The Social Media Salesman
“This social media is a total waste of time, we’ve been at it now for over a month and it’s brought us no business” …. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that!
The prospective client that was in with us had a wine wholesaling business and had decided to take it online and had set up an e-commerce website and had also joined the world of social media with Facebook and Twitter pages and even a wine blog.
He was really frustrated as the orders weren’t rolling in and he was about to totally abandon his online efforts.
OK, I started having a peep over their activities and how they had approached their whole online efforts.
They had completed one blog post, they had just made a handful of social media posts in the month and they hadn’t interacted with anyone else on line. They had very few followers on twitter and even less fans on their Facebook page.
The guy who was responsible for the posting was too busy with his day job and was squeezing in his social media activity whenever he had some spare time if he remembered.
“Fair enough ….. now tell me how your main business works?” I asked.
The company had three sales reps who reported into a sales manager. Each of the reps headed out each day in their company cars with their order book and called into their list of customers and also popped into some prospective customers. It took a good few years, a lot of hard work and determination to build up the business to the level it was now.
On each call the reps chat about their range of wines, the special offers, the new products and exciting things happening in the industry. They obviously chat about other things with their customers – everything from how their business is going to general chit chat. It’s really important to build a relationship with the customer and to understand them if you want to do business with them. “That’s what the good salesman will do” my prospect explained to me.
Why do we expect the same results from our efforts on social media without the same effort?
With all of our clients when we provide social media consultancy we look for a “Social Media Champion” from within the organisation who knows the business really well, who is willing to learn about each of the platforms, who understands how to communicate comfortably on them and who is prepared to put in the necessary time and effort to connect with users and to achieve results.
Mostly this is not a full time job but the “champion” must be given the time as part of their role to do this properly – think of this person as a Social Media Salesman.
Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion
