Get Your Sales Team Using Social Media: Customers Want to Deal With People, Not With Companies

I don’t understand why large companies create a single big Twitter account or blog that is named “@companyxyz” or “The Company XYZ Blog.” Usually these accounts end up just facilitating nothing but a long stream of advertisements and press releases, disguised in the form of tweets and blog entries. There is no hint whatsoever that an actual human being is behind these communications.

Customers don’t want to interact with companies. They want to interact with people.
Often companies are afraid to let individual employees publicly represent the brand, so a typical, misguided solution is to have a designated “Social Media Person” of whom nobody outside the organization ever knows the identity. Customers will not buy into this because they know that companies don’t help people. People help people.

Teach your salespeople, customer service reps, PR team, and anyone who has direct contact you’re your customers or the public the basics of social media. Invest in the digital communication skills of your team, and teach them how to use these mediums responsibly, but personably. Instead of one company blog, rotate the employees whose posts are featured on your blog page. Have several employees tweeting about everyday life at the company. Because nobody wants to hear what Big Company, Inc. thinks about *insert Next-Big-Industry-Trend here*. But they probably wouldn’t mind hearing what Bob from Sales thinks about what it means for them.

If your people truly are on board with your organization’s goals and passionate about what it does for its customers, you have nothing to worry about. But if you don’t trust your own people enough to excitedly represent your company on a personal level, then you have far bigger problems than social media.

I Work in Retail, or Social Media Makes You As Big As You Want to Be

I work in retail.

There, I said it. I am a sales manager at the store level for a luxury home retail chain. For some reason, I excitedly tell all my friends and family what I do when they ask, but I have been very hesitant to tell complete strangers on a career website what my current industry and position actually are. Why is that?

I really like what I do. I don't plan to do it past the end of college, but it's fun and it's taught me a lot. I make pretty good money for a student. My job gives me a substantial amount of responsibility, but also gives me a lot of flexibility, too. I work a full time schedule, I have good health insurance, 2 weeks of vacation, sick pay, paid holidays and personal days, tuition reimbursement, and all the trappings of a “normal, adult” job. I have one-on-ones with my staff, biweekly management meetings, I complete sales reports and handle payroll adjustments when necessary. I do all of the things that your typical sales manager in most industries does.

So why did I not want to let this piece of my identity get out online for so long? It hit me as I was driving home from work, sipping a watered down Dr. Pepper from a Quik Trip convenience store: Retail makes me feel small. When I am participating in social media, I feel just as big as Kyle Lacy, Holly Hoffman, or Rebecca Thorman; my piece of the conversation is just as important and valued. However, when I contrast my relatively short list of credentials and accomplishments with those of the people I communicate with online, it is easy to feel dwarfed by these Gen Y giants.

As soon as I came to that realization, I was free. Free from tiptoeing around my words to sound “bigger” and “more important” than I am when I blog. Free from my own subjective self-judgment. Because that’s the beautiful part of social media: what you’ve done or haven’t done up to this point doesn’t really matter. What matters is what you are going to do now. And I’ve got big plans. Do you?

Is Your Weird, Stupid Business Idea Really That Weird and Stupid?

Do you have a fascinating business or project idea that you have never tried because you just know there is no audience for it? So many interesting ideas get squelched because their creators discount their value before they ever test them out. But with a little courage and curiosity, you might just find they have more value than you think.

Not too long ago, I tried a little experiment to test my writing skills and also my ability to think outside the box. I started a blog called GoblinStop.com, which married topics related to social media (one of my newer interests) with Dungeons and Dragons (something I’ve been doing for most of the last half of my life). This was purely meant to be an amusing diversion, as I thought there surely would be no audience for such an odd combination of subjects.

After the first blog entry gained me exactly 3 page hits, probably all of which were accidental, I started writing notes in Facebook with sample text and links to the site, and I even started adding images to each. I had also begun playing around with Reddit some recently, so in addition to forwarding others’ blog posts and articles, I placed links to my own entries on the RPG board. I even used Twitter a couple of times to link to posts. Within a month, I was consistently getting between 150 and 200 hits a day, and I even got offered a full time blogging job for a copy-writing company (unfortunately they couldn’t work with me quite enough on my school schedule, so I had to decline). I know this is small potatoes for many bloggers, but it impressed me that such a niche topic would gain that much of a following in just a month.

That little taste of success has caused me to seriously reconsider GoblinStop.com’s viability, and I have taken a little hiatus from the site to regroup and consider if and how I might be able to really turn this into something. It still might be a stretch, but now I have tested the waters a bit and I know there is a bigger audience than I thought.

And that’s what this post is all about. We tend to beat our own ideas to death before we ever test them out, coming up with seemingly endless reasons why they wouldn’t work. I’ll bet you can think of 50 reasons why your business idea would fail miserably, but how will you ever know unless you try it, even just on a small scale? The truth is that you don’t know if a market exists for your ideas until you share them with some people.

What business ideas have you had that seem kind of crazy/weird? What advice would you offer someone who is tiptoeing to the edge, getting ready to take the entrepreneurial plunge?

Twitter For Sales Reps: Not Just For the Marketing Team Anymore!

The biggest social networking tool that people seem to be talking about these days is Twitter. Bloggers, business owners, and marketing teams everywhere seem to be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, hoping to use the mini-blogging/text messaging service to connect with consumers, business customers, and coworkers. But what if your company is behind the times, and doesn’t have any desire to use Twitter in any official capacity? How can you, as a sales rep, utilize this unique tool to your best advantage?

While Twitter’s potential as a marketing tool is yet to be decided, there are a number of ways sales reps can use it to drum up business.
• Advertise Special Deals: Offering 10% off tomorrow on orders of a certain size? If you have any special deals or discounts coming up, you can make sure that your best customers are the first ones to know by tweeting about them. As long as your tweets provide lasting value to your followers, you will likely see increased orders almost immediately simply by being able to communicate with your customers.
• Quickly Take Repeat Orders: Your frequent repeat customers, who often have a regular order that doesn’t change much, can initiate the ordering process by tweeting you a short request message. This is an efficient way to take and fill orders that typically stay pretty static. Keep in mind that this approach is not going to be as effective if your products or services are highly customizable, as many of your customers’ orders may change each time they buy from you.
• Customer Referrals: Happy customers are some of your greatest marketing tools. Business owners who are very pleased with your service will tell other business owners who they know. Since Twitter is a potential breeding ground for viral marketing, you can use this to get organic, social network-based recommendations from your current customers.

These are just a few of the reasons I can think of for salespeople to be using Twitter to communicate with customers. How have you used Twitter to expand your business? Have you seen much success with any of these strategies, or others perhaps?