Building a following and enhancing your brand are important things to do in order to close sales. But what do you do when your industry is a tight circle and face-to-face selling is the way of life in this arena–and your target demographics are changing?
You learn to use social media selectively.
Recently I presented to the biannual sales meeting of a major boiler manufacturer. This is an industry where the typical manufacturer has been in business between 50 and 100 years, sells fact to face and has a long sales cycle. Similar to manufacturers of other goods, service is a huge part of their deliverable. However, this is a very small circle of people who know one another and the tenure of most sales people and company leadership is in double digits of years.
Doesn’t sound conducive to using social media, right? Not so fast…
Really, of the 50 or so rep companies at the meeting, only a small percentage used some form of social media (mostly LinkedIn or YouTube). Given those parameters, I put together a primer of sorts on social media. The whole presentation can be found here. I focused on these media:
- YouTube
We also discussed the effectiveness and implementation of blogs, newsletters and the use of texting. The point of all this was that service and customer contact are critical when your average sale takes 18 months to 2 years and sells for anywhere from $100,000 to $4 million.
I arrived at this list of media from having read a story* about how manufacturing companies can use social media:
- To complement other marketing channels
- Leverage LinkedIn and Facebook for brand promotion
- Collaborate and source with partners via LinkedIn
- Create a YouTube channel for storytelling
- Gain customer feedback
While there is no one right way, there are guidelines that can very by manufacturing segment, customer types and sales cycles. at the end of the day, however, it is about customer engagement.
Relentless
*Thanks to Chris Kelley at V2 Marketing Communications
