Using Social Media for Sales

Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, blogs, wikis, forums and our customer communities – people are sharing more content than ever online. There’s no bigger source of honest, direct and outspoken opinion than social media sites.

Social media is global, real-time, uncontrollable and dynamic. Your prospects are talking about you online.

With the right tools, you can uncover posts that can lead to converting prospects or additional sales from existing customers. Instead of creating a special social media team with specialized software, and additional headcount and costs, you can take these posts and automatically create leads in your existing CRM application for follow up and tracking. This is next generation of CRM, called SocialCRM.

Types of Social Media for Sales

Typical types of social media posts for sales and revenue come in these forms:

• Question about service
• Comparison Request
• Complaint about Competitor
• Additional Product/Service Offerings

Once you have identified the post to be of sales in nature, Buzzient Enterprise can automatically (or manually) create a lead from the post and route it through your existing CRM application and workflows.

Many companies choose to answer these posts on a first come/first served manner. Other methods can be based on sentiment (more positive or negative first), customers first, high value customers first, most important product first, etc. Whatever choice of ordering you decide, it should be based on business needs and not social media dynamics. Buzzient’s automated scoring mechanisms allows for timely and efficient segmentation of actionable posts.

Workflow for Sales and Revenue Social Media

Step 1: Determine if this is Sales related opportunity.
Step 2: Create a Lead. Buzzient will automatically append existing customer record with posting if data connecting customer record to poster ID exists. If not a new record is created and can be attached to the correct customer record at a later date.
Step 3: Route to the appropriate sales for response. You can assign this record just like any other lead.
Step 4: Communicate with the prospect. Buzzient enables you to communicate back to the prospect over the originating social media site directly within the enterprise interface.

Step 5: Complete the interaction and tag the Lead record. Collect customer social media IDs if possible for future communications.

Metrics

Tracking of this effort can be done on a number of measures. Again, choose the one that best matches your business drivers:

• New Sales Leads via Social Channel
• Total Revenue from Social Channel Customers

ROI of Social Media in Sales

• Increased revenues
• Greater pipeline activity
• Increase in number of leads

The Buzzient Difference

Buzzient Enterprise allows you to add Social Media data within your existing CRM applications and workflows. It is the first and only integration to support on-premise and cloud based CRM systems, giving you the flexibility to implement the way that meets your business needs. Take a look at all the features of Buzzient as well as our Case Studies where our customers have seen up to 75% cost reductions while tracking and engaging with 4x the social media content.