A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the only way to sell products and communicate with customers these days is through Facebook and Twitter, as much of the advice coming out of the social media industry would have us believe that the established methods of sales, marketing and customer service are dying, if not already six feet under.
Of course, there are some relatively new companies that started out exclusively on the web and have no offline legacy to worry about. For them, all customer communication and acquisition is online. For the majority of companies, though, there are established offline ways of doing things and methods in place that have worked for years, and it can be a daunting prospect to consider dropping them.
The trick is not to think of social media as a replacement for anything, but as something that should be blended into existing practices. For example, for sales you can use social media tools to discover key influencers inside your target prospects’ organisations. Finding them in social networks and learning what they are talking about can provide more useful information than any CRM system ever could. For marketing, you can use the same information to reach out to the appropriate networks to promote events or help launch new products. For support, once you know where your existing customers are networking, you can begin to engage, offering help and advice.
None of the above should stop you from sending mailshots, making cold calls, holding face to face meetings or any other of the myriad of things that might have worked for you in the past. These activities should stay for as long as they are good for your business. But, by blending social media into your daily operations you will begin to generate new customer relationships built on trust, produce new revenues, and your company will be well on the road to becoming ’social media savvy’.
To get further down the road you may need to build your own social community, but that is another blog post for another day…
June 8th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I’m in sales, and I’ve found that Facebook and many other sites can give me an edge. Assuming I can find the people I’m looking for! Not everyone is out there, but it seems to be getting easier to locate people. How long before these sites are built right into the CRM systems, I wonder?
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
This makes perfect sense. It’s all about using the tools appropriately, rather than focusing only on the new, sexy ones