Social Media Marketing for Lead Generation crosses the proverbial line between marketing and sales where each department can benefit enormously if both sales and marketing teams are able to coordinate and help with lead intelligence through a social media marketing campaign in order to actively funnel business’s lead-gen efforts.
B2B marketing must take into account that audiences are quite socially tuned in with more awareness on alternative solutions. While marketing has been active promoting brands on social but most B2B sales and/or account team do not actively track marketing leads in order to pace a lead development in a timely manner.
Yet, taken as a whole social media selling can be a powerful tool for sales to actively add intelligence into a funnel enabling meaningful engagement for the benefit of end-users.
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Social Selling:The use of social media by sales organizations for listening, customer engagement and internal collaboration — is an inevitable consequence of social buying
How are businesses generating valuable leads on social media, and how can you do the same?
It is common phenomena that sales will have to begin from scratch when navigating larger buying teams of stakeholders at prospective companies. The number of people involved in a large technology purchase can be a group consisting of a handful to dozens. As business people become more familiar with the kind of solutions that technology sellers are offering today, more of them participate in buying them. Buying groups are tuned to doing their research and can soon be technological savvy enough to know what is best for their organization. In Asia however, standards do vary from full self-reliance to vendor dependent on every bit of information.
In more recent times in Asia, some salespeople who may be used to traditional process in leads nurturing are now placed on the back burner in their first meetings with B2B customers as the purchasing team no longer move down the ‘sales funnel’ in an orderly, predictable process. IT decision makers may swiftly form a hub whereby information gathering and learning may no longer be as linear but rather hop and skip directly to what is deemed key ingredients to help solve issues at hand.
“Our customers are coming to the table armed to the teeth with a deep understanding of their problem and a well-scoped RFP for a solution. It’s turning many of our sales conversations into fulfillment conversations.”
B2B buying process is lengthy and with a few people to corel sales should increasingly use social media to influence some or all of the decision makers.
Although B2B buying should dictate more rationale and logic but at the end of the day we are all human and prefer a long term relationships, such as most of B2B purchases, to be smooth coupled with great and friendly support services.
Lastly, the value of your brand plays a big role ultimately as a good brand conveys attributes that buyers able to resonate with. Big brands invest millions in ensuring their brands are at the forefront with key messages and content that encompasses peace of mind in the long term.