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.

Se há algo em negócios que nasceu para ser social, é vendas. Mas até agora ainda não existia uma boa forma de utilizar Social Media em Vendas.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs e outras fontes sociais oferecem uma riqueza de informação que:

• nos deixa conheçer melhor os nossos clientes
• ouvir e responder a eles
• gerar mais leads
• fechar mais oportunidades

Seus clientes têm mais opções do que nunca, e tem opções para interagir com outros clientes com necessidades semelhanges.

Se você, vendedor, ainda não descobriu e se juntou a esses grupos, então você precisa de um sistema social de vendas para ajudá-lo.

Um sistema de CRM Social permite que você localize seus clientes e leads e permaneça conectado com eles. Você aprende sobre suas necessidades e interesses e constrói relacionamentos mais fortes que como resultado acabam conduzindo a mais vendas.

Então, não é o momento de se conectar com seus clientes?

O que é o Social CRM da Coffee Bean?

Social CRM é uma estratégia e abordagem de vendas que é baseado em compromisso e interação com o cliente.

Um sistema de CRM social é um novo tipo de software para vendas e marketing que dá às pessoas as ferramentas de vendas que elas precisam para fazer seu trabalho. É diferente de um software de CRM tradicional, pois é construído desde seu início para ser social, para que você possa se conectar com seus clientes nos meios de comunicação social, compartilhar idéias e colaborar dentro de sua equipe de vendas. Em vez de sentir como se estivesse em um diálogo com um banco de dados você vai ter um diálogo maior com seus clientes e com sua equipe em um ambiente que se sente mais como Facebook do que uma aplicação de banco de dados e o aprendizado que você obterá irá ajudá-lo a fechar mais vendas.

• Economize tempo na pesquisa - Em vez de gastar horas por dia tentando encontrar seus contatos em todas as redes sociais e acompanhar o que estão dizendo e fazendo, Coffee Bean permite que você localize seus contatos rapidamente nos meios de comunicação sociais e constrói um Social ID uma identificação social) que está ligado com a informação regular do cartão que você colocou no seu CRM e torna-se uma parte do seu sistema. 

• Encontrar novos leads - Quando a comunicação com seus clientes e leads torna-se uma parte de sua rotina diária, você começará a encontrar novas pistas nas mídias sociais. Pessoas que estão procurando produtos e soluções, que oferecem ou que estão reclamando sobre o seu concorrente. Coffee Bean permite encontrar leads na mídia social, e o leva a seu CRM Social, onde continuará a dialogar com eles para se apresentar e ajudar a resolver o seu problema ou necessidade. Veja como isso é feito

• Feche mais Oportunidades - Nós todos sabemos que as pessoas compram de pessoas que conhecem e confiam. Seu relacionamento não deve terminar quando é fechada a primeira transação, mas muitos sistemas de vendas nos dão essa sensação porque as coisas param quando a oportunidade está fechada. Coffee Bean Social CRM mantém a sua ligação com o cliente viva e você será o primeiro da fila quando o cliente precisa de seu produto ou novo serviço.

Próximos passoss...

Saiba mais sobre a funcionalidade do Coffee Bean Social CRM, experimente, ou visite o nosso blog de social business para saber mais sobre como a mídia social pode ser utilizada em vendas e marketing na sua empresa.