How A Sales Professional Can Achieve Greater Success Through Online Marketing
Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Ryan Corey, Sales and Marketing Director with TrainAce and Co-Founder of SalesRepMarketing.com
Over the past several years many major sales industry superstars have been telling sales professionals to build their online presence. In particular, the focus has been placed on building a strong social media base. The obvious reason for this is that a sales professional with a healthy and active social media presence can use that base of followers to move their message and generate more leads for themselves. A strong social media presence gives a sales professional an appearance that they are a thought leader in their field and a resource to those who are potentially looking for the product or service that they sell. Sales people are making sales consistently via social media marketing and those that do not participate are losing business to those that are, although it isn’t always easy to get started and head in the right direction.
Currently, the key to social media selling success is to establish and grow a Twitter presence as well as LinkedIn presence. This allows a salesperson the ability to move a message among their followers/connections. The larger the following, the more eyeballs see the message and the eventually resulting in more leads. It is also necessary to establish one’s self as a thought leader in their field. By building this thought leader status, the sales professional will establish a positive reputation, become more relevant and will gain popularity in the field. Doing so will grow more followers, will garnish the attention from people that matter in that following and will give the ability to move messages that actually get read by decision makers.
Besides social media, a sales professional should also grow their own blogging presence. Steady industry blogging results in many new targeted visitors/readers hitting the salesperson’s website, reading the writer’s viewpoints and gaining information from the writer. Since online search marketing today is very centered around geographically local websites and blogs, a sales professional can now use this strategy to get prospects to find them. They visit the website based on a search that relates to something once blogged about, then they see contact information that is listed on the side of the blog. Hopefully, at that point they will contact the rep about what they sell. Even if they don’t contact the sales professional, that website view builds name recognition for the sale professional.
Another effective method of online marketing for sales professionals is online advertising within one’s territory. With some attention and setup, a sales professional can place an advertisement that displays the name, product or service and a small message on the computer screens of key accounts within a territory. Ads can be geo-targeted to such a micro level to exclusively include important geographic locations like an office park, office building, hospital, shopping center etc. In addition to the geo-targeting, ads can also be set to exclusively appear on the computer screens of people that have an internet browsing history that would indicate that they have a close relation to the target customer of the sales pro. These ads can both generate leads as well as get the sales rep seen and known, before the sales rep even places a call to meet with the prospect. It’s a similar approach to how a prominent Real Estate Agent puts their name and face in several different advertising mediums to establish recognition within their region. The potential end result is that when a home buyer is ready to find a real estate agent, they immediately think of that Realtor, because that Realtor has built strong name recognition.
The key for online marketing success as a salesperson is to approach these with a commitment to daily activity. There are services available for territory sales professionals that can manage the entire process but without the help of a service it's likely to take about an hour per day to eventually reap the rewards. The approach will not result in immediate success, but as the efforts build, so will the results, exponentially.
