Let's face it, in sales we all want to close more deals and the classical marketing funnel approach is giving us declining results. Social Media can help!!!

In John's article on Sales Lessons from the Grand Bazaar Istanbul he shared the skillful way in which the sales people first focus on making a connection with the customer. In a physically saturated market they know they have one chance to make a connection and keep you interested.

Classically, sales and marketing use segmentation to target messages to specific audiences, bring them to a landing page and capture their business data. Diligent sales and marketers will do some research to further qualify the "Lead" and turn to Google search or business directories for more data which they use to categorize and prioritize the lead. 

That's all well and good but at this point although you may have an interested visitor and their contact details there is no way to really connect. You send them the follow up or automated email which typically they filter as junk because they are just too busy. The problem is that these approaches and tools give you data but don't tell you anything about the person, their priorities, or interests in your product (not to mention that the data is often months or even years old and in some cases just plain wrong).

Social Media can help!

Social Media can help sales and marketing throughout the customer buying process and help you close more deals.

• Social Sales Intelligence - In LinkedIN you'll find business data about people and companies and in Facebook and Twitter you'll find people (and companies) engaging in conversations that are important to them. And Social Media is NOW. You won't find old articles or information in Social Media, you find current and generally more accurate information there, it's a real time media managed by the owners of the information. 


• Make a connection - The lessons from the grand bazaar tells us that first we make a connection. This is where social media comes into its own. When you find and connect with you customers and follow their relevant conversations you'll soon learn more about them, their interests and priorities. You can connect and drive conversations with them by engaging in subjects that are important to them and know more about the events that are affecting their company and industry so you have more to talk about. 


• Pre call research - Before you pick up the phone to ask for that next meeting you should first check their social profiles to see what they have been saying and doing recently. It's about making the connection. Did they just check-in a new location in foursquare, or book a trip on trippit, or promote their product in Facebook or enter a technical discussion that relevant to you in Twitter. 


• Buy Indicators - We have all learned that the customers buying cycle is far more relevant to the outcome of a deal than our own internal sales process. Social media gives sales great insights into their prospects moods. If a prospect just "liked" your whitepaper or commented in your company Facebook page or blog then its a great indicator that they are engaged and enjoying their relationship with your company and products and if you know it happened one minute ago then thats a great prompt to reply to them or make that next call.

What next

Searching for your contacts in social media can be a lot of hard work, not to mention following them and connecting with them through relevant conversations.

If you are already using Coffee Bean you can start by using Social-ID to automatically search and find your contacts in all of the social networks. Their social profile and activity gets integrated with their business card info so you can always see what they have been talking about recently. For even more context you can add feeds from google blog search or from news and alerts services to keep track of your customers. 

If you are new to Coffee Bean then you can learn more about our social sales and marketing solution or try it free for yourself.

Here are 5 ways you can use social media today in sales and marketing

1. Social ID - Quickly search and find your contacts in social media and connect to their profiles so that you can always be connceted and follow them whenever you come to their contact stream. Wouldn't you want to know if one of your decision makers moves to a new company? This is one of the things you'll get from Social ID through the integration with LinkedIN

2. Look whose talking - Search and monitor social network chatter for keyterms so that you can find social leads, react to complaints and gather insights from influencers and your customers.

3. In the News - Integrate blog and news searches through your RSS feeds to get social news and views on your industrstry space. You can gather and share these insights within the company, find new influencers that you need to connect with and find interesting content that you can share with your community of customers and prospects.

4. Whose who - Segment your contact database using tags that reflect the social groups that they belong to. You can tag based on twitter # tags, Linkedin Groups or keywords so that you know where and how to talk to your target market.

5. It's good to share - Share an insight, write a note in a stream, comment on streams that you follow or write in someones profile to share some knowledge or just to add smoe encouragement and motivation.

What Next

You can learn more about how Coffee Bean can streamline your social sales and mearketing efforts then you can read more about our Social CRM products or browse through our Social CRM guides and social business blogs.

