How to get to know your prospects through social media

John Jantsch (@ducttape), marketing consultant, speaker and  author of Duct Tape Marketing, wrote yesterday about how to use social media in sales. Rather than get stuck on the word sales, think business development and building relationships.

Today’s qualified prospect is often far easier to find and reach using social channels.

Today’s qualified prospect often shares invaluable buying signals and data via social channels.

My first job out of college was a sales job and I recall my first sales mentors, my father, coaching me on the ways to scan a prospect’s office for clues to information that might provide conversation starters and common ground. Things like diplomas, photos and awards were data points for relationship building.

Today this data, as well as information about buying patterns, challenges, company culture and news that may impact purchasing needs, is often shared freely in social networks.

You may have heard “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” With social media, Jantsch says, “It’s not who you know, it’s what you know about who you know.”

From Jantsch, here’s the four keys to using social media to learn more about the people you know and want to know better in your business development efforts. With a little annotating from me:

• Mining. By subscribing to RSS feeds of blogs and news feeds from prospects you’ll pick up gems that competitor law firms will never see. Share such items on Twitter with the appropriate attribute to the source and you’ll get noticed by the company in a New York minute. Create Twitter lists of company principals and executives. Get to know them through re-tweeting their stuff – it’ll be viewed as giving them an attaboy or attagirl. It works wonders to just re-tweet items the prospect company Twitter feed is kicking out. Who else is showing them that type of love?
• Connecting. Mining social networks is only part of the equation. Social networks are all about connecting and, in many cases, discovering who is connected to whom. Those people I meet through strategic blogging and tweeting like the above I connect with on LinkedIn. I reach out to them via email and phone. I ask to get to get together with them for coffee, lunch, or breakfast when I am on the road. It’s not solicitation for you, as a lawyer, to ask a prospective client to lunch. Let other lawyers believe that.
• Engaging. A great deal of relationship building energy is focused on getting and closing the deal, but as most sales professionals know, the long term money is in growing relationships before and after the sale. This is where loyalty, repeat purchases and referrals happen. One of the best ways to establish increased value is to provide value in ways that may be, or at least seem to be, unrelated to the products and services you offer. You can do that by curating and sharing relevant information and insight. Lawyers are being hired, in part, these days based on their ability to find and share the good stuff.
• Adding depth. How many accounts have been lost over the years because the salesperson had a great relationship with a buyer, only to see that buyer move on? Use social networks, such as LinkedIn, to discover and connect in a meaningful way with others in the organization. There’s often more than one stakeholder that’ll decide who gets what legal work. Get to know those stack holders through social media.