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| Social Networking For Salespeople – Pros and Cons |
We have all seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of salespeople in real life, but what about on social networking sites? Do you and your salespeople look more like the top picture or the bottom one?
Take a minute and consider the pros and cons of social networking for salespeople and see if it is worth investing your precious time, money and resources into before you jump in head first.
Pros
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Cons
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- You can interact with your target audience.
- It is easier to give and get referrals and reccomendations.
- You can generate leads for yourself.
- You can use it as a CRM to keep track of contacts.
- You can improve your credibility and reputation.
- You can improve your search engine rankings and brand recognition.
- You can monitor what people are saying about you.
- You can keep up with industry trends, experts and vendors, and the competition.
- There is a low hard cost of using social media.
- Most people do it wrong.
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- It is hard to keep up with all the changes in social media.
- You might get negative feedback.
- You might look unprofessional.
- You might waste too much time.
- You will need computer skills.
- People will try to sell you.
- It has a lot of soft costs like time, energy and resources.
- Everything is public and lasts forever on the Internet.
- Requires some new thinking and strategies.
- Most people do it wrong.
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The deciding factor is “Most salespeople are using social networking completely or at best mostly wrong.”
If you are considering getting more involved or investing more energy and resources into social networking as a business or salesperson, please consider this factor heavily and commit yourself to either be a professional or generally stay out social networking and cut your losses.
The fact that most salespeople are doing it wrong can be a pro or a con. If you can take the time and energy to learn how to do it right, then you can easily crush your competition on social networks, because they are doing it wrong. If you can’t or don’t want to do it right, then you are probably wasting your time. This single factor will negate most of the cons and maximize most of the pros for social networking.
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| Social Media For Salespeople |
Social networking for salespeople, when done right, can be a powerful new tool to connect you with qualified leads and referrals that you would have otherwise missed.
Look at the cons list again for a second. If you really decided to dive in head first and get good at social networking, how many of those would still bother you?
You could… keep up with changes, handle negative feedback and win over a customers, look more professional than your competitors, deal with the spam and other bad salespeople, learn the computer skills necessary, handle the soft costs because they are resulting in revenue, learn the privacy policies and how to post professionally thing to want to last forever, gain the knowledge and skills necessary to communicate your sales message over social networking sites, and finally, you could dominate anyone who was not willing to invest the same energy to do all that.
One more thing… There is no magic bullet in sales or social networking!
If you haven’t noticed by now, social networking will never be a magic bullet that gives you all the leads and sales you can handle with little or no effort on your part. Building a book of business through social networking is no different than doing so in the real world. It takes longer than you want, it requires commitment and a strong desire to succeed eventually, and finding qualified buyers is still like herding cats.
However, for salespeople social networking does have it’s advantages compared to the real world. It is more easily monitored and tracked. Most salespeople are not that organized to begin with and these tools help. You can reach a lot more people in a shorter amount of time. You can send the same message to multiple people or groups. You can prospect around the world instead of just your town or hopping on a plane.
Finally, once you do the hard work of building your social network, it is harder for it to come crashing down. In general, even if a competitor decides to get serious about social networking, they are going to be way behind you and you can use your established network to continue your momentum. If you change jobs, you can bring your social networking with you much easier than real life.
Overall, social networking for salespeople is a very powerful tool, but it is not a magic bullet. Understand that, and you can make the right call.