Way back in May 2005 BusinessWeek published an article entitled "Blogs Will Change Your Business" and since then of course blogs, and the idea that we can all have a voice and become an influencer has been driving companies to create their own blogs and to follow blogs that are important to their industry (and therefore to their customers and prospects). 

So we all need to invest some time to know whats happening in the blogosphere that might be affecting our business. But how much time do you need to spend each day to find and filter through the multitude of blogs and other online sources to find the insights that will help you in sales today.

Wouldn't it be great if you could get the most relevant and up to date blog articles delivered to your Social CRM system along side your Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook feeds. Well using the Coffee Bean RSS features, you can!

Here's How

Go to Google and search for the keywords that are the most interesting to you. In the search options (top left) select Blogs to search for blog articles. In this case below I'm looking for mentions of my company in blog articles

NOTE - Further down on the left side of the page are some options to filter this by time so you can get just the articles from the last day, week and so on.

Now if you scroll down to the bottom of the page there are some options of how you can 'follow" these search results to stay up to date. CoffeeBean supports the RSS and ATOM formats.

In this case I'll use the ATOM feed so just click on the link that says ATOM

You'll see the new page load with something that looks like a news feed. You only need to get the URL for this page so go to the address bar in your browser, highlight the address URL and copy it.

Now in Coffee Bean go to the stream where you want the feed to live. You might create a stream specifically for sharing this information or you can connect the blog feed to an existing company or contact stream if its about a specific company or person. Select the RSS tool from the "more" menu and paste in the address URL that you copied.

That's it. Now each time you come to the stream you'll see the latest insights from the blogosphere right there inside Coffee Bean. You'll save time each day by having all of your feeds consolidated in Coffee Bean and you can share the insights with your whole team by connecting them in context to the business.

Google Blog search is just one of the ways you can use RSS feeds to bring information and insights to your sales and marketing team through Coffee Bean.

How do you use yours?

What next

Learn more about Coffee Bean Social CRM features, try it for yourself, or take a look over our social business blog to learn more about how social media can be utilized in sales and marketing in your company.

If anything in business was born to be social then its sales but until now there hasn't been a good way to use Social Media in Sales.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs and other social sources give us a wealth of insights that

• let us know our customers better
• listen and respond to them

• find more leads

• close more opportunities

Your customers have more choices than ever and have more places to go to seek advice, to complain and to help others that have similar needs to them.

If you haven't discovered and joined these conversation then you need a social sales system to help you.

A Social CRM system lets you find your customers and prospects and stay connected with them. You learn about their needs and interestes and build stronger relationships as a result that ultimately leads to more sales.

So isn't it time you got connected with your customers.

What is Coffee Bean Social CRM

Social CRM is a strategy and approach to sales that is based around customer engagement and interaction.

A Social CRM system is a new type of sales and marketing software that gives sales people the tools they need to do it. It's different from a traditional CRM software because it's built from the ground up to be social, to let you connect with your customers in social media, share insights and collaborate within your sales team. Instead of feeling like you are in a dialog with a database you will be having a dialog more with your customers and with your team in an environment that feels more like Facebook than a database application and the insights you get back will help you close more sales. 

• Save time on research - Instead of spending hours a day trying to find your contacts in all of the social networks and keeping track of what they are saying and doing Coffee Bean lets you find your contacts quickly in social media and builds a Social ID that's connected with the regular business card info that you put in your CRM and it becomes a part of your system.

• Find new leads - When engaging with your customers and prospects becomes a part of your daily routine you'll start to find new leads in social media. People who are looking for products and solutions that you offer or that are complaining about your competitor. Coffee Bean lets you capture leads from social media into your Social CRM where you continue to engage with them to introduce yourself and help them solve their problem or need. See how its done

• Close more opportunities - We all know that we buy from people we know and trust. Your relationship shouldn't be ending when the first transaction closes but many sales and CRM systems give us this feeling because things stop when the opportunity is closed. Coffee Bean Social CRM keeps your connection with the customer alive and you'll be the first in line when your customer needs your product or service again.

What next

Learn more about Coffee Bean Social CRM features, try it for yourself, or take a look over our social business blog to learn more about how social media can be utilized in sales and marketing in your company.