7 Twitter Tips – How To Use Twitter Best Practices for B2B Prospecting

Twitter is the second most popular social networking website. With over 250 million unique visitors every month chances are your prospects are on Twitter. Twitter provides a unique way to connect with prospects. It is a more passive way to prospect than sending messages on Linkedin, and provides unique information you might not find from sales databases like ZoomInfo or Data.com.

1. Complete Your Profile – This should be a given. Grab your twitter name, upload a picture of yourself, and write a brief summary specific to your industry. You might mention a hobby in your summary as well.

Including company website, full name, and location is essential to completing your profile.

Keep your Twitter account politically neutral (or if you don’t I recommend noting in your summary your opinions are not that of your company). You can link to your company or any other twitter account in your summary by typing @ “account.”

2. Correctly Utilize Hashtags – Hashtags are one of the most misunderstood and underutilized features on Twitter. They index your posts and make them easily searchable to a Twitter user searching for a specific topic. Simply type in #topic. There is a bit of a science when choosing what your topic will be. I recommend using Google’s keyword tool to see the what word people are searching for a on Google. If they are searching for it on Google they will be searching for it on Twitter too.

3. Follow & Retweet Interesting Posts by Prospects and Customers – Following your prospects and customers is much more valuable than simply receiving updates from them. When you follow prospects Twitter sends them an email notifying them that you are following them. This can result in them viewing your Twitter profile. By strategically deciding what and when you post along with when and who you follow it is easy to craft a targeted post to your prospect.

Leverage Info on Twitter to Increase Contact Rates

4. Gather Unique Sales Intelligence Prospects post information on Twitter that they do not post on Linkedin. If you’ve been calling a prospect for a while with little success consider leveraging this information to earn their interest and make an introduction. I had been calling a high level executive over 5 times with no response. I found on his Twitter summary that he was a Reebok Classics enthusiast. I left him a voice mail asking him for advice on Reeboks. He called me back and helped me pick out some new shoes and I helped him out with his sales department. 30 days later I had a new pair of shoes and he was making more sales with the PowerDialer.

5. Post links and Articles of Value Specific to Your Niche  – Post links and information that prospects would find interesting (press releases, blog posts, research etc). Utilize a link shortener such as bitly so that you can comment the post and track the number of clicks.

6. Space out the Timing of Your Posts – Don’t make many posts in a short time frame. Spread out your posts by hours or days. Some Twitter users I know recycle content if they have nothing new to post. This is a grey area, but if this is something you decided to do consider changing up the comment or hashtag for broader exposure.

7. Thank People When They Retweet or Mention You – Thanking someone that retweets or mentions you on Twitter is proper etiquette. It shows the person that you are flattered that they liked your post enough for them to share it with their network.

Thanks for taking the time to read, and be sure to follow me on Twitter @PaulFischerSaaS for more tips!

From Junk Lead to Major Account: A Lesson for Inbound Sales Consultants

In my previous position at InsideSales.com one of my primary responsibilities was to respond to marketing generated leads. These came in the form of interested parties filling out web forms to access white papers, downloading a trial of our award winning PowerDialer for Salesforce, and viewing our inside sales research. Often times people would fill out junk information into the web form to avoid our team from contacting them. I remember one lead in particular that falsified a name, phone number, and company information, but the email address was correct. From the email address I was able to track down the company website, and from there I was able to track down the phone number. After a brief conversation with the receptionist he pointed me in the right direction and I was able to get in touch with the original person that filled out the web form (and was able to do so while they were still on our website). Two months later they were one of our biggest accounts at InsideSales.com

The moral of the story is to treat every inbound lead like gold. Look for clues when the information is not correct. Get to the lead fast and be persistent. Do not accept what you are given, but nurture a lead with the vision as to what it could become. If you do, you might just land your biggest account!

Inside Sales Managers: Don’t Waste Your Time Cutting the Pie (Make it Bigger)

In a previous blog post Jonathan Miller, Sales Manager at InsideSales.com, described the impossible sales trinity: equal distribution, defined parameters, and lead priority. In this post he stated that it is impossible for sales teams to attain all three criteria without sacrificing sales productivity. I couldn’t agree with him more.

Sadly most sales manager spend far too many resources figuring out how to divide the “pie.” Typically, they try to settle situations in which one sales rep encroaches on the other’s territory after it was divided or two business development associates unknowingly call the same company. Instead managers should be focusing their efforts on value added activities for their sales teams, that is: How can I make the pie bigger? Here are a few ideas:

• Track Key Metrics such as lead source and close rates. Track major metrics that influence buying. These may include local, size of company and lead source. Compile lots of data. More is better to start.

• Begin to mine this data. Run probabilities such as: Given the company is a Boston based real estate company and has 20 brokers, what is the probability that Erik will close this deal versus John? If Erik’s close rate is only 5% and John’s is 10% for this lead profile the lead will be routed to John. In actuality the algorithm used at InsideSales.com is much more complex.

This is what I mean when I say it is the obligation of sales managers to make the pie bigger. It is their jobs to not merely “deal the deck of cards” but to “stack it the deck” for their sales reps.