Social media plays a crucial role in building an effective and sustainable sales pipeline - learn why social selling is important. From prospecting on LinkedIn and Twitter to making social media and your sales pipeline work together, learn how to built your sales pipeline faster. Grab the entire ebook here.

1. 10X more productive series
How to Build Your Sales
Pipeline Faster Using
Social Media
PRESENTED BY

2. Presented by Base
Why Social Selling is Important
An effective and accurate sales pipeline is a vital component of any successful
business, and social media now plays a crucial role in the sales pipelines of
truly outstanding companies.
The constant flood of posts being published by consumers on all social media
platforms can provide an invaluable data source for salespeople, but it also
comes with responsibility. Customers are more engaged than ever, and they
demand regular contact and highly personalized relationships with the
businesses they patronize. Consumers have extremely high expectations of
businesses, as Daniel Newman notes on his Millennial CEO blog:
“...67% of consumers expect a same day response to a
service response that they post on social media channels... a
staggering 47% expect the response in 2 hours and 35%
expect it in just 30 minutes.”
That’s a tough standard to meet, but for companies that keep in touch with
customers on social media, the payoff comes back in the form of intense
customer loyalty, social proof, testimonials, and referrals.
Newman also mentions that while advertising sources show less than a 50%
rate of trust among consumers, a personal referral from within a customer’s
social circles has a whopping 90% trust rate. By wowing customers with great
treatment on social media, you build relationships within their communities. If
even one of those people becomes an ambassador for your brand, and starts
recommending you to their friends and colleagues, your business will reap the
rewards.

3. Presented by Base
So how does the sales pipeline factor into all of this?
Tracking customer interactions and knowing what each one means is the only
way to build a strong sales pipeline. Using social media to engage with
customers allows you to have many more interactions with them, and it allows
you to track those connections. From prospecting to engaging brand
ambassadors and even closing deals, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social
platforms can give you the data you need to make a super-efficient and
accurate sales pipeline.
Before you can start cashing in on the value of your social media contacts
though, you need to have the foundations of a strong sales pipeline in place.

4. Presented by Base
1
Building a Robust Sales Pipeline
Your sales pipeline needs to be a well-oiled machine for recording data and
making predictions based on that information. The more info you can gather
about any potential customer, the better the service you can provide them at
each stage of the sales process. Your sales pipeline will help you determine
which customers to go after, what kinds of offers to make them, and when it is
time to either close a deal or let the customer go.
A well constructed sales pipeline is vital because it can tell you how best to
allocate time and effort to maximize your sales and build the best relationships
with your clients. The first step is to build your pipeline, and for that you need
the first piece of information, the seed from which all sales grow: a lead.
Base’s 6 Step Plan to Manage Your Sales Pipeline offers solid, actionable
advice for building a sales pipeline, all the way from capturing your first lead to
closing the deal. It all starts with capturing leads, and Base offers a succinct
explanation of why a lead capture form on your website is the best and
easiest way to do that:
“Lead capture forms can be solid gold for your business. The contact
information you glean from these forms belongs to people excited enough
about your product to offer their contact information. Leads generated through
these forms have contacted you directly and expect you to reach back out to
them.”
3

5. Presented by Base
Customers who fill out a lead form will not only be your most likely buyers,
they may also become ambassadors that bring you new business. Treat these
people right!
Once you have the framework for capturing leads, you need to be able to
track each potential customer throughout their entire relationship with your
business. Base’s ebook, How To Understand Your Pipeline and Track Sales
Effectively, breaks down the sales pipeline into distinct stages:
1. Prospecting: Finding new customers using social media and other channels
2. Qualified: A customer shows real potential. They want what you’re selling!
3. Quote: If they’re asking for a price quote, they probably mean business.
4. Closure: This is where the rubber hits the road. You’ll need to be highly
responsive and promptly answer any remaining questions the customer has.
Go out of your way to provide industry data and other supporting info that
shows them why it is a great choice for them to go with your product!
5. Won (or lost): Make the sale. Sign the paperwork. This is the start of a great
business relationship with your new customer.
4

