No matter your market, you have customers and prospects using social media. What if you could find and engage them, far earlier in the buying process, in just a few minutes a day?
What if you launched a custom social sales listening and engagement platform for every sales rep in your organization, helping the accelerate relationships and meet/engage with more of the right prospects more often?
Getting started is surprisingly simple. I recommend getting started with two simple steps – one proactive, and one reactive.
Proactive (target lists in HootSuite)
If you know exactly who you’re trying to sell to (companies and/or individuals), find their Twitter handles and start following them via your own Twitter account. Then sort them into lists (you can make these lists private in Twitter) and load those lists into separate columns in HootSuite.
By doing this, you will have (all in one screen) access to all Twitter updates from your target prospects. Especially if you’re working in a defined territory with a finite number of prospects, this is a great way to be the proverbial “fly on the wall.”
Much of the conversation you observe won’t have anything to do with what you’re trying to sell, but that’s good too. You’ll learn what else makes them tick, what they’re thinking about and worrying about. You’ll also observe the early buying signals (needs, pain, desired outcomes) that will help you engage in a more consultative way.
Reactive (TwitHawk)
Let’s say you can’t keep up with the more than 200 billion tweets generated each day. Let’s say you really only care about when people tweet about a specific topic, or use a specific phrase in their tweets.
TwitHawk is perfect for capturing that for you. Think of TwitHawk as Google Alerts for Twitter. You set up as many searches as you want, filtering based on keyword(s) and geography, if desired. Then TwitHawk finds search results for you daily, plus allows you to semi-automate and throttle out responses to get and keep you engaged with prospects you may not have known about before.
If you have a geographic territory and want a daily feed of new prospects expressing interest and/or need, TwitHawk should quickly become part of your daily routine.
Of course, there are fantastic tools out there that go deeper and cost a lot more. But you can get the above two steps set up in about 20 minutes, and they work.
