Why are my prospects allergic to my sales people?
As a service provider, one of the things you may be struggling with is a way to expand your business to new customers. Mail, e-mail, cold calling, print, or radio advertising are all time consuming and expensive.
Great post, Gene. As someone who’s sold using both traditional marketing methods (e-mail, cold calling, etc) and using inbound marketing methods such as social media, I’ve found the latter to be far more effective.
Rather than calling blindly hoping the timing is right, social media marketing provides a way to start a dialogue with a potential customer when they’re in the process of looking for what you have to offer. Not only are they more open to starting a discussion, but the issue of timing that so often popped up when I was cold calling is far less frequent.
There are some great (free) resources available here for people just starting out with social media marketing: http://www.hubspot.com/social-media-marketing-hub
Hope this helps.
Dan Sally
HubSpot
I just can’t seem to buy into the idea of Social Media working for a Managed Services Provider who is trying to target other companies. How many dentist offices have a facebook or a twitter? What about law offices? Or research companies?
We don’t attack any particular vertical but I just don’t see very many leads coming this way. I’m the marketing manager for the MSP I work for and I can create 25-30 warm leads a month with traditional marketing methods (cold calling, email, marketing events etc.)
I can certainly see the use in online marketing with things like SEO and your website capturing info but Twitter? I just don’t see it.