Are there any guidelines from big B2B companies for their sales people on how to use social media to close more deals?

Are there any guidelines from big B2B companies for their sales people on how to use social media to close more deals?

Sales is all about going prepared to your customer, rather prospective customer.

Social Media has opened a big tap for serious sales people, so that they can do methodical research on their prospective clients. This includes both the business, they are trying to pitch and the relevant person, who is conduit to that business.

Doing online research about the business on Social Media and then beefing that up with whatever information is available online for the relevant person, once can prepare a comprehensive dossier, which could act extremely handy during the sales presentation.

The dossier can be divided in to three parts:

1. Questions to seek further details.

List down questions which needs to be asked in order to gather complete details from the customer, in order to satisfactorily make a successful proposal. This would have details from what the company has done in the past, how that impacted it's revenue, what the company is trying to do current, who are it's present customers and how they fit into the total scheme of things with respect to the current proposal to be made, what is the future plan of the ocmpany and how adaptive one has to be able to make the proposal a sound long-term one.

2. Arguements to support the sales pitch.

Gather all the data points related with company which could help you bolster your sales pitch.

3. Conversation inputs to increase confidence.

It is important and essential that the salesman sounds prepared when she is talking. There are various tits and bits of information available online, which could help bolster her position, as she is conversing with the relevant representative of the customer company. There would be instances when the representative would be telling a piece of story, and you are able to complete the rest of it, because you have already done a methodical research ont he same, leading to a complete 'WOW' moment for the representative. 

While this research is done it is essential to omit everything which are 'professional non-essentials' and could sound like, someone was 'snooping instead of researching'. Eg: Personal opinions about products, politics, hobbies, friends etc.