6. Presented by Base
Tracking customer interactions throughout the sales process is important, but
it is only one part of the equation. Using the data you have to make accurate
projections about sales targets, customer retention, and sales team
productivity are also vital. Having the sales pipeline in place is great, but
managing it carefully is what really pays dividends.
Management consultant and sales blogger Mack Powers offers some concise
reasons on why sales pipeline management is fundamental for any business.
Powers says that a good sales pipeline can:
• “Assist you in tracking “deal flow” or “deal velocity” to determine if any
opportunities are stuck.”
• “Show you how to allocate resources to assist in closing business
opportunities based upon the deals most likely to close.”
• “Indicate how likely you will be in achieving your budgets or targets.”
The Sales Funnel Analysis report in Base will help you analyze lead and deal
progression through the sales pipeline. By looking for stages with low
conversion rates, you can start to identify stage bottlenecks and correct
course.
The Sales Funnel Analysis Report also tells you how effective your team is at
closing deals. Instead of looking at the conversion rates between stages, this
time look at the number of deals closed. You can specify by team or by rep
over any given period of time.
With Base, you can filter, sort and define dates on all your business activities
to help you analyze your company, team and individual performance. By
spotting trends and patterns, you can improve your sales process, pinpoint
strengths, and anticipate challenges.
5

7. Presented by Base
Your business has limited resources, and your time is valuable. The ultimate
purpose of a sales pipeline is to help you leverage that time most efficiently so
that every moment that you invest in sales yields the best possible returns.
There was a time when successful salespeople spent most of their time on the
phone or visiting clients in person. While those are great ways to make sales,
they are time intensive, and today’s hyper-competitive business environment
makes it hard to invest that kind of effort in anyone other than top-dollar
customers.
Fortunately, new social media platforms provide an incredible resource for
salespeople to make connections and build relationships with individuals and
communities while simultaneously gathering info to enhance the sales
pipeline. Hubspot’s current CRO and ex-VP of sales, Mark Roberge said:
“I challenge sales people to take 2 hours per week for the
next 2 months that you would have been prospecting, and
blog. Or go to Twitter and Retweet some stuff, or go in a
6

8. Presented by Base
LinkedIn group and participate in conversation, or go find a blog where your
prospects are hanging out and put a smart comment in there. You know a lot.
You are a thought leader in your space because you’re answering the
objections and helping prospects every day with your value proposition. After
those couple months, reflect back and ask yourself, “Were those 2 hours you
spent blogging and interacting on social media – would they have been better
spent prospecting or did you get enough value from that effort?”
Takeaways:
1. Customize your sales pipeline to your business using Base.
2. Use the sales funnel analysis report to analyze how your sales process is
performing. Make necessary changes.
7

9. Presented by Base
2
How to Use LinkedIn as a
Prospecting Tool
Social media platforms such as LinkedIn can offer benefits at every stage of
the sales process, but finding new customers, or prospecting, is the area
where it is easiest to make social media work for your business. Thanks to
LinkedIn, there is an easily accessible, highly detailed database of
professionals that savvy salespeople can tap into to find customers and
ambassadors for their businesses.
LinkedIn’s main value as a prospecting tool lies in its premium Sales
Navigator and Lead Builder tools. These services provide targeted search
capabilities that can help salespeople get in touch with influencers and
decision makers in any industry or niche.
LinkedIn’s Lead Builder tool allows you to search the complete profiles of
potential clients using a variety of criteria, including:
• Location
• Industry
• Seniority level
• Job function
• Company size
A major challenge for many B2B salespeople is finding and contacting the
right person at a potential client company. One of Base CRM’s 6 Steps for
Managing Your Sales Pipeline is to identify decision makers at companies you
8

