Cold Calling - Professional Blog Service

Four Ways to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool

Have you gotten any sales leads from Twitter? Have you ever found any opportunities, whether personally or professionally, from the micro-blogging network?

While some of the social media purists might still gnash their teeth and pound their laptops from the safety of their moms’ basements, anyone who wants to see Twitter (and other social media tools) succeed needs to show their bosses that it can generate business. If you’re in sales or marketing, here are four ways you can use Twitter as a lead generation tool.

1) Connect With People in Your Industry.

Twitter is a great way to easily get connected with people in your industry. Use tools like Twellow (for Twitter Yellow Pages) to find people in your industry, and search.twitter.com to find people talking about your industry keywords. Also try Googling a title and/or company with the words “on Twitter” in the search. So, look for VP of Creative Services on Twitter or Professional Blog Service on Twitter, and see what pops up.

If you’re a TweetDeck user or use Twitter lists, save your industry contacts into their own list, and communicate with them. By keeping them in their own list, you’re more easily able to see what they’re talking about.

2) Build Relationships.

The newbie mistake that many new Twitter marketers use is to treat Twitter like an advertising channel. That is one thing you absolutely cannot do. People don’t want you to sell to them.

Instead, establish relationships. Have conversations with them, retweet them, introduce people, share articles, ask them questions. If they’re local people, or you have a chance to attend industry conferences, connect with them in person. Meet for lunch or coffee, and create that all-important offline relationship. Then, you’re a person, not a handle. You have a face, not an avatar. By creating those relationships, you become someone they’ll trust, especially if they ever need what it is that you do.

But never, ever try to sell anything. Do that in phone calls and meetings, when the time is right, not when they start following you.

3) Establish Your Expertise.

When people have a problem, make sure they know you’re the one to solve it. Answer questions, share information, refer useful articles to them. If you write a blog (you do write a blog, don’t you?), share the useful posts with them. Ask them to comment, and leave thoughtful comments on their blog.

If you’re trying to reach people in your industry, write about topics related to that industry, especially if you can make them useful to the problems your Twitter network is having. For example, if you own a Mac repair shop, and you know a bunch of Mac-owning public speakers, and you know a lot of them are having problems dealing with the new Keynote 09 (which, irritatingly, ruined a bunch of my past slide decks. Thank God for backups), you could write a couple blog posts about how to solve that problem.

Then, forward the article on to them via Twitter or DM. They’ll see that you know your stuff (as well as theirs), and they’re more likely to call you for that problem that can’t be fixed with a few keystrokes, or explosive cursing and an external hard drive.

4) Direct or Facilitate the Conversation.

If you create the subject people are talking about, or steer people to the place where they can find answers, you are helping people figure out they may need your product or service in the first place.

The best example I can give is Apple computers. Before 2001, no one knew they needed a portable MP3 player. No one knew they needed a way to play music on anything besides a portable CD player. No one knew they needed a way to create or listen to podcasts, or that they could even learn through radio shows of random length and scheduling. Once Apple introduced the iPod, people realized they needed this device, and the industry changed.

By directing or facilitating the conversation, you can help people see the pain point they never knew they had, and they will look to you for solutions.

How do you use Twitter as a lead generation tool? Do you even do that, or do you think it’s just wrong and that people shouldn’t do it? Leave a comment, and let us hear from you.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Is Cold Calling Dead? Can Social Media Fill the Void?

Yes and No.

I know this is a hot topic right now.

Traditional cold calling seems to be a thing in the past. How many of us like an interruption in our day of someone trying to sell us something? I particularly like the ones that do not even ask, “Is this a good time to talk?” Or, I had one recently where the guy made it sound like he was representing the firm that put on a trade show I participated in. After I realized I was being sold, it kind of pissed me off. I decided not to do business with him anyway, because he had been deceitful.

I hired an expert in cold calling several years ago. She had built a successful IT Staffing business before cold calling had become so widespread. She got frustrated because it had become much harder to get people to even want to talk. Cold calling in her mind was dead.

Those are my anecdotes.

What are the statistics?

Proponents of cold calls will tell you, it depends on the industry. But the fact of the matter is it is about numbers. On one site I found, the sales manager did the math to figure out how his people could make the $100k the owner says they could. He found his folks would need to make 510 calls a day. He already knew that he needed to “speak” to 100 people in order to get three buying customers (a .0058 percent close rate from calls to closes). He presented the numbers to the owner and suggested the following:

Purchase a bigger list to support the increased numbers needed.
Or, increase commissions so reps can earn the 100k
Or, find new ways to work smarter.

The owner’s response: “The reps might do better than those statistics.”

I am not suggesting that the phone is dead. It just needs to be used differently. Prospects need to be warmed up before calls are made. And at a .0058% close rate, there has got to be a better way.

How can social media help?

In B2B, social media can play an important role. It is a list building exercise, only it’s a list you build. The ROI in social media is building the list of possible customers, and industry contacts. An organic list is more valuable to you than a rented or purchased list. If you are generating conversation through social with your marketplace, they are more likely to do business with you.

With social media, it won’t take 100 conversations to get three clients. You can start getting one client in about eight phone conversations — which happens after you’ve laid the groundwork through a social network. Your sales pipeline becomes more predictable.

Cold calling in the traditional sense is dead. But, warm calling is alive and well. Social Media can help warm those folks up.

Paul Lorinczi

Paul Lorinczi is the President of Professional Blog Service. The goal of the company is the help clients use Blogging and Social Media to expand their business online through planning, execution, and measurement.

Email Subscribe

Branding Yourself

Categories

Sites we love

Archives