Sales Intelligence from Social Media

Admit it. You’ve done a vanity search on Google for your name, and possibly your company’s name, just to see what came up. Here’s the thing. If you are doing it for yourself, what’s to stop others doing it to? Indeed what is to stop sales people doing it before they call to canvass you? Nothing. Employers already widely admit to Googling a potential candidate before they make an offer, so it is only a matter of time before the digital persona you use on social media is used as sales intelligence. This is not necessarily a bad thing and in 2011, I believe, it will become a reality.

Information is premium. Social Media, being that you interact with friends and colleagues, is a place we readily agree to put information about ourselves. Places like LinkedIn provide the perfect opportunity for us to network with old colleagues and potential employers hence in order to get the most from it; you fill in as much of the detail as you can. This makes it easy to meet your end goal – be it to find a new job, a new contact or a new piece of business and also for Sales People to meet their goal – which is probably finding a qualified lead.

Don’t stress yourself thinking that myriads of sales people are going to be sniffing around your LinkedIn profile day in, day out sizing up the value of you as a potential client – the majority of the process is going to automated. It will be bottled and sold much in the same way as targeted advertising is for sites like Facebook. This will give you as B2B consumer the opportunity to browse what is available to you and what has been selected as an advert relevant to you. Indeed, look at the opportunity on the other side of the coin, how can you get your sales teams to utilize this free sales intelligence to maximise their effectiveness? Now perhaps the possibilities seem more tangible.

Some organisations might well take this a step further and start to contacts individuals directly via social media. It will be interesting to see how this is received. Social Media is a funny game. Anything that is seen to upset the applecart is quickly tweeted, retweeted, blogged about or status updated, therefore aggressive sales approaches are going to be brutally quashed by the nature of the beast they seek to tame. However, looking at data available online and reserving the bespoke approach for offline might work better. This would allow intelligence to be garnered and used properly without revealing where the intelligence came from as it would with a direct approach via social media.

These approaches are all just another form of targeted marketing. While privacy issues may alarm some, the rise of digital reputation management will be an opportunity for others. For you as a consumer be it in your B2B work or in your personal life, it could work well for you too. Not all sales people are there to pester and annoy, this way of approaching you using information freely available online is as much about qualifying you as a potential lead as it is about matching their products with your company. Taken to the Nth degree this should cut out a lot of unwanted approaches for sales people not well versed in what you do. So enjoy the change.