10. Presented by Base
want to sell to, and LinkedIn makes that much, much easier.
Sales Expert Jill Konrath’s recommends using LinkedIn not only for finding
contacts, but for gaining deeper insight into their personalities, their business
goals, and their networks. Konrath’s book, Cracking The LinkedIn Sales Code,
notes a few pieces of information that top sellers pursue when prospecting
with LinkedIn, including:
• Multiple points of entry into organizations.
• Likely people involved in the decision process.
• Common connections they can leverage.
• Mutual interests to start conversations and build trust
In a blog post on Baseline, Konrath emphasizes the power of having multiple
contacts for a given company:
“Having more contacts within an account increases your
likelihood of getting in and getting to the right person.
It gives you a chance to gather even more invaluable
information necessary to drive the sale. It protects
you from losing your relationship if you only have one
contact. And, it leads to more business.”
Another power tool you can put in your LinkedIn prospecting toolkit is the
Base Contact Clipper.
LinkedIn makes it easy to find prospects based on detailed search queries,
but you still need to save that info somewhere that you can use it. The best
9

11. Presented by Base
sales pipelines depend on CRM and sales productivity software to make their
data easy to access and interpret. The Base Contact Clipper saves complete
LinkedIn or Facebook profiles to Base CRM so you have every potential
client’s social media info a mouse click away when you’re making that crucial
sales call.
LinkedIn itself has published a handy article on how to use the social platform
to find contacts, build rapport, and nurture leads. One of the smartest insights
in the article cuts to the core of why social selling is taking center stage:
“Sales is built on trust, and trust is built on existing relationships.”
LinkedIn helps salespeople learn about connections they didn’t even know
they had. By leveraging second- and third-degree connections, top sellers can
use their relationships to build stronger, more lasting connections with new
and existing clients.
The power duo of LinkedIn and the Base Contact Clipper can bring any
business closer to having the ideal sales pipeline that can use every
10

12. Presented by Base
interaction and every bit of customer data to make accurate, long distance
predictions about sales success.
LinkedIn isn’t the only game in town though. Twitter has also proven that it has
incredible potential in sales prospecting.
Takeaways:
1. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Lead Builder for sales prospecting.
2. Use Base’s Lead and Contact Clipper to port prospects and influencers
into your CRM.
11

13. Presented by Base
3
How to Use Twitter As A
Prospecting Tool
Twitter offers two incredible benefits to salespeople:
1. Easy, personalized communication with customers and their communities
2. A fire hose of free data about those individuals and communities
A study from Forrester Research shows that buyers are frequently up to 90%
through the process of considering a purchase before they actually get in
touch with the vendor. Customers are doing their research about you before
they even think about contacting you, and you should do the same. Learning
as much as possible about potential buyers during your prospecting phase will
make it easier to build a relationship with them and give them the info they
need at every stage of your sales pipeline, and Twitter is a great place to start.
The first step is actually finding and connecting with potential customers.
Twitter offers a few great tools for finding individuals within your target market:
1. Keyword Searches: Twitter’s search bar allows you to search for Tweets
containing specific keywords. You don’t have to do this manually though. In a
blog post on Baseline, online marketing expert Susan Payton describes her
system of using HootSuite feeds seeded with relevant search terms such as
“software” and “small business” to find people who are discussing the types of
products she sells.
2. Hashtags: Many of the hashtags used on Twitter are basically empty
chatter, but there are plenty that are used by professionals to engage in real
dialogue as well. Finding a hashtag that is frequently used by your target
market can open a door into that community for you and your brand. For
12

14. Presented by Base
example, many sales professionals use the #SocialSelling hashtag to engage
in robust conversation about how social media affects their sales process.
3. Lists: If you start to follow a lot of people, it can start to get overwhelming.
It’s helpful to build out Twitter lists to group similar people who you want to
keep track of. If your target market is tech company CMO’s for example,
curate a list of just tech company CMO’s. You can keep the list private and
check in daily with what they’re saying.
Once you find the users and communities on Twitter that might turn into
customers for your brand, you can start participating in their conversations. A
few well-placed Tweets with useful information for your target audience can
position a salesperson or company as a thought leader in their industry, which
will translate directly into inbound sales leads. Look for people who are asking
the questions your business knows how to answer. That level of authentic
engagement is the key to successful sales prospecting on Twitter.
Russ Fradin, the CEO of Dynamic Signal, writes that “...the networking
potential and the ability to understand a prospective customer's pain points is
where much of the value lies in social media as a sales tool.”
Once you’re following the conversation and contributing regularly, start
looking out for people who need what you’re selling. People often post to
their social media profiles asking for recommendations for a particular product
type, software, or business solution. The Hootsuite Blog highlights research
from Vision Critical that proves social media engagement influences
purchasing decisions. Customers turn to Twitter to research the products they
need, and you can be there to help them.
When you are truly engaged with your target market on Twitter, you will be
able to regularly identify potential customers. You can then gather other
information about them and keep track of it in your chosen CRM system.
13

