Selling without Spending SOCIAL MEDIA HANDBOOK FOR SALES AND

MARKETING PROFESSIONALS

“Lead Generation was never so easy. Sales people can never run out of leads in the

Social Media era.” Bhupendra Khanal, CEO – Simplify360

Simplify360 Tel (US) 512-539-0360 Tel (India) +91 80 40971130

www.simplify360.com contact@simplify360.com

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction _________________________________________________________________ 1

Changes brought by Social Media _______________________________________________ 2

Getting Started ______________________________________________________________ 3

In this section, we will give you some direct tips to generate Sales Leads. Let’s get

started. ___________________________________________________________ 3

LinkedIn ___________________________________________________________ 3

Find people ______________________________________________________ 3

Add contacts you find ______________________________________________ 4

Once you have built a good friends list, do the following: ___________________ 4

Use LinkedIn Groups _______________________________________________ 5

LinkedIn Answers _________________________________________________ 5

Twitter ____________________________________________________________ 6

Profile Search for Target Market Companies ____________________________ 6

Profile Search for People ____________________________________________ 6

Monitor Industry keywords in Simplify360 (or other monitoring tools) __________ 7

Monitor Competition in Simplify360 ____________________________________ 8

_________________________________________________________________ 8

Quora ____________________________________________________________ 9

Finding people from answers _________________________________________ 9

Profile Search ____________________________________________________ 9

Slideshare ________________________________________________________ 10

Browsing through Pro-Accounts _____________________________________ 10

Through your company account _____________________________________ 10

Keyword Search _________________________________________________ 11

Google Plus _______________________________________________________ 11

Case Studies _______________________________________________________________ 12

Business Case 1: Hiring/ Business Development in 4 Easy Steps _____________ 12

Business Case 2: Finding CMO of Infosys _______________________________ 13

Business Case 3: Finding 50 Digital Marketing Folks in Chicago ______________ 13

Pg. 01

Introduction

Introduction

We live in the era of Social Media - The biggest ever revolution in terms of reach and exposure. You are just a few

clicks away from connecting to the right person in the target company. Yet, you might not be aware of such

possibilities. You may be launching email campaigns and banner ads, and hoping that the mass emails or banners

are read and the target becomes interested in you. But all this while, you might not be optimizing your actions

through social intelligence.

Remember, a fresh 20 year old sales person who is Social Media savvy has a good edge over you. He might not have

the experience or contacts, but he knows whom to talk to and how to talk to them. One of them may just beat you in

performance one day and say – “Why are you upset? Don’t you use Social Media, UNCLE?”

So what should you do to stay in the competition? All you need to do is – unlearn whatever you have learned so far in

lead generation and start using Social Networks. Here are the reasons why you should.

• Your customers are on Social Media

• Your potential customers are on Social Media

• Their profiles are open and reachable (mostly)

• They are on Social Media to talk and listen.

“All you need to

do is – unlearn

whatever you

have learned so

far in lead

generation and

start using Social

Networks”

Pg. 02

Changes brought by Social Media

Changes brought by Social Media

The biggest of all is – Open Profiles. Reach anyone you want to talk to directly.

The era of emails, mass marketing, Tele-marketing, TV ads & print ads are slowly dying. The world is moving towards

being social, engaging and empowering. In the media world, it is often said that the world is moving away from Paid

Advertising to Earned Advertising. The change is big.

“All you need to

do is – unlearn

whatever you

have learned so

far in lead

generation and

start using Social

Networks”

EXPERTS TO MASS DECISION SYSTEM

STUMBLEUPON, DIGG, REDDIT, DELICIOUS

VIRTUAL FRIENDSHIP

ORKUT, HI5, MYSPACE, FACEBOOK

ONLINE BRAND MANAGEMENT

FACEBOOK, TWITTER

VIRAL FLOW OF INFORMATION

FACEBOOK, TWITTER, YOUTUBE

CORPORATE CONNECTIONS

LINKEDIN, ZING

OPEN INFORMATION

WIKIPEDIA, BLOGS, YOUTUBE, TWITTER

OPEN PROFILE

TWITTER, QUORA, GOOGLE PLUS

Pg. 03

Getting Started

Getting Started

In this section, we will give you some direct tips to generate Sales Leads. Let’s get started.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most important channel if you are in B2B Sales. The channel is more closed than Twitter or Facebook. You have to be careful and not become too aggressive on LinkedIn. Yet, you will be doing a bigger injustice if you aren’t aggressive at all.

Find people

• Colleague search

• School mate search

• Search using Email contacts import

• Search for your target segment by his profile. It can be industry keyword like ‘Digital Marketing’ or job profile

like “Chief Marketing Officer” or “Head of Marketing”.

“All you need to

do is – unlearn

whatever you

have learned so

far in lead

generation and

start using Social

Networks”

People search through

companies, connections,

location and many more.

Action Items

Pg. 04

Getting Started

Add contacts you find

• Understand the person by reading his/her profile.

• If he/she has more than 500 connections, you can just invite him choosing one of the relevant options.

• If he/she has fewer connections, you have to be cautious because the person does not accept any random

invitation. So you will have less chance to connect and talk to him. You may send him in mails or ask one of

your contacts to introduce you. You can do it using the “Introduction Request” feature of LinkedIn.

Once you have built a good friends list, do the following:

• Keep updating LinkedIn status with relevant news

• Keep sending emails every month with a new development with your contacts. This could be your new

newsletter, eBook or research papers.

• Talk to folks who reply and try to understand his work; look for opportunity and pitch your offerings.

Ways to connect with

people in LinkedIn.

Updates related to how to

achieve things on

organization is quite

popular in LinkedIn

networks.

