Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}

Let social media pre-populate your business relationships

This is a picture of me building business relationships in Italy during World Cup. Well sort of.

Let me relate three quick stories that took place in the last 24 hours:

I’m not telling these tales to demonstrate my good fortune on this particular day. I’m providing examples of how a social media strategy can be used to attract potential customers and “pre-populate” business relationships.

What do I mean by this? In normal business relationships, it might take weeks or months of discussions and meetings for a new potential client to know and trust you. Through original web-based content and participation in forums related to my profession, these nice people felt they had a personal relationship with me — before they even made a single phone call.

In effect, I was able to pre-populate the business relationship with my life, talents, hobbies, opinions –and probably a few flaws — to significantly expedite the sales cycle.

Here’s an important point. In NONE of these cases did I actually try to sell something to somebody. One pundit likened social media to a dinner party. If you stand there and simply talk about yourself and your product, people will quickly try to get away from you. But if you offer something of interest, they’ll listen, seek you out, and perhaps become a new friend.

What are your experiences with this topic? Does it make sense to you? How is pre-populating sales leads relevant to your business situation?

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