Knowing whether your buyer or prospective customer is a social buyer is increasingly important. Particularly in B2B sales, gleaning information about what makes someone tick—and then using social networks to connect with that person in order to form a relationship with them—can mean the difference between making an eventual sale vs. losing to one of your competitors.
At Sales Performance International, we typically sell to large corporations with potentially many buyers involved in the decision making process. We know that only a certain percentage of who we call power sponsors—those people who are potentially interested in our solutions who can champion our cause and introduce us to the ultimate decision makers—are active on social media for business purposes.
However, across the board, regardless of their industry or position—more and more people are using social media sites on a personal basis. A majority of adults are getting comfortable with social sites and are using them often. That means there are increasing opportunities to meet people where they are on social media at the appropriate times—assuming you can find them.
Someone in your buyer’s organization is on social media, and often it just takes getting to know one or two people who can help you gain access to others who aren’t active on social media. Intelligent prospecting is a key first step toward successful Social Selling.
Adults Have Embraced Social Media
According to the latest research by Pew Research Center’s Internet Project, 73% of online adults now use at least one social networking site. The old excuse that “my buyer is not on social media” is getting weaker by the day.
According to the research, Facebook is the dominant social networking platform by the sheer number of users, but plenty of users are now branching out onto other platforms. Some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites.
But…Is Your Buyer On Social Media?
Is your buyer tweeting, posting in LinkedIn groups, or perhaps blogging? How can you tell if they are using social media or not? And what if they are—does that mean they will welcome the opportunity to connect with you?
Let’s address the first two questions, then deal with the third one, which is a bit trickier.
Below are several tools and techniques to determine whether your buyer is actively using social media. This is not an exhaustive list, but it’ll go a long way toward helping you find your prospects on social networks.
Google Search
The obvious place to start is by Googling the person. Use their name in quotations for best results. I’ll use “Bill Gates” as my example here.
Most of the time, when you search for a working professional, their LinkedIn profile will be one of the first links to appear on Google’s results. Not surprisingly, this is not the case for Gates. So I’ll modify my search to include “Bill Gates” AND LinkedIn. Bingo! The first link in that query takes me to his official LinkedIn page. I’ll talk about what to look for on his LinkedIn profile in a bit more detail below.
First, though, let’s go back to the initial search. From Google, the first link takes me straight to Gate’s website. On the home page, I note that he has links to his Facebook and Twitter accounts, along with an RSS feed for his blog. I’ll return to these in a moment.
When researching your own buyers, look through the first few pages of Google results to see if they have a blog or other social media profiles. Ideally, you may find them listed on one or more major sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram or Tumblr. If you can find a personal blog or one associated with your prospect’s firm, use a tool like Feedly to subscribe to it to keep up with new items of interest.
Bing Search
Since we’re focusing on Bill Gates here, I wanted to see what Bing would bring back when searching for him.
The results were similar to Google’s; however, the right sidebar presents some great information at a glance, including links to his Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as his Klout profile.
Social Mention
If you suspect a buyer or their company is active on social media, you may also try searching on Social Mention. This search engine may yield different results, such as YouTube videos, news items and blog posts.
Clearly, if your prospective buyer is on LinkedIn, this can be a wonderful place to connect on a professional level. There’s an art to gaining new connections, however, and you’ll want to proceed carefully.
In looking at Bill Gates’ profile, certainly he is an exception as an Influencer on Linkedin. Most of the rest of us aren’t that important/famous, so we’ll have a more typical profile that will allow people to reach out to us in various ways.
However, I notice that even on Bill Gates’ page, there is an option to connect with him, next to the Follow button (assuming I know his email address). It’s fairly easy to figure out the correct email address for most people, if you have their company’s web address (URL) and the typical naming convention for their emails. Using a tool like Rapportive and an email permutator, I can usually decode anyone’s email in a few minutes. However, I’m sure Mr. Gates’ may be a little tougher than that—not to mention that I haven’t really done my homework yet before attempting to connect with him.
I’ll go into more depth on proper ways to seek an introduction on LinkedIn in a future post. But for my case study here, I’m not likely to attempt a connection to Bill Gates here—I doubt he even keeps up with LinkedIn regularly.