Pg. 05

Getting Started

Use LinkedIn Groups

You may join 99 LinkedIn Groups. Find active relevant groups and join them. The best groups may not be your industry groups but where your clients and potential clients hang out. Participate in the discussions there.

Ask questions, answer existing questions, vote up answers etc. Remain relevant to the group.

Look for good opportunities to pitch products or service and do it. But do not over do the sales pitch, it will degrade your reputation.

People appreciate if you seek help. Questions like these “Guys, we have launched a new site. How do you like it? ….link ….” Do sell better than saying, “we have launched a new site. You may want to look at it”.

Always call for action.

LinkedIn Answers

Participate in Q&As, be relevant and make your personal brand. Company stuff can be sold later. You may ask for suggestions from people about the industry, trends and can talk about your products. Be receptive about people’s thoughts and don’t oversell yourselves.

Group search allows you

to find relevant groups

and communities.

LinkedIn provides search

engine to discover

questions and answers.

Pg. 06

Getting Started

Twitter

Profile Search for Target Market Companies

Use profile search in Twitter or use keyword search in Google, you can find your target profiles. - use “Twitter + …… (Industry keyword or company name)” search query in Google. If you are looking to talk to Human Resource Consulting companies, you just have to find one such company profile. Rest Twitter will keep on suggesting similar profiles while you visit one. Just keep digging down and whole World of your target is with you. Follow them. Talk to them. Most importantly, make a list of those folks.

Profile Search for People

Similar to above company search, find a few folks who are your target market (CMOs, VP for Business Development, Marketing or Sales, VP Customer Service etc.). Identify the relevant folks and talk to them. Most of them will revert.

Twitter has a good

search and

recommendation engine

for finding relevant

Twitter Profiles.

Pg. 07

Getting Started

Monitor Industry keywords in Simplify360 (or other monitoring tools)

Build all relevant keyword profiles in Simplify360 like for our case; we would search for keywords like “Social Media Software”, “Social Media Monitoring”, “Social CRM” etc. We are sure you guys don’t use this gold mine. You can just add industry keywords and find lots of people talking about those topics. For more information on this, you can check out our presentation on How to create Social Media Monitoring? You need to start the dialogue and here are ways to do it:

• RT the tweet

• Reply to it

• Ask questions related to his tweet

• Identify yourself and ask if he is interested in a demo or trial

Simplify360 allows you to

track combinations of

multiple keywords.

Pg. 08

Getting Started

Monitor Competition in Simplify360

It is always a good idea to find folks who talk about competing products. Look for the opportunity and come in between the guy and the product he is talking about. Break the communication line if the person is talking negative about your competition and pull towards you. You have a strong lead for sales.

Influencer dashboard in

Simplify360 allows you to

find relevant profiles on

multiple channel.

Engagement Dashboard

of Simplify360 allows you

to seamlessly engage with

multiple prospects at

once.

Pg. 09

Getting Started

Quora

Finding people from answers

Best way to reach out to people is to follow some of the interesting questions related to your industry. For examples: We search for keywords like Social Media, Digital Marketing and the likes. The folks who answer are mostly the target group.

Identify those folks and build a rapport with them:

• Thank them for answering (some good ones)

• Comment on their answers

• Up vote the answers

• Follow them

• Write a message to them (3 per day is allowed)

Profile Search

Google Search for “site: quora.com digital marketing (use your target market keyword)” throws 104k results. These are mostly for the profile of the people. You may want to try and see it. You can go to the user profiles and perform some of the actions like:

• Follow the user

• Ask a question to the user

• Write a message (3 per day allowed)

Searching for questions

and answers in Quora is

easy.

Using Google search to

find profiles in Quora.

Pg. 10

Getting Started

Slideshare

Browsing through Pro-Accounts

Take some time to reach the user profiles through the facility of browsing pro-accounts. Then reach a profile and do the following:

• Browse through the presentations and comment (to let the user know that you exist)

• Follow the person/account

• Send message (for some profiles its possible)

• At the end of most presentations, there is a facility to connect to the account admin. Use it to send the

message.

Remember any company having a Slideshare Pro account is a power user of Social Media. The person or company is likely to reply to your messages.

Through your company account

How Slideshare email

notification allows you to

track the interaction and

connect with new leads,

or get noticed.

Pg. 11

Getting Started

If you have a Slideshare account and have some followers, visit their profiles and connect to them on a personal level. If the guy is interested in listening to what you have to say, he is certainly a good lead for Sales.

Keyword Search

Search for your industry keyword (in our case it is “Digital Marketing”) on Slideshare.net or search using Google search (“Digital Marketing” site: slideshare.net) to find the relevant profiles. Once you find the profiles, initiate some activities on the profiles. Use the tips listed above 4.a.

Google Plus

As a Google product, it has one of the best search interfaces. You just need to type your industry keyword and choose an option as “People and Pages”, you will be given a list of relevant pages. You can avail certain facilities to connect to those folks. For some you will be given an option to email (in case the person is connected to you) and for others you can send messages. Google Plus messages are like tweets; you may send a public message that is targeted to a person.

Google Plus has a

comprehensive people search

engine which leverages Gmail

account and public profiles.

Pg. 12

Case Studies

Case Studies

Business Case 1: Hiring/ Business Development in 4 Easy Steps

LinkedIn People Search -> Advanced Options -> Country = United States,

Zip code = 60601 (within 50 Miles), Keyword = Social Media -> Done

Pg. 13

Case Studies

Business Case 2: Finding CMO of Infosys

Google.com -> CMO Infosys

Business Case 3: Finding 50 Digital Marketing Folks in Chicago

Search (Plus.Google.com - > Digital Marketing) ->

People and Pages - > Location = Chicago

Pg. 14

Case Studies