Corporate sales expert Sharon Drew Morgen recently asked a provocative question in her blog:
How does social networking help make the sale?
She observes that social networking has facilitated customer attraction by building automatic trust in our relationships with people we have met online. It is much easier to make connections and even identify live sales leads than it was in pre-Internet days.
However, she says, while we make more connections more easily, we are closing less because we “are not helping others reach the sorts of decisions necessary to close a deal.”
In other words, making a sale requires more than “know, like, trust.” To sell a high-priced, game-changing resource to a company, the organization must be open to change and able to manage this change process.
To get the full impact of Sharon’s message, read her blog entry to the end for a true incident in which a close social networking relationship wasn’t enough to effect a sale.
Originally posted 10-30-11