Am I the Last Person to Realize How to Use Twitter in Sales?

I have been perusing a bunch of sales blogs and my distinctly not sales trained mind is seeing a lot interpersonal and managerial skills. For someone with an engineering background this is the undiscovered country. So I am pleased to finally find a non-obvious engineering strategy for sales.

I have long resisted getting a Twitter account because it seems like it could easily devolve into a lot of time spent with no functional results. I do understand Twitter and several friends do have accounts but I did not yet see how it might help me. As of today I will have to seriously reconsider this policy.

The Quick Sales Tips Blog invites guest sales professionals to contribute ideas and strategies for the benefit of all blog readers. While perusing the articles one really stuck out as a certifiably good use of Twitter which almost convinces me to start using an account. This was also a case, for me, of a solution that appears entirely obvious after hearing about it.

The article recommends using notify.net through Twitter to look for keywords of people you are following that would indicate that they are ready to buy something. “We’re thinking of moving” in a tweet should raise the interest of any self-respecting real estate agent. So the trick would then be to know the appropriate keywords for your market and be the first in line to contact a potential buyer once they make any indication of being in the market. Following a lot of people would make perfect sense at that point since you would be interested in what they had to say.

So this seems like a fabulous idea and I am puzzled that I had not thought of harnessing the obvious technology to do this before. So I will now need to review notify.net and see what it would take to set this up as a test. An engineering task within a sales study is just what I needed.

It has a safe amount of buzzwords

The Sales and Sales Management Blog is a straightforward, professional blog. I used to work for Intel Corporation and still easily recall the large company, Dilbertesque type of words that came through training and other announcements. During cynical moods I and other slacker coworkers (or, cow-orkers, as Dilbert would describe them) would deconstruct management pronouncements from on high.

And this makes the Sales and Sales Management Blog very nice because they have a safe level of buzzword usage combined with good, applied sales advice. I would recommend a recent post titled The Last Thing Your Sales Team Needs is a Manager which details some aspects of sales that I personally had never considered. By training I am an engineer and took a long time to view managing as much more than a necessary evil. Their description of Sales Leader is a breath of fresh air for a description of even a general purpose manager.

Ten Secrets of Persuasion is a guest article by Nido Qubein. This is a bulleted list of sales theory where every item starts with the letter ‘P’. Because of my deep love of mathematics and statistics I particularly liked # 10:

(10) Persist.

Call on good prospects as many times as it takes to sell them. About 80% of sales are made on the fifth call or later. Yet studies have shown that:

· 50% of America’s salespeople call on a prospect one time, and quit.
· 18% call on a prospect twice, and give up.
· 7% call three times, and call it quits.
· 5% call on a prospect four times before quitting.
· Only 20% call on a prospect five or more times before they quit.

It’s that 20% who close 80% of the sales in America.

Asking more than once sounds like such an elementary principle. I do not know if this data is completely substantiated with a rigorous methodology, but it would be worth trying this to see if it works. This is a great blog and I will continue following it.

I don’t know who this guy is, but I want to hire him

I have a long unorganized list of sales blogs. They were found by a standard Google search and I am assuming that if they show up on the first page of a Google search then they must be doing something right.

So, for no particular reason, here is Jeffrey Gitomer with an excited looking website. On his bio page he list a gazillion presentations at all kinds of companies on sales training. I definitely have to admire a man who has minted his own coins as well and has a Pokemon worthy  game card.

In many ways this is what I hoping to encounter.  This guy is selling his own book and services.  His website has only a vague demarcation between providing information and then trying to get  me to buy his book.  If he had Jedi mind powers I’d probably have my credit card out already.

His Sales Help section had a weekly column which I rather liked because he made a point that seemed blindingly obvious after I had read it. People want authenticity, not be “sold” to.  The vast majority of people do not like sales and relying on a “system” for sales tends only to make people skeptical.  Jeffery states: RULE ONE: People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.™. The ™ symbol was added by himself and I will gladly acknowledge this. I dislike having clerks in Safeway ask if they can help me find the milk. Thank goodness they weren’t trying to actively sell to me also.

I’m going to spend some more time on this site before going to another one.  This site secretes enthusiasm (although that sounds vaguely unsettling). Jeffrey Gitomer clearly has something for me to learn about sales.

I am trying to eat an elephant

…one bite at a time. I am collecting links to as many sales oriented blogs, discussions, websites, and any other media I can reasonably point at. From this I am going to figure out what I do and don’t like about each information source as well as what I find useful. I have no idea how long this will take but I hope it is both useful and informative to myself and others.

I have not done research quite like this since my Master’s project at Arizona State University, and the subject there was software project management and practices. It’s a far cry from learning about sales. It would be nice to find some overlap.