories.

Core – members you need to survive

a. You

b. Staff

c. Customers

d. Suppliers

e. ?

New – members you need to thrive

a. New customers

b. Specialized resources/experts

c. Critics/product reviews/press

d. ?

Step 2:

Define how each member gives/gets value from each other today, and how they could give/get value once connected via the internet.

You may want to start with Core members, and add New later. To keep things simple, I have only considered Core clients for now.

My Community

Step 3:

Now think about your goals. Sales strategies support organizational goals so think about yours; new customer, new products, or what?

For this example let’s say you sell software, have 300 clients and your goal is to increase professional services fees.

Look back a the My Community table. Is it consistent with your overall goals? Have you included people that generate professional service fees? If not, add them and look at how they interact with other members of your community. How could they exchange value to make you money?

Here are some suggestions I would make

1. Connect consultants to customers – Engourage consultants to blob about projects, problems, and solutions. Client will be quick to call if they spot ideas that could work for them.

2. Connect customers to each other – Encourage cilents to share stories, guest post, and comment.

3. Connect yourself – Play a central role. Maintain the blog and make sure everyone is participating. Combe the content for ideas on how to increase professional service revenue. Is there a solution to a problem you can standardize, is a customer expanding, have you asked happy clients for referrals and so on.

Sales 2.0 can be daunting. If you don’t have time to do a comprehensive strategy, tackle it in bite size pieces. Keep it simple, use standard tools and remember that you can always adjust course along the way.

Patrick Mason is the principal and owner of Simple Sales, a venture that is all about making sales and sales consulting better. Way better. Simple Sales looks to improve our clients’ sales results quickly, effectively and in lasting and meaningful ways. We do this by drawing on our experience in sales, sales methodology, and where appropriate the focused application of technology to capture opportunities and solve problems.

Posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Advertising, Business, Computers, Entrepreneurship, Internet, Marketing, Sales, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.