Are you Making this Mistake on Social Media?

A lot of people are spending a lot of their time using social media but are not getting any results. If you are spending a lot of your time and not getting the results you want you may be making this mistake.

This thought hit me last week when visiting a customer’s office for a meeting.  Just before I entered the building I was handed a leaflet for a new barber shop with his words to me “Haircut Sir?”

The man handing out the leaflet didn’t look up he was just handing the leaflets out to everyone who passed him in the street.

This got me thinking about a conversation I had earlier in the day with a business owner who was looking for training for sales to help her win new customers. She was getting frustrated that all her effort was not producing results.

I asked her what she was doing in attempting to generate new opportunities. She said she was busy using social media but getting no new enquiries. She was extremely busy at tweeting, retweeting and gathering followers as well as dabbling with LinkedIn but claimed she didn’t get LinkedIn.

She was getting frustrated, annoyed and worried that all her work was a waste of time. She needed to find new business so she could grow her business.

I asked her who she was targeting with all of this social media activity. She answered everyone and anyone who she thought might need her services. Her answer highlighted two problems and was something that we can all be guilty of from time to time.

The first problem is that a lot of people think that social media is the answer to growing your business by generating new opportunities. We think that if we are busy on Twitter and other social media platforms that is all we need to do to generate new leads.

The second problem is we think that if we use social media we don’t need to do any other sales activities. We still need to speak with potential customers, use the phone, meet with them, email them, and build relationships with them.

The fact is social media just another tool we can use in developing and implementing our sales campaigns.  Sales skills and people skills are still needed to attract and win new customers. The big change today is in how the customer does more research before any purchase decision is made.

Years ago the salesperson had all the information and used sales skills like cold calling to start a relationship with prospective customers. Today in most cases, apparently in 70% of cases, the customer does research on what they need, where they can get the product or service and who they can get it from.

This is where social media comes into play and should become part of your sales campaign to win new customers. Today a good sales training course will include social media in all sales activities in helping you plan your campaign.

The structure and process of planning a sales campaign hasn’t changed just some the tools have changed to execute some of the activities. If you are planning a sales campaign, follow this process and answer some of these questions.

• Who is your target market?
• How can you reach them?
• What sales and marketing activities are you going to use to attract your target market?
• What are your goals, objectives and targets?
• What do you want your sales activities to achieve?
• How are you going to manage and measure your sales activities?

Once you have answered the questions above and researched your target audience you can start to plan and schedule your activities.

It maybe that social media is a big part of your sales activities or that cold calling is the prominent activity or probably a mixture of several sales activities.

So before you dive into social media think about what you want to achieve first before spending time tweeting or posting pictures on Instagram.

Don’t be like the man who handed out his leaflets for a “Haircut, Sir?” to everyone. Think about who you are targeting and will they have a need for your product or service.

As for the man handing out the leaflets and why it was a waste of time take a look at my profile picture.

Image courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net

http://www.arrowsales.co.uk/blog/are-you-making-mistake-social-media/