6 Tips For Driving Sales With Social Media In 2012

Will your sales teams be taking advantage of social media to generate leads and sales this year? A few years ago, companies were blocking social media sites with network firewalls to ensure that employees weren’t having too much fun on the job. While these platforms may be a distraction for administrative groups, they have become a valuable tool for sales teams. As social media continues its explosive growth trend through 2012, we’ll start to see more formal social media sales strategies emerge and even formal social media sales training. Here are some tips and tools that sales people can consider to take advantage of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook & Google+ this year.

LinkedIn: With over 120 Million users, LinkedIn is the number one B2B social networking site in the world. While most users use the site to connect with current and former business associates, some saavy sales people have used LinkedIn to build a constant flow of new prospects and customers.

1. Focus On Your First Degree Contacts: Take the time to analyze your first degree contacts on LinkedIn. These are those contacts that are directly connected to you. Most people will find that their list is made up mostly of former work colleagues and school friends. Saavy sales people, on the other hand,  will use LinkedIn to connect to prospective customers. Sales people should get into the habit of sending connection invitations to customers and contacts immediately after every meeting or event. Just as great sales people spend time thumbing through their latest stack of business cards from the field, they should be reaching out to these folks with a LinkedIn invitation. While it’s still valuable to connect with colleagues, the salespersons goal should be to reverse their mix of first degree contacts. Set a goal to have 50% of your contacts be prospects and keep driving it higher each month.

2. Use “Advanced People Search”: Click on the small “Advanced” link to the right of the search field at the top right of your LinkedIn screen. This will enable a screen that allows you to search for people on LinkedIn by keyword, company, industry, level of seniority (Job Title), and interest. What more could you ask for when seeking out potential buyers for your products and services? Find prospective buyers and try to get introduced to them through your network, or find out what company they are with and pick up the phone for a cold call.

Twitter: With over 300 million users generating over 300 million tweets a day, Twitter has become a valuable prospecting tool for sales people who are willing to lend an ear to the millions of micro conversations going on.

3. Use “Lists” to Follow Prospects and Partners: Create lists on Twitter to follow prospects. Find out what they are talking about and what their current priorities are. You may need to do a little research to find out the Twitter handle being used by decision makers but it’s well worth the effort. By following them on Twitter, you’ll get to know them better and be able to identify opportunities to engage with your solutions. You can also gain access to prospects by following partners and competitors who share your same target audience. You can even use private lists so prospects don’t know you’re following until it’s time to engage.

4. Follow Topics, Keywords and Hashtags: Use tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck to follow Tweets around keywords, topics and hashtags that prospective buyers are looking for. If you’re in the advertising field you might follow the phrase “small business advertising” or “advertising help”. Listen for buying signals and engage with solutions without sounding too much like a salesperson. Once you’ve established yourself as a resource, the pitch will get easier.

Facebook/Google+: As the largest social networking site in the world with over 800 million active users, Facebook has evolved into a platform which can provide valuable prospecting information to sales people. Google plus has also successfully attracted over 70 million users and is growing at a phenomenal pace.

5. Sales Intelligence: Facebook and Google+ provide sales people with valuable inside information about what’s going on in their target prospects’ industries and companies. Sales people can browse client FB and G+ pages to see what they are doing, and what others are saying they are doing.  Status updates and updates from key employees can trigger engagements to introduce products and services.

6. Promote Clients & Prospects: Salespeople can use FB and G+ to spread the word about their clients products and services. This will help build rapport and strengthen customer relationships. Sales people should “Like”  or “+1″ their customers’ pages and share their updates though other social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

While most of these ideas are centered around listening to and engaging with customers and prospects, sales people should also be taking part in social conversations themselves. They need to representing their products and services in social conversations. Clients will be using social networks this year more than ever, sales people can’t afford not to be there with them.

Online Selling: 5 Part Online Advertising Needs Assessment

Selling online advertising requires more work up-front to ensure that effective solutions are built for advertisers. The client needs assessment is one of the most effective tools in a sales executives arsenal to accomplish this. Most execs are familiar with the process, and many even have a formal document or form that they can complete on a sales call.

While having this form is helpful and makes for a great accountability tool on the management side, it can be a bit too clinical on the first call. The best sales execs know that the needs assessment also provides the greatest opportunity to build rapport with a prospect. Keeping the interaction conversational builds rapport and trust rather filling out a form in front of a prospect.

By remembering this simple 5 part needs assessment, sales execs can collect information conversationally and allow questions to lead into discussions about online advertising solutions. While it’s still a good idea to take notes, a note pad or a notebook is more personal than a form which may appear more like a “system” than a conversation to prospects.

