Is Social Media a Distraction or a Powerful Sales Tool?

According to the June 23, 2008 issue of Businessweek, “the average knowledge worker has the attention span of a sparrow,” reports Maggie Jackson, author of Distraction. It gets worse…28% of the average U.S. worker’s day is lost to interruptions. This amounts to $650 billion in lost productivity. Can we blame this all on social media? Some say yes, but some say these workers are not leveraging this powerful online marketing force for their business, more for self-serving needs. Here is why.

If you are in sales your number one goal is to bring in new business. Therefore, as a sales person, what are you doing to close new business. The options are:

1. Make cold calls (we all know this is the hard way and the long route to landing new business)

2. Networking – going to local events, meeting people, passing out business cards and giving your elevator pitch hoping you are presenting to a decision-maker or someone that can get you in front of the decision-maker.

3. Marketing – sending our newsletters (online and offline), promoting your services in ads (online and offline), direct mail, etc.

4. Referrals – hitting up who you know, customers and prospects to get warm leads (now we are getting close)

5. Social Networking through social media – this leverages all of the above and turns #1 from cold calls into warm leads…here is why.

People buy from who they know and trust and most often from people who they have gotten a referral from. Social media and specifically, social networking sites gives users the ability to leverage the connections and contacts of the people they know to:

1. Create warm leads

2. Establish trust quickly due to the introduction or connection from their extended network

3. Qualify prospects into customers faster than any other means of new business generation.

When you get a referral through a trusted connection, you immediately get past the who are you stage and immediately go to, can you help me grow my business, save me money or make my life easier from what you have to sell. This all makes sense but what does this have to do which social media killing our attention span? Simple, in this example of the salesperson, they can use social media to connect with friends to reminisce about old times or leverage their friendship and the connections in their combined network to generate warm leads and eventually new business. Then, when the interruptions come in from social media, they can spiral one of two ways; in the right direction to generate new sales or alternatively add to the 28% of the workforce being unproductive.

Let’s go one step further, social media has made it so that virtually anyone from the CEO on down is accessible. Case in point, yesterday I got a call from Michael Goodman of the AZ Sales Pros thanking me for filling in as a speaker on July 9th. As we continued talking he asked me a question about www.FastPitchNetworking.com on how he could use it for setting up a group to market and manage AZ Sales Pros network online. I was not sure of the answer so I used Fast Pitch’s instant messaging (IM) tool to contact Bill Jula, the CEO of Fast Pitch to get the answer. Not only did Bill respond but he and I engaged in a 15 minute IM session and I learned that their tool is a fit for what Michael is looking for and that there are discounts and additional benefits for associations like Michael’s group. I also got a chance to plug The World Webinar Network, a social marketing webinar company I helped start and that Bill (or someone from Fast Pitch) offered to be a speaker in one of our webinars. This all happened within 2 hours of Michael giving me a call…a social media distraction or a powerful sales and marketing tool for online businesses?

Oh, by the way, I have gotten two new customers in the last two months through Fast Pitch Networking from using their IM tool and these customers were inbound connection requests to learn more about my company.