Leveraging social media during a sales process can make a huge impact on the deals you are working on. Using Twitter for Sales Intelligence gives sales teams some great insights to the companies and contacts you are targeting. Never before in the history of sales have sales people had the ability to know so much information about the activities of a prospect. Where they travel, who they hang out with, even as much information as how they are feeling. Don’t you think it could make a difference on when you call a prospect based on if they are having a bad day or not? If nothing else, it will let you decide how you approach them.
As more companies and employees start leveraging tools like Twitter for communication you have the opportunity to get a direct line of sight on what’s happening within their worlds.
How Can Sales People Use Twitter For Sales Intelligence and Sales Growth
Based on our research, there is irresistible evidence that Twitter should be a component of a B2B sales person’s tool kit. Here are some easy steps you can take to boost sales using Twitter:
- Create a Twitter account.
- Identify the Twitter profiles of your customers and prospects. The easiest method is to look for the Twitter symbol on the website or to run InsideView to search for contacts with Twitter profiles.
- Create a Twitter List of your target profiles. This will enable you to isolate the tweets from your targets (vs. those form your family and friends).
- Use various Twitter search tools (e.g., search.twitter.com)
Here’s a list of some tid-bits of sales intelligence we came across:
- Customer recommendations
- New company initiatives
- Exhibitions at conferences
- Job openings
- New senior hires
- Articles by executives
- New customer wins
- Product launches
- Awards won
