The question was simple I thought. Apparently not. “If I want to use social media as a sales prospecting tool, how do I go about controlling the process so that like any other prospecting tool, I know how much of what activity will result in what amount of revenue?” I have asked the question of multiple social media marketing professionals and of the 500 or so of my sales friends who make up the email communications list on Yahoo called AzSalesPros. I was scolded, chided and given excellent guidance on social media protocols, tools, and websites but none of it dealt with a sales strategists guide to developing a winning formula. While I am quite comfortable proving my own formulae, I like any sales professional, will need to know how many exposures to my value propositions will result at the end of a sales cycle in how many dollars over what period of time.
The first problem is that the notion of social media as a prospecting tool goes against the grain of what many people believe the value of social media is. A social tool, period. At the same time I was being chastised for misunderstanding that notion, literally thousands of tweeters (the official, if whimsical term for twitter users) were advising other tweeters how to use social media for revenue generation. One of my personal heroes in the mix, Gary Vaynerchuck was in fact creating a video of the value and how it not only grew his wine store from a million dollar a year business to over six million dollars a year.
The second problem is that no one really knows how to convert their efforts on social media into a specific revenue number. For one reason, if anyone has actually measured it, they aren’t reporting the answers in any place I have yet found and the second is that actually measuring the results from interested eyeballs into actual dollars is a rather daunting task.
To accomplish this, one must first measure how many people expose themselves to your outbound communications through your various social media outlets, from there measure the number of expressions of interest in your value proposition are acted upon and from there how many people actually enter your sales cycle and then actually close a sale. When you find a fairly consistent number over time, you end up with a controllable sales process using social media.
Once you have that information, you can add social media to your sales efforts as a legitimate tool for prospecting. Before you social media junkies climb all over me for suggesting that not having that information does not make social media illegitimate, please understand I am not suggesting it does. There are hundreds of analogous stories to prove the value of social media.
What I am specifically suggesting is that not having that information means you have little or no control of how using social media impacts your revenue stream and consequently have little or no way of turning income up or down depending on your companies capacity to deliver products or services. For a guy like me charged with the responsibility of hitting a specific number at a specific time, that is hardly acceptable.
It is also important I think to understand that every social media outlet will have different number of time and dollars involved in generating revenue and different people with different styles will impact the mix too. That means that while we will eventually have a generally accepted rule of thumb for all this, we will all have to prove our own models.
I am happy to report I am currently building the measurement tools into my efforts and look forward to generating at least a starting point rule of thumb on all this. I will of course report what I find.
Respectfully (& only slightly confused) submitted,
Michael D Goodman
Twitter www.twitter.com/goodmansales
Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldgoodman
S
Recent Comments