True Or False Social Listening Can Help You Find Leads

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you'll be able to:

Explain how reps can use social listening to get new sales leads.
Explain how to automate lead generation with Salesforce Social Studio.

Introduction

Meet Toni. She's passionate about helping people put on awesome events, so she's ideally suited to her job in sales at a furniture rental company.

Toni knows something that other organizations are starting to get: Social media isn't just for marketers anymore—every team in a company can benefit from it. She's incorporated social listening into her sales job, which is why her pipeline is always full of new leads. Social listening is the process of monitoring publicly available social media posts for matching keywords so you can take action on them.

The democratization of social media data is finally happening across every department, and it's empowering sales teams across the globe.

So how does a savvy salesperson get started using social media to build their sales pipe? It all begins by using social media to understand who their prospects are and what they need.

Listening to what prospects are saying on social media helps you get new insight into their business priorities and challenges, and helps you determine where you can potentially help. Listening to what key executives are saying can be incredibly insightful, especially as it relates to industry topics that you won't find in mainstream news media. Let's say Toni comes across an executive's social media post announcing early access to tickets for their company's conference. This is a chance for her to reach out about a potential furniture rental opportunity well before the announcement is made across other channels. This allows her to get a head start on her competition.

Now, let's talk about how Toni captured her latest sales lead using social media. Through social listening, she noticed eGaming events discussing how gamers were using high-end office chairs for competitive gaming. After discovering this new insight, she decided to use lead automation to capture any new announcements on social media of upcoming eGaming events. This gave her a jump-start on new business opportunities, which allowed her to generate some new leads.

While it's awesome for sales to access all these new opportunities, you don't want them to become overwhelmed trying to assess every new prospect captured from social listening. That's where automation comes into play.

Turbo-charge Sales Leads with Automation

Using lead automation from social listening, you can identify top leads using triggers within social posts. Those triggers provide information that helps rank and score sales leads by priority. This makes a your job easier by helping to focus on the hottest leads that come from social listening.

For example, imagine a prospect is looking for hotel recommendations for a Canadian mountain getaway. They turn to social media to ask friends for hotel recommendations. At this stage, they're probably not ready to purchase, so it's not the right time for a sales rep to join the conversation.

Later on, this same prospect shares hotel links on social media asking friends what they think of the hotels. This is a stronger signal that they're getting closer to making a hotel reservation. At this stage, the sales reps who has been followed this scenario with social listening can use Salesforce's Social Studio Automate product to create a sales lead in Sales Cloud.

Let's consider a social media post from Ben: "I'm loving this Salesforce webinar. I want to learn more about Social Automation. Who should I contact?"

On the surface, this reads like a regular post from someone who's watching a Salesforce webinar, and is interested in learning more. However, there are quite a few signals that Social Studio Automate uses to automatically score and action this lead.

Influencer score
Key topics discussed
Sentiment
Contact request

These are some of the types of signals sales reps can use to create a score that prioritizes a social lead. If the score is strong, Ben's post is assigned to a salesperson, but if the score is deemed low, Ben is sent on an advertising journey instead so the sales team can continue to nurture him as a potential buyer in the future.

So how can sales reps like yourself get set up with social listening and automation to start generating new leads today?

To start, you need Social Studio, a one-stop solution for social media marketing and management. Sales teams can benefit from Social Studio Automate, which is the software engine that sorts social posts and actions them based on your set criteria. After setting up a bucket of posts to listen to, known as a Data Source, you can create rules for those posts. Once those rule conditions are met, sales leads are automatically created in Salesforce.

Once those leads are generated, they live in Sales Cloud as a lead object, ready for action. This is a great example of how Salesforce's products are designed to talk to each other, which is key to democratizing social data across organizations.

Now you're well on the path to success with your automated sales leads. But what about growing your existing accounts? Social media can help drive opportunities there, too. We dive into how in the next unit.