The following three ways Twitter helps your sales team sell more tie together into one consistent theme: Knowledge is power, and Twitter’s become a place where you can find fresh, untapped, unfiltered knowledge. The more you know, the more you sell. It’s that simple. 

Image.

Like all social media, Twitter plays a vital role in portraying the image of a modern company, as important to image today as a website became yesterday. Companies function and perform well enough without social media campaigns or presence, but like the dinosaurs of yesteryear with no website to be found, a company not applying itself to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media venues is missing out on half of the conversation.

An active, well-managed Twitter campaign goes one step beyond ‘this company pays basic attention to modern life’, it becomes a powerful tool for controlling image in all fields. Prospects may not be Twitter users, may not subscribe to your account or read your messages first hand, but if you maintain the right tone and offer strong content, choice bits WILL filter through and saturate the larger body of potential customers, as will a positive reputation.

Prospecting. 

Twitter also provides a more direct avenue for your sales team to sell more, as a tool for prospecting. The value of strong sales prospecting can’t be overstated, and Twitter provides an excellent base for the process. Learn the hashtags relevant to your industry and you have a ready-made list of people that may be interested in what you have to offer. Look a bit closer, and you can gather all sorts of information that might be useful in making cold contact.

You can also make very casual, very effective first contact with prospects via Twitter. A tweet takes seconds to read, so it’s not the imposition that a call or even an email might seem to a cold contact. Firing off a quick message in response to something a potential customer has said can lay excellent groundwork, especially if you can get a response back. You don’t have to move straight into selling from Twitter, but your sales team will easily sell more in the long term if they get the hang of this warming up process.

Insight. 

The expert level application of Twitter, where the clever make fortunes-and the less clever don’t even understand how. Twitter, and other forms of social media, can be thought of like this: If one individual saying to another in-person is the ‘zero beat’ of a trend starting, social media is the first beat, followed by smaller publications at two, then big ones at three. Your sales team probably won’t be there for the zero beat, but if you’re using Twitter right you’ll be there at one-well ahead of less savvy competitors.

Knowing the trends, and rumors, and scandals, and other big news early in the news cycle gives you room for fast maneuvering. It doesn’t matter whether news and trends move quickly in your industry or not, just that you’re ahead of the competition and adapting faster and more effectively than they can. A sales team that sees the wave coming because they engage with customers, industry figures, and prospects on Twitter can absolutely dominate that wave and ride it to sell more and more.

On the other side, there’s self-analytical insight to be had from Twitter as well. Maybe you’re seeing an uptick in returns, unsatisfied customers, and a drop in return customers-if you’re paying attention to Twitter and engaging with your customers and potential customers, it will be very easy to figure out what’s causing that trend. That’s organic insight, untainted by format or polling style. Going back to image, Twitter also lets you engage and defuse complaints with minimal merit before they go viral and taint your image with the population at large.