" Facebook's announcement of its Messages service is just the most prominent evidence of how electronic communications are changing in a fundamental way. And while Mark Zuckerberg said he got the idea from talking to teenagers, the shift has implications for business-to-business sales too.
In previous posts I've described how the web has transformed B2B selling. Buyers now have easy access to sales information, yet sellers can regain leverage in a variety of ways.
Facebook and other social media are a whole new ballgame. Salespeople tend to see social media as just another static channel — they'll typically use LinkedIn discussion boards as lead generators.
But social media are becoming dynamic arenas where you jockey against your competitors in real time. That's because the services are evolving toward smart sorting. Initially, this is all about giving priority to messages from close friends. Soon, though, these services will adjust your inbox according to how well the messages match your expressed interests.
The result will be a spam filter on steroids, one that focuses on the content of the message as much as the sender. Say an executive realizes her company needs to adopt RFID for its supply chain. She trolls the web, looking for what's available, and e-mails a few people in her network. Her smart messaging service will analyze the URLs she visits and the keywords in her e-mails. When she turns to her always crowded inbox, the first messages she sees will likely be those with text that's related to her recent activity. Mail that scores poorly will be buried and probably never read.
How can you work with this? If you sell supply chain management solutions and she visits your web site, you can track where she goes and get a sense of her interests. Or maybe you can find postings from her on a discussion board. Once you figure out her contact address, you'll want to customize a message so it goes to the top of her heap. Meanwhile, your competitor is sending her messages with a laundry list of supply chain management functions. If you can zero in on RFID, you'll be golden.
The process is similar to search engine optimization, except that you design messages rather than web sites, and you do it interactively. You'll need good content and good communication skills, and you'll need to move fast.
The payoff will be huge. As messaging services get smarter, people may trust them far more than they do now. If you shape your messages in ways that truly connect to where buyers have been, you'll jump right to their attention rather than having to fight through all the barriers that salespeople usually face. It won't matter so much who you are: The message becomes the messenger."
Steven Woods is the author of Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World and chief technology officer for Eloqua, a marketing automation company.
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