B2B Sales Strategy: Using Twitter to Find and Close New Business

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B2B Sales Strategy: Using Twitter to Find and Close New Business

I am regularly challenging the sales organizations that I work with to find ways to use social media in their selling efforts. Social media is often thought of as a "marketing" tool, but it is also a very effective sales tool. 

I'd like to share with you how one of my clients is using Twitter to find, engage and close new business.

1.    New business: The sales people regularly monitor what people are saying about their competitors. When they read a tweet expressing frustration over a competitive product, they will enter that person’s information into salesforce.com, and will let marketing start the nurturing process. In many cases, these have ended up as customers in 30-60 days.

2.    Customer Retention and Upsell: The sales people regularly monitor what customers are saying about their company. When a customer writes about his dissatisfied with the product's performance, the sales person will send a tweet letting them know that they have forwarded their information to support. Support will then call the customer and work to resolve any issues. Without exception, the customer ends up happier and with a more positive perception about the company – and in some cases, the customer ended up going back to the sales person to purchase additional products.

When sales people read a tweet from a happy customer, they also send a thank you to them thanking them for their positive comments. They don’t just take action when there are negative comments.

One of the things to note here is that sales is a coordinated effort between the sales team, marketing and support.  Twitter has been a great tool for all three departments to collectively find/engage/close new business.

Sometimes the hardest part is just getting started. I suggest that you listen in to some discussions before jumping in. After a few days of listening, I believe that the discussions will not seem so foreign and you'll be closing business with Twitter as well.