1. Ideal Customer Profile: What does the prospects ideal customer look like? Gender, age, income, location, occupation, interests. Use this query to lead into discussions about behavioral, geographic and demographic targeting solutions.

2. Buying Cycle : How long does it take for customers to make a buying decision? At what stage in the buying cycle does an advertiser want to reach a potential customer? Is the goal to build awareness, provide information, elicit a purchase decision. This query can lead to discussions about online display and search and how the two work together at different stages of the buying cycle.

3. Marketing Objectives/Differentiators: What does the advertiser want to accomplish with the campaign? Is the goal to drive web traffic, online sales, build email databases, generate leads, drive foot traffic, grow local (regional, national) share? What differentiates the prospects products and services from competitors?

4. Ad History/Product Mix: What type of media is the prospect currently using to advertise? What have they been using over the past year? Newspapers, TV/cable, radio/broadcast, yellow pages, magazines, billboards, direct mail, online? Were any of these mediums effective? What types of products did they try? Banners, video, contests, directories, coupons, SEO, SEM, email, mobile?

 5. Sales Revenue/Ad Budget: Sales execs can be sure that they’ve established rapport when they’re able to ask the client to provide information about annual sales revenue and annual ad budgets. These are usually the final questions in the process and are really the door openers to showing the client how they can increase sales or ROI with new solutions.

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With a little imagination and a bi-lingual twist, AE’s can use the following phrase and acronym to remember these 5 parts: “I See More” or “I-C-Mas” (“Mas” means “More” in Spanish):

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I-Ideal Customer Profile

C-Cycle (Buying Cycle)

M-Marketing Objectives/Differentiator

A-Ad History/Product Mix

S-Sales Revenue/Ad Budget

Selling Audience: 3 Steps For Sales Executives.

Attend any local publisher sales meeting this year and you’ll likely hear the following statements: “We need more traffic.”, “We’re running out of inventory.”, “Our home page is sold out.” These are all indications that sales teams have become great at selling their sites but are still learning to sell audience.

Local publishers pulled out their calculators years ago and figured out that they wouldn’t have enough inventory or revenue opportunity to make the jump to 100% digital. This is why they formed partnerships with companies like Yahoo!, Monster, and AutoTrader. In fact, by virtue of being “local” they shouldn’t expect to generate as much traffic as the National players.

It’s taken some time but it’s clear that legacy sales teams are finally getting good at selling online display. The challenge is that many are still selling their sites rather than their audience. As audience metrics continue to mature and credible content becomes more valuable, publishers will benefit from a transition to  higher premiums for site-specific, targeted display advertising. For this transition to take place, however, sales teams need to become better at audience selling.

Here’s three steps for sales executives can take to ensure that they selling audience in their sales presentations:

1. Represent the “network” not the site. Sales execs should speak to advertisers in terms of their audience network, not their site. They’re not selling the dailynewspaper.com site, but rather the dailynewspaper.com network of sites which includes the audience that and advertiser is looking for. Executives need to take the time in their presentations to explain how targeting works and the fact that the advertiser is not really looking to buy a web site, but an online “audience”.  An explanation of how the publisher has partnered with a network of sites will make sense to an advertiser. In the case of Yahoo! a newspaper executive might ask his client to search for local news on Yahoo! to demonstrate how Yahoo! is simply another venue for local newspaper readers. In essence, Yahoo! is the newspaper. Account executives need to think of these partner sites as their sites.

2. Determine your “Total” inventory.  Regardless of the arguments made by this blog and others, many legacy sales teams are caught up in a “territory” mentality. Sales managers can use this to their advantage by challenging sales execs to determine and sell out their “total” audience inventory. If there’s an account executive that’s responsible for a region designated by zip codes, that executive should know how much inventory and what type of online audiences are present in his region, regardless of which partner site the inventory is on. This should become a target for Account Executives. Who can be the first to sell out 10% of their “total” available inventory? etc.

3. Blend the CPM.  As the demand for site-specific inventory drives those CPM’s higher, sales execs need to become comfortable with blending site-specific CPM’s with CPM’s from partner sites reaching a target audience. When done properly the advertiser will benefit from increased exposure on extended networks and valuable branding on publisher sites, without breaking the bank.

Online display advertising will be turning the corner very quickly from the lower CPM’s of remnant to the higher CPM’s of real-time-bidding, but direct sales channels will always turn in higher revenue per impression for publishers. The extent to which publishers can train their sales teams to become total audience sellers will determine their success moving forward.

