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.

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Sales 2.0

Pat Mason, Simple Sales

Many people are writing about the new crop of social media tools, also called Web 2.0 and how they can be applied to business. This article is about Sales 2.0, or how these tools can help you sell to your customers more effectively.

Let’s start with a definition. Sales 2.0 is a term that refers to the use of on-line tools that can help establish and manage a community for the purpose of selling. Examples would be blogs, RSS feeds and so on.

Now for a little science. How does Sales 2.0 work? As is often the case, the tools alone don’t do the trick. If they did, I wouldn’t be writing this article, I’d simply set up a blog and let the money roll-in!

Effective use of Sales 2.0 tools boils down to three things. Process, community, and technology or what we will call “tools”.

Before you apply technology, you need to make sure you have a process to connect and organize sales activities from beginning to end. If you don’t have one already, find one that is simple and straightforward. This will make it easy to understand, implement and most importantly use.

Next up is community. What people do you want to include in yours and why? It’s important to recognize that Sales 2.0 is not just focused on sellers and buyers. In Sales 2.0, anyone can get involved!

Your community is key to your success so it’s important to think carefully about who will be in it, and how they will help you sell. One way to tackle this exercise is to lay out your sales process, and then imagine who could help you at each step in the process and how. If you don’t know what the tools can do, you can pause here and go find out, or you can simply make an assumption that once you create this communityyou will find the tools to suit your needs.

Finally, think about the tools. For the first time, the tools are available to quickly, easily and cheaply reach a mass audience. What you will find is that Sales 2.0 tools are very people friendly too. They are web based and easily support rich content such as images, audio, and video. This makes them easy to set-up and dare I say it, fun to use. Most importantly, they are also built to connect people together quickly and easily letting you create and manage a community like never before. Think of it as technology with a built in snowball effect.

So, what kind of community will you build?

My next article will provide examples of exactly what tools are being used in each step of the sales process, and how they can be used to help you sell! If you want to know more, please visit me at www.simplesales.ca or drop me a line Patrick@simplesales.ca

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.

Related Topics: Business, Entrepreneurship, Sales, Technology    1 Comment