Yesterday I sat in on a webinar. Speaker was very good and the points he made was clear and interesting and relevant but I found myself unsatisfied when it was all over. It took me a few hours to figure out why – he didn't show us any examples of "good" and "not so good" and because of that he wasn't as effective as he could have been.
I like examples, especially simple ones that you get right away. My simple mind perhaps? Whatever the reason, because I have been researching successful B2B uses of Twitter lately I thought I would share this example of how Twitter helped at least one company make a sale.
It all started with a tweet (once upon a tweet?) from someone I follow.
I hadn't heard of crowdSPRING so I checked them out. Now it turns out that I was a few days away from using their competitor 99Designs (who by the way I had used before with great results), but hey, if my colleague who I respect was using Crowdspring, perhaps they were better yet?
So I replied to him:
And here is where it gets interesting. I did not hear back from him but within 5 minutes I got tweets from both 99designs and crowdSPRING, literally seconds apart.
Clearly they had staff running an ongoing search for any mention of their company, and both took the opportunity to try to influence my buying decision – good on them!
Takeaway #1 – every company should be using Twitter to search for opportunities to react to people who are shouting out that they are interested in their products.
It's also interesting that while my tweet clearly referenced 99designs, I shortened crowdSPRING to cspring, which means they were searching, not just for their company name but for at least one variation of it – really smart.
Takeaway #2 – search not just for your exact company name but for variations on it, especially abbreviations.
Lastly, as I read their tweets it also occurred to me that a new skill is required from salespeople – pitch your product in no more than 140 characters, but more on that in a future post.
Both companies reacted quickly and well, and I did end up buying a service from one of them – which one would you have picked?
I would probably go with crowdspring…both companies offer a similar service and have a seemingly similar skillset. Sure, 99designs has more experience but the downside to that is that they may employ a standard strategy for each project as a result of that..without even realizing it. I think a newer company such as crowdspring would offer a more innovative and possibly more creative product and that’s always been very important from a web marketing perspective.
As a side note I think both companies use of twitter shows confidence, due to the open nature of their interaction with prospects. Transparency may ultimately be the moat valuable thing that twitter has the ability to provide businesses.
– Raize
CrowdSpring added a little personal touch in the way they phrased their tweet.
I think that we want an personal touch.