I would like to share with you a very powerful idea of mine that you could easily replicate at no cost to your business, to improve your sales and marketing operations.
You will undoubtedly have heard a great deal about Twitter, it has great potential to provide intelligence to sales and marketing teams that will help them sell more.
How Does Twitter Help Sell More? Use a private subscription of Twitter as a company specific newsfeed that busy sales, marketing and public relations executives can view and cherry pick relevant information from.
Sales specific intelligence can be posted to it, including information on: 1.
PROSPECTS and CLIENTS - So you can engage based on their news, needs and strategies.
2.
RELEVANT INDUSTRY NEWS - So you can keep track of wider issues, such as compliance, that could be used for sales campaigns.
3.
COMPETITORS - Keep up to date on competitors' activities, have they lost a client? Have they developed a killer app? Are they about to go into administration? 4.
ANALYSTS AND RESEARCH - Stay in touch with what is being said by analysts in your market.
5.
LEAD GENERATION IDEAS - Suggest sales campaigns and PR ideas based upon this market intelligence.
6.
INTERNAL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS - Align sales and marketing.
Just create bite sized snippets that can be drilled into by relevant management, sales and marketing.
Business Benefits This strategy is ideal for rapidly providing executives with the latest pin-point focussed information they may not get a chance to source individually.
Just by using Twitter in this way you will also instantly be marked out as a business alive to the opportunities with up to date market knowledge, thereby enhancing your credibility in today's competitive market place.
By equipping your sales and marketing teams with the latest market knowledge they will be able to: o Work closer together, better aligning sales and marketing.
o Demonstrate exceptional knowledge of prospects', clients' or a vertical's idiosyncrasies.
o Gain advantage over less informed competitors.
o Stay close to target markets and provide solutions and marketing information based on real needs.
o Reduce time otherwise spent trawling through masses of information.
Who should update the Twitter Sales Information Page? The role of updating the Twitter page is best left to someone who has regular access to industry publications, analyst reports, the internal sales team, industry influencers, business partners and competitor information.
Typically this would be someone in Public Relations who must have an acute understanding of the sales process or an external specialist.
We hope this simple, yet powerful idea will be of use to you.