Sales Training Insight: Social Media Is Here to Stay

By Frank Visgatis, Co-founder & Co-author of CustomerCentric Selling®

Facebook was recently valued by Goldman-Sachs at $50 billion dollars. Pretty impressive for a company that is a mere seven years old. "Good for Mark Zuckerberg," you say, "but what does that mean to me?"

The bottom line is this: Social media is here to stay and if you or your company don't have a strategy to leverage it, you are falling further behind your competition every day.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn...you need to be actively engaged with all of them. Even if you think that no one will actually buy from you based on a Facebook page, you may be right; however, your active participation with posts, tweets, etc. will dramatically impact your rank in the search engines. If you're not on the first page of Google search results when someone searches for what it is you do, you may as well not be listed at all.

As we documented in our latest book, Rethinking The Sales Cycle (McGraw-Hill, 2010), buyers are leveraging the vast resources of the internet BEFORE they ever engage with a salesperson or vendor. In fact, many salespeople/vendors are eliminated from evaluations that they never even knew they were part of.

Even if you find yourself in the increasingly rare situation where you actually cause someone to start an evaluation, they are going to research you and your company online. Will what they find cause them to be more or less interested in investing their time with you?

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