Still Don't Get Social Media? Try This

Marketing Precedes Selling

In a traditional sense, marketing is what you do to increase awareness, to otherwise move potential buyers closer to engaging with your sales process.  The idea with marketing is that it makes your sales process easier, because good marketing  "pre-sells" your product or service.

The challenge with any type of marketing that it places a burden on the salesperson to ultimately close the transaction. This is precisely why sales people are typically highly compensated. A skilled and experienced sales professional knows first and foremost how to make a buyer comfortable.  

Making a sale starts with building relationships and establishing trust, which are vitally important for keeping buyers fully engaged so that a well-designed sales process can be allowed to properly unfold.

Social Media Precedes Marketing

This is where social media can be invaluable.  Marketing helps to build awareness, and to some extent it educates the potential buyer.  Social media can do some of this too, which is where we get the term social media marketing.  

Yet, the greatest value of social media is not necessarily to "pre-sell" – but to "pre-humanize."  In this sense, it actually becomes an extension of that salesperson.  In other words, social media is best used to personalize the sales and marketing process.

I have been in sales my entire career, the first ten years in a corporate environment selling B2B – business to business. As an entrepreneur and small business owner, that experience helped me immensely.  I understood that you don't just show up and start selling.  

To be honest, as a young and inexperienced MBA, I wanted to get down to business.  I didn't understand why my more experienced mentors "wasted time" with lunches and dinners and the like. That getting to know each other process is easily accomplished with social media.

Your potential clients these days don't always have the time for business socializing, though its almost always a productive use of your time if they do.  It comes down to that simple truth that people do business with people, not brands or companies. Because if they like you and trust you, you are more likely to consummate the transaction – provided of course that your product or service is indeed a good fit for them.

Use Social Media to Learn and Relate

If you are using social media to extend your traditional marketing, then you will not be as effective as the business that uses it to support or precede it.  If I were a marketer just getting started with social media, I would sit down with my top salespeople and ask them how they make their prospects comfortable.

What makes this interesting is during that first and all-important meeting with a prospect, the most important activity is passive – it's listening.  The best salespeople will let the prospect do all of the talking.  So, this is the lesson number one. 

Consider how you can create an environment where everyone feels comfortable so that they will reveal what's on their minds.  How do you do this?  Ask open-ended questions.  Let them use you as a sounding board.  Show them you understand.

How do you show them you understand?  My favorite way of doing this is always to relate a similar experience about a previous client or customer.  Experience is always relevant.  If you have previously solved a similar problem for a satisfied customer, that story is pure gold.  Use it.

Now I'm Listening

One thing I've realized is that while I have endeavored to reduce the length of these blog posts, they nevertheless seem to be getting longer.  So, now I'm going to stop and listen to you.

How can I make this blog more useful for you?

What's on your mind?   

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For my American friends, enjoy the Labor Day weekend.  For everyone else, enjoy your weekend as if it were a holiday!

 All the best,  Jeff