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Feb 03, 2010 -

Most people refer to this social media thing as social media marketing - implying that the use of these new tools and tactics is primarily the domain of the marketing department.

It’s funny, but I’ve always said that while marketing owns the message, sales owns the relationship, so using social media to build deeper relationships on a customer by customer basis just seems like a pretty natural thing for the sales team.

No matter what you think about social media personally, your customers are moving online and into the social web in droves, so you and your organization have little choice but to figure out how to benefit from this evolution.

Embracing this concept might actually be one way to get your sales and marketing folks on the same page, but the bigger question is – what will happen when your competitor starts doing this and you aren’t?

Below are five ways the marketing and sales can work together to use social media in the sales department.

1) Create listening stations

Social media and reputation monitoring have become vital marketing department functions. I wonder how many organizations share and filter content about products, needs, trends, competitors and customers that is picked up through effective monitoring?

Setting up a filtered stream of information and making that available to the sales team would be a very good use of this data. Even using Yammer, an enterprise Twitter client or setting up special hashtags to bookmark and filter relevant industry content sent via email or RSS alert would be a killer competitive tool.

2) Build social CRM

To me, adding social media activity of your hottest customers and prospects is a no brainer, but not very many sales and marketing folks have embraced this yet. Using RSS or social media modules currently being added to most popular CRM software a salesperson can gain a tremendous amount of additional information about a prospect or customer by simply glancing at Twitter and Facebook status updates added automatically to a contact’s record.

Any salesperson will tell you that the more information they have about a customer, both personal and professional, the easier it is to make a connection. Let’s face it, people prefer to buy from people they connect with period.

Sales folks need to get in the habit of connecting on LinkedIn or Facebook with that prospect they met at last night’s Chamber event, to more easily and naturally facilitate connecting in person again.

Education and nurturing are the two vital selling functions that social media tools make much easier.

3) Mine for leads

Every minute of every day prospects are expressing the dissatisfaction with or need for the products and services offered by sales folks around the world. Actually they’ve always done this, but now it’s just a lot easier to hear.

Sales people now have the ability to drill down, using a tool like the Twitter advanced search combined with TweetDeck or RSS, and listen in when prospects are expressing, in real-time, a buying signal for their specific products and services.

Smart sales and marketing folks are figuring out how to filter, aggregate and respond to this new form of lead generation found by mining social media conversations.

4) Create community

I’ve always been an advocate of bringing customers together to allow them to network and discuss with their peers the challenges they face. Bringing four or five customers together for a lunch once in a while is a tremendous way for a salesperson to add value and build loyalty.

Social media tools make community building even easier. Sales folks need to reach out to their customers and prospects and help connect them in Facebook, LinkedIn or even Flickr groups to make it easier for them to network online and consequently build deeper relationships for mutual benefit.

5) Teach and amplify

If your company is primarily a B2B sales organization and you’ve started to master some of the things in this post then you have a tremendous opportunity.

Every business, including those your hold as customers and prospects, must get good at mastering social media and other online marketing tools.

What if your sales team added teaching customers about social media use to one of their lead nurturing and customer service activities? In the end, the true job of a salesperson is always helping customers achieve their business objectives. The salesperson that looks beyond the specific products and services and focuses on doing that will always win.

Hold Twitter webinars for customers, bring a group of strategic partners together to create a community blog, how Facebook Fan Page training at your office. Even if you feel more comfortable bringing in outside experts, you will score major points in the “helping meet objectives” category.

Once you get help your customers get more actively involved with social media, add them to your social CRM, form a Twitter list, bookmark their Facebook pages. Then either through the use of a tool like TweetDeck or with the help of Google Alerts and RSS – Retweet their content, comment on their blog posts, Digg their content, and find other ways to help amplify what your customers are up to.

Image credit: Rick Harris

John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine (May 2010).