How Social Insights Give You a Sales Edge

Buying and selling processes are quickly adapting to our information rich world. Tap into all of the information you have available to you through social in order to make smarter connections. If you are able to gather more information about prospects, you will have a much higher success rate by engaging with the moment is right. There are right and wrong ways to efficiently sift through social data.

Make smarter decisions out of social data

The McKinsey Global Institute said that more data is stored in companies with over 1,000 employees than what is contained in the US Library of Congress. That is a lot of social data. Your sales reps need help making sense of these social streams. Instead of going through all of this data looking for signals, you need a tool that monitors and alerts your sales team of buying signals that may come up. This way, your sales reps can better manage their time and engage with relevant messages.

Social Intelligence Embedded in CRM

To stay better ahead of your competition, your sales team needs to be provided access to CRM tools that are embedded with social intelligence. These CRM systems provide real-time social feeds that are directly connected to lead accounts. This allows for sales to focus on what matters. They can reach out at the opportune time and with content that matters after a social buying signal comes in. Pre-call information searching can be reduced by over 70% with this information automatically stored in one place.

Here are three of the best ways to take advantage of this tool in CRM:

1. You can find and connect with new prospects – By tapping into social networking contacts, you can enhance your lead-generation efforts. Focus on conversations and topics that are relevant to your company’s offerings when you are identifying prospects.
2. Make your conversations more meaningful – By viewing conversation history, you can make your new conversations more meaningful. Make the conversation relevant by focusing on interests.
3. Understand your customers on a higher level – By seeing a social networking profile for your customers, you can gain well-rounded insight into who they are. Track professional events such as job changes that are relevant. And you can also identify key online influencers to connect with and learn from.

Take advantage of your company’s internal network

There is a lot to take away from tapping into the combined social network of your colleagues. Enterprise social networking applications like Yammer are other social resources you and your sales team need to take advantage of. According to a blog on the Harvard Business Review, “strong sellers don’t merely execute their day-to-day tasks well… they rely on collective skills in ways that weren’t possible a few short years ago.”

Organizations are more likely to close large deals when they collaborate across the entire company. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, “companies using enterprise social networks saw business productivity rise by as much as 30%.” Putting sales reps in the position where they are able to collaborate and find answers through social networking should be management’s top priority.