Using social media for business isn’t restricted to marketers these days, but is an important strategy for your home building company’s sales department to get on board with, as well. It’s not as daunting or tedious as it sounds, and if you want your company to achieve optimal sales productivity, having your sales team use social media to turn your leads into actual customers is critical. Here are some helpful techniques to get you started with a social media strategy for your home building company’s sales team.
Use Social Selling to Qualify Leads
When your sales team receives leads from your marketing department or through referrals from previous customers, they can use social media to increase their chances of winning the customer over while also saving valuable time in the long run.
How, you ask? By doing a little social media “research” on the lead, that’s how. By no means are we suggesting that you “cyber stalk” every lead you receive, but utilizing key social media platforms to gain demographical information on your potential customers helps to prepare for contact. By learning a little about them your sales professionals will better be able to customize their pitches towards the lead’s specific needs and might also gain an insight to a conversation starter for their first meeting or consultation.
Gaining information up front can also save time down the road by weeding out leads that might not fit your company’s target audience. If your building company only builds luxury, multi-million dollar homes, and a lead comes through who is single and still in college, you are more than likely not going to put high priority on that specific lead. This could save valuable time if your sales department is weeding through multiple leads at a time.
Social Networks to Use
LinkedIn will probably be the most helpful social media platform when searching for a lead’s information as it is a steadily growing site that can provide you with a professional look at a person’s work history, resume, business interests and professional groups he or she belongs to. This can be where a conversation starter can be generated, through a mutual interest in a group or professional activity.
Your sales team might also find helpful information by searching for their leads on Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram as well. Although Facebook is the most used social media platform, it might prove to be the least helpful for sales as many people have private profiles and it can often seem too intrusive as people use Facebook for their personal use.
Reach More Followers
Hopefully your home building marketing team is creating amazing content, such as helpful blog posts, and distributing it effectively through social media, however that doesn’t mean your sales team can’t contribute to the company’s success by sharing the content on their own personal accounts, too. As individuals, your posts reach more people than your company’s posts do, so your home building company would benefit by increasing its social media reach even further by having sales people posting your marketing content on their own accounts.
This would also benefit the individual sales person, as they would be exemplifying their expertise in their field, thus creating more reliability for themselves and your company in the eyes of your social media followers.
No Time? No Problem!
Don’t feel like your sales team has enough time to add social media posting into their selling schedule? That’s OK. Inbound marketing software for builders, such as Hubspot, provides marketers with the ability to integrate individual social media accounts into one master account and publish content at the same time, to all accounts. This would mean absolutely no work needs to be done on the salesperson’s behalf, minimal work on the marketer’s behalf, but with a possibility of maximum results for the company. Now that’s a win-win-win situation if you ask me!
For more information on sales and marketing for home building companies, check out our Builders & New Home Marketing blog. Have you had any success with social selling for your home building company, or do you have any questions for our marketing department? If so, please leave a comment in the box below…we’d love to hear from you!
