Via InsideView
You can spend all day, every day, wasting an enormous amount of time on the social web.
Or, you can focus your time and energy on tools that deliver measurable value for your business—real, qualified leads, growing sales pipeline and closed deals. Sales & marketing professionals that leverage social selling techniques close more business, and you can too. In fact, InsideView reported that IBM saw a 400% increase in sales in 1 quarter after launching a pilot social selling program.
If you’re more interested in the latter, here are 5 social selling tools I recommend you take full advantage of moving into 2014:
1. Socedo
The bottom line on Socedo is qualified leads, using your existing assets and offers, at a significantly lower cost than paid search and many of your other paid channels. Socedo finds relevant tweets based on keyword, bio content and location, then automates a follow-up process that culminates in a personalized, customized direct message offering a download, white paper, webinar registration, whatever you want. RELATED CLASS: Buying Signals: The Key to Social Media Sales
It's very easy to start leveraging Socedo to mine Twitter for real prospects, all integrated into demand generation offers you already execute to compare on cost and conversion. In my tests thus far, acquisition costs and conversion rates on my control landing pages have been significantly better.
2. Little Bird
Type in any categories, keyword or phrase and you’ll receive a rich report of the top influencers (Little Bird calls them “insiders”), ranked by how many other influencers in that category also follow the individual.
If you’re trying to accelerate the reach of your content via others who have significant influence with your target audience, I can’t imagine a more efficient tool to use. It works for categories, brand names, hashtags, conferences and more. I use it weekly to find and engage new influencers for our business and for our clients.
3. LinkedIn Contacts
A few months ago, LinkedIn allowed users to consolidate contacts from a variety of sources into a single, dynamic database – from Yahoo, Google, Facebook and more.
Why is this important? Because now, every morning, you can receive an email that summarizes, across all of your social networks, who has a birthday, who’s celebrating a work anniversary, who changed jobs or titles, who was quoted in the news recently and more.
All great opportunities to generate a new, value-added impression for yourself or your brand. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a simple “happy birthday” message turn into a business conversation. RELATED CLASS: Holistic Integration with LinkedIn Innovation
4. OFunnel
Referrals are the lifeblood of any consistently successful sales or business development professional. OFunnel helps you filter specifically for the referrals you most want from your direct network.
Simply tell OFunnel what companies, individuals or titles you’re targeting, and they’ll let you know whenever someone in your direct network connects with someone you need to meet.
Great way to ask for a direct introduction and make quick traction towards a new business opportunity.
5. Slideshare
Content marketers may be familiar with Slideshare already, but it continues to increase in importance for sales & business development professionals as well. Its ability to rank highly on Google makes placing all of your content—white papers, collateral, even sales and feature sheets—a must on their platform.
For example, I posted a one-pager featuring an end-of-year service offering we launched a few weeks ago and it’s generated hundreds of views and several downloads—with no promotion whatsoever.
Slideshare also allows you to post an optional, customized registration form on top of your content, which regularly generates new leads from companies and decision makers who are already engaged with our content.
There are dozens of great tools out there, but these are some of my favorites that I’m using regularly to find new leads and sales opportunities. What are you using?
Convert conversations into sales by identifying buying signals.
Watch Buying Signals: The Key to Social Media Sales, and learn how to turn social media into a quality lead stream for your business. You'll see how to use keywords and listening programs to identify buying signals—and then hone in on the people ready to buy. After watching, you'll be ready to separate the signal from the noise, and start optimizing your social and content activity for increased sales. Get instant access to this class now.