Selling Behavioral Targeting Campaigns

As newspapers across the country continue to rollout Yahoo!s APT platform, strategies are starting to emerge for selling BT (Behavioral Targeting) campaigns to local businesses. Because the APT platform allows local newspapers to sell BT campaigns on both the Yahoo! network and local news websites, too many newspapers are confusing the sales process. Here are a few things newspapers need to consider as they move forward with their BT sales efforts:

1. Only Yahoo! Can Provide Sufficient BT Inventory Initially.

While it’s exciting that newspapers can now track the behavior of their site visitors using Yahoo!s tools, the road to building BT inventory on newspaper web sites is a long one.  Newspapers that expect to have sellable BT inventory within weeks of launching the APT platform are setting themselves up for disappointment.

Regardless of the higher page views that news sites often enjoy, the economics of BT inventory is dependent upon unique users,  something that “local” newspapers have in limited supply. BT inventory can only grow so much as the on-line user community grows and newspapers have limited themselves by being the “local” source for information. While it’s true that users can be members of multiple BT categories, the value of the target decreases as the number of categories they are part of increases. BT sales efforts need to be focused on Yahoo’s BT inventory first.

2. Contextual Advertising Still Rules On Newspaper Sites.

In their zeal to market new BT campaigns locally, newspapers may neglect their real strength which lies in contextual advertising. In contrast to BT opportunities that are limited by online users, there are an infinite number of online user interests which contextual advertising can take advantage of. 

By “contextual” we also include targeted section campaigns which are becoming more effective when combined with topic specific advertising messages. These campaigns offer advertisers the ability to communicate with the newpaper site users by messaging different offers to the same user at different times rather than segmenting and classifying users into targeting categories.

3. Agencies Understand BT.

Just as many agencies jumped on the bandwagon of local search, the same has happened with BT. In fact, agencies have been marketing BT campaigns for the past 4 years to their larger accounts. The cost of BT programs has generally been very high though, so they have not been able to provide solutions for lower tier clients.

The Yahoo! partnership allows newspapers to create lower cost entry points for BT which should attract more agency interest. Purchasing BT campaigns direct from Yahoo! can cost as much as $25,000/month. Agencies can buy Yahoo BT campaigns from newspapers for as litttle as $2500/month. Newspapers need to reach out and create custom packages for agencies in their local marketplaces.

“The Word Is Alive”

6 Steps For Selling Local Search Products To Businesses

Step 1. Choose The Right Prospects:

Search engine marketing (paying for keywords) is not for every business. With effective small business packages ranging from $150 to $2000 per month, the cost is significant for small businesses. You have to ask the ROI question when approaching a small business. How much revenue does the average sale generate? If you’re a flower shop or a dry cleaner and your average sale is $25, it’s going to take a lot more clicks to get a return on your investment. Use a 2% conversion rate to determine if an advertiser will make enough money to cover the cost of the campaign. If it costs $150 for 50 clicks ($3 per click) and you are getting a 2% conversion, each customer costs $150. It’s true that repeat business might result in future payback but prepared to explain that when selling to business owners with small ticket items. Paid local search campaigns are better suited to businesses that are selling high ticket items or service organizations such as home improvement services, legal services etc. Here’s a list of industries that tend to have a higher ROI on local search campaigns. Pick a category and go after it.

Step 2. Lead In With The Major Players:

Forget the name of your product, program or SEM company. Businesses have never heard of you. Lead in with “Google” and “Yahoo”. Remember, as an SEM salesperson,  you’ve “partnered” with these companies. Let your prospects know that first and you’ll be more likely to get the appointment. Try cold calling 10 businesses by telephone and you’ll see that there’s a genuine interest in marketing on Yahoo and Google. Most businesses may not know what “SEM” or “SEO” stands for but they use the major search engines every day.

Step 3. Print Search Results Before The Appointment:

Conduct a local search for the business you’re going to see and print out the results. Try searching for at least two keywords or phrases for the business. For example, if its a flooring company in Los Angeles, search for “carpets Los Angeles” and “tile floors Los Angeles”. It’s also good idea to run searches in surrounding cities, especially if the prospect comes up high in the organic (free) results when you run the first search. Put the printed results in a folder to take with you on the appointment.

Step 4. Prepare Sample Keywords & Geotargets:

This is a “suggested” list of keywords and geotargets (cities, areas etc.) that the client can use to start the campaign. 10 to 20 keywords and 5 cities would be ideal. The easiest way is to think of words that consumers might search for when looking for the clients products or services. There are also some on-line tools where you can pay anywhere from $269 to $599 per year to find effective keywords see Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery .  It’s a significant investment, but for the seasoned salesperson it’s well worth the cost to ensure the success of a campaign that can result in repeat business. The search engines themselves also offer free alternatives. Check out Google Suggest or Overture’s keyword selector tool (currently under construction). Once you have the list print it out and put in the same folder with the search results generated in step 3.

