Social Media and PowerPoint for Business Development

All businesses need new customers and anyone who has ever worked in the sales team trying to find new prospects and convert them into customers will know that it is one of the toughest jobs to do. 


And yet, Social Media is an increasingly popular approach for generating B2B sales and the number of social networking tools available make it easier to find your ideal customers than has previously been possible.
With a little ingenuity, salespeople can use their PowerPoint slides to help them find new customers in a much for efficient manner using social media tools to reach people. 


This post is aimed at helping salespeople to use social networking and PowerPoint to generate leads more easily.


Old School
The old method of cold calling people has to be one of the most discouraging, dull and thankless tasks in business. Most people hate it and for good reason. There are still many businesses who rely on hiring people to call 1,000 people to see if they can persuade them to buy their products or services with the hope of maybe getting 10 of them to buy in the end.


That is a very wasteful and inefficient way to operate. In addition, receivers of these calls are becoming wise to the problem of these cold callers and are filtering them out through a numbers of tools designed to protect them from time-wasters. I am naturally suspicious of calls that come to my mobile phone when I don't recognise the number. Social networking can help you work smartly and not hard.


In fact, yesterday, I missed a call from a number in Norwich which turned out to be a pension company with an annoying reputation of trying to flog their wares over the phone. How did I know this? I used a social networking service called ' Who Phoned Me? ' that showed me that the customer service from this company was less than appealing. I now know to block their number when they try to call again.

Powerful PowerPoint
A much simpler way is to reuse your PowerPoint slides which you use in front of customers and prospects which help them solve a problem with your solution and share them through social media tools.


For instance, Slideshare is a great social media tool which, as the name suggests, enables you to share your slides with people online. Many people subscribe to the service and viewers of your PowerPoint slides can share them with their contacts easily.


If you have written speaker notes in your slides, these are uploaded too and they are indexed by search engines which helps makes your content more easily found. It also means that you need to write your notes using keywords used by your company on their website.


Furthermore, with the 'Pro' version of Slideshare, you can add in a form to capture leads from people interested in hearing from you. I upgraded to the Pro service a few weeks ago and I have had over 1,000 views of the four PowerPoint slide decks I uploaded and I have received leads from India and China.


Smart Prospecting
This is a simple illustration of how you can find interested prospects without making 1,000 telephone calls. Social networking and social media are excellent tools for finding new customers. They make you more efficient so you can spend your time working on projects and solutions for customers.


Here's a quote from Chris Brogan, the social media expert, who wrote to me about cold calling:

Cold calling will certainly convert a few people. But it takes a lot of time, too. And you're doing 1-1 calls. That's 3 minutes per call per potential no answer per one human at a time. Give me 20 calls and you've got an hour. That's one blog post or newsletter with a call to action. If your newsletter reaches 1000 people, you'll get 980 more potential chances for a yes.

I think that sums up nicely how reusing your PowerPoint slides through social media can make you a more effective salesperson.