Twitter CRM - Find and Manage Sales Opportunities on Twitter

Right now, someone may be asking the 'Twitterverse' for recommendations to exactly the product or service you provide. Your challenge is to find out about it - and to take action!

This blog explains the approach we take - and enable our users to take - within the BlueCamroo Social CRM solution. I'll also explain how you could use similar techniques in Tweetdeck - a free tool - so hopefully these suggestions will be helpful to non-BlueCamroo users too.

Step 1 - Keywords

Just like Search Engine Marketing, exploiting Twitter for sales opportunities starts with identifying good keywords. So Step 1 is to make a list of the terms that people might use when selling, buying or commenting on your category of products/services.

Imagine just for a moment that you were looking for sales opportunities as - say - a 'Digital Coach'. You might choose keywords like:

"Digital Coach"
"Twitter Coach"
"LinkedIn Coach"
"social network coach"

Step 2 - Buying Signals!

Even with quite unusual search terms like these, a straightforward Twitter search is likely to bring a deluge of results - most of which will be of no value to you. You'll have people boasting, bitching and barracking about your service; competitors pitching; irrelevant 'noise'.

What you are looking for are the tweets from people who are ready to buy, so next step is to list relevant 'buying signals', for example:

"I want"
"I need"
"We want"
"We need"
"Can you recommend"
"Can anyone recommend"
"What's the best"
"Where can I get"

Step 3 - Put them together

Now you are going to combine your Keywords and your Buying Signal phrases to build a long list of searches:

"I want digital coach"
"We want digital coach"
"We need digital coach"

...all the way down to...

"Where can I get social network coach"

Step 4 - Set up your searches

If you are a BlueCamroo user, this is the easy bit. Just go to the setup page for the free, built-in "Social Network Scout" module and list your Keywords and your Buying Signals ("Filters", in BlueCamroo), and the system will take care of combining them for you - no need to build a huge list yourself.



If you don't use BlueCamroo, set yourself up with a desktop twitter client - I like Tweetdeck for this - and add your searches one-at-a-time.



Step 5 - Take action!

If you've chosen good Keywords and Buying Signals, you'll quickly start to get some relevant and actionable 'hits'. There'll still be plenty of 'junk', but with some careful tuning you should be able to get up to about 1 in 4 'hits' being valuable sales intelligence. Here are two screenshots from a BlueCamroo search that we've run for a few days:




Now you need to take action:

* Research the 'prospect'
* Tweet your reply
* Follow-up

Step 6 - Keep good records and study what works

With only 140 characters in each message, it can be hard to keep on top of your sales 'conversation' with multiple prospects via twitter. For this reason, you should keep good records of your interactions.

BlueCamroo users have the advantage that because BlueCamroo is a fully-featured CRM solution, Twitter sales opportunities can be clicked straight in to Leads, and the system will automatically save messages with the Lead record. There is nothing to stop you doing this manually, however, so if you are not using BlueCamroo I would recommend setting up a spreadsheet in Excel with one tab for each twitter contact. This will enable you to easily copy and paste your conversations into a structured 'log'.

Step 7 - Close the Sale!

If what has gone before sounds like a lot of effort, I'd just like to reassure you this does work! We enjoy regular new sign-ups to BlueCamroo as a result of people we've identified and contacted using BlueCamroo's twitter tools, and we get feedback from our users that they too are finding and winning sales through the system.

Obviously, BlueCamroo makes it easier to administer a Twitter lead generation campaign, but all the system is doing is following the steps set out above, so there is nothing to stop you doing the same for yourself.

Happy hunting!