What do you do when you meet someone for the first time? You quickly try and establish common ground right? Salespeople call this small talk.
Small talk eases the salesperson into the conversation and helps them make a connection with the person their trying to sell to which assists in developing rapport. A sales pitch won’t have the same punch without first establishing trust and rapport. Sometimes finding common ground is really easy, and you hit things off immediately. Other times it can be awkward, particular if the two people don’t share any interests, aren’t reading the same news or don’t share the same values.
So as salesperson, wouldn’t it be great if before you met a potential client, you knew a few things about that person? What if you knew their interests, passions, or what they’ve been up to lately? Wouldn’t this give you a huge advantage over the next sales guy?
Well with online social networking sites such as Twitter and personal blogs, now you can search for that information. I recently met with a sponsorship manager and before the meeting I checked if they were on Twitter. Turns out they were and I quickly discovered that we shared a passion for golf. Guess what, I just found common ground and I hadn’t even met the person yet!
Suffice to say the meeting went well. Our respective golf games dominated discussion for the early part which laid the platform for an extremely productive meeting.
You wouldn’t go to a job interview without first researching the company would you? So why wouldn’t you research the person you are meeting? In this day and age it’s possible so why not use the technology.
Tags: Social Networking, Twitter
