Links to the resources mentioned by Lauren:

• Radian6
• Radian6 SocialCRM & Presentation on SocialCRM
• Paul Greenberg
• Lauren Vargas on Twitter

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, Radian6 is often a sponsor of the Inbound Marketing Summit that is operated by my current employer, New Marketing Labs.

/Colin

/colin

Enjoy the interview!

/colin

I wanted to ask about where all of you see the strongest impact of Sales 2.0 techniques today. Please feel free to add details in comments – I am eager to hear!

/colin
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-colin

The days of smile and dial are dead and unproductive – not to mention annoying and not much fun for the poor sales person. Instead, why not talk to your friends with re-tweets, tweets, direct messages, blog comments and more?

Somehow I have found myself in the world of sales- many find that to be a dirty word.  It does not have to be – it can be a fun exchange of ideas with your peers.  The tools of social media makes it much more fun and interesting.  Here is one of example of how I leverage Twitter on a daily basis and more specifically Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck is a wonderful Twitter client that allows you to store searches and groups of individuals.  I use this in several key ways:

• Saved Keyword Searches: I keep saved searches for key prospecting terms in my industry.  In my case, this is ‘social media events’ or ‘sponsorships’ or ‘social media consulting’.  Whenever these key terms are mentioned in the Twittersphere, I see it and can respond appropriately.
• Prospect Groups: I store a group of prospects as an open column on Tweetdeck to easily monitor their twitter updates.  This is a great way to keep tabs on the people that are at the top end of your sales funnel.
• Customer Groups: I also keep a separate group of all of my current customers open so that I know what is happening to them at any given moment.  I can engage with them in conversations as well as help to promote their efforts.  This helps me to build lasting relationships.

Why is this better than a call and especially a cold call?  Let me give you just a few reasons:

• I am human! You can see my picture, profile background, prior conversations,  and a link to my blog for more information.  That is a lot better than caller ID on a phone.
• Trust: When I reach out to someone it is easy to see all the topics I discuss on twitter and the people I follow and follow me back.  This builds a certain degree of trust and transparency that cannot be duplicated.
• I have to behave: If my own personal edicate is bad, I can be unfollowed or blocked by the people I am trying hard to build relationships with.  The control is in their hands – I can’t just fill up their inbox or voicemail until they relent, they can litterally just remove me from their Twitter lives.  This is what makes Twitter a cool, almost self policing sales tool.  If people start behaving like ###holes and used car salespeople – Unfollow & block!

This is part two in my ongoing Sales2.0 series.  There is more to come, including an eBook.

Please share your thoughts.  How have you used Twitter in sales situations?

/colin

What currently does not work (or could work better) in sales 1.0:

• Cold Calling: A tremendous amount of time and effort for the sales professional and an extreme annoyance for the prospect.  Why should you trust these people that interrupt your day?
• Complex Sales Process:  Sales organizations need to adapt to two connected facts: technology has made information readily available on most every topic and buyers are leveraging it to become very sophisticated.  Sales processes that emphasize education insult the potential client and slow the process down.
• Presentations: These are used too many times as a crutch for the sales professional and end up as a barrier to real conversations.  Should I mention boring too?  Or did you already fall asleep when I said wrote presentation?

So what am I doing for Sales 2.0? Here is a partial list, it is growing every day:

• Research: Social Media gives us access to so much information, it is a sales person’s dream.  Every day I comb through RSS feeds in which I target prospect’s blogs and key search terms in Twitter.  I track trends in Friendfeed as well as stay on top of the latest news through Google alerts.  Bottom line: this leads me to the right person at the right time.
• New Outbound: Instead of cold calls, I use a whole range of technologies that blast through the clutter.  I comment on prospects blogs and engage and retweet messages on Twitter.  I become a trusted contributor to the conversations.  Outbound efforts become highly relevant and personal, not interuptions.
• Conversations/Presentations:  Standard sales presentations prevent active dialog.  Engaging in a real conversation with a prospect about what they want to do and what they are looking for is the goal. At Mzinga I used Delicious.com as my slide deck, I am looking to enhance that at New Marketng Labs with Flikr, Twitter, slideshare, YouTube, and others to stimulate and foster conversations during sales presentations.

So far I have been very successful in my Sales 2.0 experiment.  Here is a quick example of what I did today to more clearly illustrate what I am doing:

Quick Case Study in breaking through the clutter:

9:20am: found read relavent blog post in RSS feed and added comment
9:45am: found blog author on Twitter and followed & added to prospect feed in TweetDeck
11:00am: prospect followed me back
11:30am: re-tweeted prospect’s blog post with compliment
4:00pm: sent prospect direct message through twitter asking if I they had interest & if I could email
4:30pm: recieved response with prospect’s email address!

I will continue to report on this, but I would love to know what others think.  Please comment below.

/colin