Step 5. The Presentation:

Don’t forget the folder! Take your time educating the client about local search. It’s helpful to show a generic search results page while explaining the difference between “Paid” or “Sponsored” results and “Organic” or “Free” results. Don’t be afraid to explain to the client that they can go directly to the search engines themselves and engage in the bidding and tracking process that your service provides. After they realize how much work and time is involved, they’ll appreciate the service your solution provides. Even if they’ll be paying $1 to $2 more per click, the hands on service and attention they receive will be well worth the investment. Lead into your search results pages (from step 3) by explaining that there could be local consumers right now searching for their products or services without knowing that the client exists. Hand the search results pages to them. You’ll find that most clients will take their time perusing the list for their competitors. After you’ve gone over your packages and pricing you can close the presentation and open the relationship with your suggested list of keywords to kick off the campaign.

Step 6. Follow Up:

Most sales executives will drop the ball here. Local search programs provide detailed reports, including keywords searched and clicks generated  on at least a monthly basis. The best programs will include customized landing pages with unique call in numbers which allow the campaign to be tracked from the click through to a call from the consumer. If these are not available you need to insist that the client track the source of incoming calls and sales. After 30 days of data you can make adjustments to the campaign, fine tuning the keywords and geotargets for better results. Effective campaigns will run for at least 90 days so you’ve got plenty of time to make adjustments if the campaign seems to be under-performing initially. If everything goes well you’ll be increasing the package at the end of the first 90 day run.

Here’s some other documents that might be helpful in your efforts to sell local search:

Nielsen Report On Local Search

Local Search Advertiser FAQ

“The Word Is Alive”

4 Steps For Selling On-line Banner Campaigns To Print Advertisers

The Pareto Principle applied to sales presentations tells us that 80% of the sale comes from 20% of the presentation.

Many small business owners are not web saavy so you can present yourself out of the sale if you’re not careful. As always, be sure to let the client talk as much or more than you in the process. If you allow your interactive sales presentation to become a lecture you’ll end up with an educated non-customer. After you uncover the pain, here’s 4 key steps to presenting on-line banner campaigns to print advertisers.

Step 1. Lead in with demographics:

Lead with demographic information about your on-line visitors. This makes a great transition from a print presentation. Ask questions like: “What kind of customers would you like to have more of?” or “Where do your best customers come from?”. Often time the answer is “referrals” or higher income “buyers” looking for quality and service as opposed to “shoppers” looking for price.

It’s no secret that on-line users, especially on-line newspaper readers, are cream of the crop consumers. Use visuals with bullet points to show the attractiveness of the on-line user to an advertiser. Mention the the advantages of the newspaper demographic over other media types if you identify that as a concern for your client. Click here for some graphs comparing the household incomes for users of competing media types. On newspaper websites you’re actually reaching the “cream” of the cream of the crop. Click here for a sample on-line demographic one pager.

Step 2. Show Samples And Specs:

Most print advertisers are accustomed to paying more for color so be sure to show them some attractive color banner ads from other advertisers in their industry. You may need to search the web to find them but it’s time well spent. Even if you don’t have a laptop available to demo the animations, a color print out works just as well. Better yet, you can prepare a spec ad for them in different sizes. Seeing their business advertised in a color animation is sometimes all it takes to get the contract. Click here for a list of sample banners across different industries.

Step 3. Show Traffic Reports:

The best thing about internet advertising is that it’s measurable. Make sure you show your client that they can know how many people saw their ad, how many responded, what day of the week, what time of day, where they were located. All of the information in a standard DoubleClick report is impressive to a print advertiser. We can only speculate the reach with print campaigns which are often only measured by phone calls. Bring a sample report from another advertiser with you or show them a report on-line if you can. These reports are a natural lead in to the closing step next.

Step 4: Offer the Trial Run.

“You know Mr. Advertiser, with all of these reports available to us, many of my advertisers will run a 90 day trial campaign. We can place different banners in different sections over a period of 90 days and then analyze the data to fine tune the campaign going forward.” Then you pull out your list of available sections and match up their products or services with the best on-line section -Preps, Sports, Health, Main News etc.

I’ve had far more success selling a “sponsorship” with guaranteed minimum impressions at this point than getting into the CPM discussion. $1500 per month for a home page Leaderboard with a guaranteed minimum of 50,000 impressions is 3x more revenue than a $10 cpm. CPM’s are on their way out anyway as I mentioned in my post on “Selling On-line Advertising for Newspapers“.

“The Word is Alive”