By Nigel Edelshain, Sales 2.0
Every time I speak at a conference or do a webinar someone asks about Twitter. Seems like that bird is a bit of an obsession these days.
I have a couple of theories on how sales people should use Twitter but I thought I’d check my sanity this week and ask a brain trust of sales experts for their top tips on how sales people should use Twitter. I asked them... “What's the best way for sales people to use Twitter to develop leads?”
Miles Austin, Fill the FunnelKevin Popovic, Ideahaus
Use Twitter as a “listening” device to gather information and develop an understanding of what is important to your prospects. It is a terrific way to help do your homework. If you want to sell to Ford, create a twitter list of all the keywords, topics, suppliers and competitors of Ford. Twitter provides a very big set of “ears” to listen into the conversation and learn the strengths and challenges of the company. If you sell phone systems, Twitter might help you discover that customers are expressing frustration with call disconnects and trouble hearing the representative when they call for help.
Twitter is as a channel for sharing information, but its an even better listening device. And in our case, we’re going to listen for sales leads.
Tools, like TweetDeck, can help filter the stream of information (Tweets), much like a cable box helps decode and prioritize the “channels” so we can watch them, one from another. We can create a “channel” for our product and service categories by listening for keywords in the tweets; real estate, business, training, etc. The same words we think our prospects would use if they were search for us using Google.
When a Tweet is detected in the stream it shows it in a list, along with their user name and icon, i.e. a lead.
Its also a great way to demonstrate your experience and expertise in a vertical or specialty. Sharing information on a regular basis that helps, educates and informs establishes you as an expert in the space and a point of contact when they need to learn more (like who to hire or where to buy.)
Anneke Seley, PhoneWorks
Provide something of value to your prospects and customers via Twitter. This could be a simple observation, a quote, or link to an article that's pertinent to the industry, geography or job function you serve, an invitation to an event, a recorded webinar, podcast or video...even content created by your own company such as e-books, white papers, surveys or events that could help increase their trust and engagement. You can also re-tweet something that your prospect or customer tweeted to show you are listening and value their contribution.
David Anderson, MyWay Interactive
1. Rather than look for leads directly on Twitter, I would suggest looking for other sales people on Twitter that would likely have the type of leads you are looking for. Sales people are easy to approach and they like to help other members of the "club". To begin, search twitter profiles by company, title and location such as Cisco, Sales, NY. Follow the sales people of interest to you. Read their profiles and see what they are interested in. Read their tweets. Then call them up and see if you might collaborate on the XYZ account or exchange some contact names.
2. Follow an industry leader in the market you are selling to. this may be the CIO of a major bank. Then follow their followers. Pick those followers who are also bank CIO's. Set up a system to monitor each of their tweets and detect conversations between them on subject areas of interest to your business such as security, virtualization of the data center, training etc. Look at each of their profiles and create news feeds (from Google) to monitor the things they have an interest in (wine, hiking, snowboarding). You then have a warm lead and you can tailor your initial approach to things you have in common.
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