For any other prospect, I’d rely heavily on my Sales Navigator account to help me identify common connections. Using LeadBuilder to do advanced searches, I’d create lists of my best prospects by industry, title, geography and seniority, then dig deeper to see how close they are in my network.
Before reaching out through someone I know to ask for an introduction, I would study the person’s profile in depth. I’d look for common interests and information I might use to compose a well thought out message. Using a lazy approach like “I noticed we’re in a group together and thought we should connect” won’t cut it and may even backfire.
I love to find a potential buyer on Twitter. That will tell me a lot about them, and their penchant for using social media.
The key things I recommend you look at include:
How many followers do they have, vs. who many are they following?
If you’re Bill Gates, you have well over 14 million followers, and you’re only following less than 200 people. That tells me that unless I am one of your closest connections, there is no chance—pretty much nil—that you’ll follow me. That said, I can at least follow Gates if I want to…or better yet, what I would do is simply add him to a Twitter list such as Hot Prospects. If I make that list private, he won’t even know I’m keeping tabs on his tweets. I recommend you do this with key prospects and companies you’re interested in.
How often do they tweet?
Are they using Twitter regularly, or did they abandon their account months ago? Or perhaps they just use it to lurk rather than post anything?
If they are tweeting (by that I mean at least a few times a week), take notes on what they are interested in, and who some of their influencers are.
Do they engage with others?
Look back through their last 25-100 tweets and note any @ messages they included, or retweets. If their messages are just one-way blasts, it’s a sign that they aren’t going to be too open to engaging with you on Twitter.
Otherwise, if it appears they “talk” to others on Twitter beyond their own tight network (using @ messages and perhaps hashtags), and they have a decent amount of people they follow, then you have a shot at following and engaging with them.
I suggest doing this slowly, first by following them, then by reading their tweets awhile. Next, you might retweet them a few times, and even better add a comment on something they wrote or commented on. Don’t just @ message them for the heck of it, or try to force a conversation too quickly.
Look for something that they are interested in or can benefit from, not simply your spiel. If you can express genuine interest in the other person and not come across as pushy or schmarmy, the other person is more likely to be receptive to tweeting back and forth.
Klout
I like to check Klout to see if someone is listed here, and if so what their score is. While there is a lot of debate about the merits of Klout, it will give you a quick idea whether someone is influential on social media or not. If they have no presence at all here, or a low score (40 or less), it tells me I’ll likely waste my time trying to engage with them on social media.
Bill Gates has a Klout score of 94, which is off the charts compared to most people. However, what interests me most about his profile (and potentially others I’m researching) is looking at related accounts that are listed, as well as others who are considered influencers. These might be people surrounding your buyer who could provide insights or perhaps an introduction path.
I don’t recommend trying to reach out directly to a prospect or a customer on Facebook. Most people get creeped out by that, due to the highly personal nature of Facebook. Yet Facebook can be a goldmine of insights in other ways.
Using Facebook’s Graph Search, for example, I can look up a plethora of information about people who work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. With one search, I find out that I have at least one mutual friend of someone who currently works there. I could spend a lot more time using some of the advanced search filters to really get a better understanding of what the organization and its people are all about.
According to the Pew research on social media usage, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check into the site on a daily basis.
As an Instagram user, you can use Statigram for free to search by usernames and hashtags. I found both #gatesfoundation and #billandmelindagates with recent photos and potential users I can follow who might have insights or access to my prospect.
If you run across your real prospect, you can both follow them and add them to a group (such as Prospects) on Statigram. I guarantee if they are active on Instagram, you’ll get a more intimate peek into their motivations and what is important to them.
The Big Question: Will A Prospect On Social Media Welcome the Opportunity to Connect With You?
Just because your prospect is using social media doesn’t mean they will be eager for you to try to pitch them your wares. That’s not good “social selling.”
As mentioned above, you have to spend some quality time studying what your prospect is talking about, what they are most interested in and whom they are connected/connecting with. If you jump too aggressively, you will probably make a bad impression. On the other hand, if you take a thoughtful approach and look for ways to add value to your prospect, you have a pretty good shot at standing out from the crowd.
Just finding someone on social media is the first step; the harder and more significant step as a sales person is developing a genuine rapport that will add value to your prospect and give them good reasons to allow you to make an offer for your services when the time is right.