15. Presented by Base
The final step in using Twitter as a sales prospecting tool is to actually reach
out and initiate a direct conversation with a potential buyer. If you follow each
other, you can send a direct message letting them know you are interested in
working with them.
Relationships are at the core of social selling. Cold calling scripts have no
place on Twitter. Learning about your potential customers by paying attention
and figuring out how to help them resolve their pain points are the only ways
to take prospects you gain from Twitter, and bring them all the way through
your sales pipeline.
At Base for example, our marketing team uses Hubspot’s social media tool to
create a custom stream of “Twitter Prospects.” With this tool, you can set
keywords that a potential customer might be searching for where your
product or service is a good fit. For example, we added “best CRM solution”,
“looking for a CRM” and “CRM recommendations” to our list. We’re then
alerted any time someone Tweets our key phrases so that we have an
opportunity to chime in to the conversation.
Takeaways:
1. Use Twitter to build relationships with your prospects and customers.
2. Utilize social media tools like Hubspot to monitor conversations about your
brand, product or service offering.
14

16. Presented by Base
4
Build Recommendations
Through Social Media
Customer testimonials and recommendations are an amazing way to
demonstrate the quality of your business and bring in new clients. These
testimonials don’t have to be huge pieces of content. The classic version is
just a picture, a full name, and a brief statement about how your business
helped the customer meet their goals. It isn’t much, but having these
testimonials on your website, in your slideshows, on your blog and in your
marketing collateral can have a powerful positive impact on your sales.
Social media platforms provide a whole world of new formats and venues to
get the testimonials that will really boost your business.
To Get Testimonials, Ask For Them
The first and most important step towards getting testimonials and
recommendations is to ask for them. Sales 2.0 mastermind Miles Austin puts it
concisely in a blog post for Baseline:
“If you are not asking for testimonials you are leaving money
on the table. Getting past this hurdle can deliver a significant
uptick in your revenue almost immediately.”
Using social media to seek testimonials has the added benefit of giving the
client a ready-made publishing platform. Happy customers are quick to praise
their favorite companies via Twitter. You can screenshot or embed those
positive tweets and post them on your blog, or reach out to customers who
praise you via Twitter, and ask if they’ll provide a more fleshed out testimonial.
15

17. Presented by Base
LinkedIn Recommendations
LinkedIn has a built in option for recommending companies, products, and
services, but your customers might not know about it. If you are specifically
seeking testimonials on LinkedIn, it is a great idea to let your customers know
that’s what you’d like. It all goes back to rule number one for getting
testimonials: you have to ask!
Help Your Customers Out With Their Testimonials
Even if your customers are completely open to writing a recommendation,
they might not know exactly how to write the stellar testimonial you’re looking
for. This gets to the heart of another strategy for earning great testimonials:
help customers write them!
Opinions differ on how much a company should try to influence the content of
their customers’ testimonials. However, if the customer asks for guidance, it is
a great idea to give them some previous examples of ideal testimonials, or
offer some pointers on how to write a good one.
The influence that a good testimonial can have on your bottom line is
incredible. A study by Keller Fay Group, outlined in Forbes, shows that
“Personal recommendations are the number one driver of consumer purchase
decisions at every stage in the consumer purchase cycle.”
Social media platforms offer a unique opportunity for businesses to get
testimonials while also building a stronger relationship with customers and
their communities. Reaching out to a customer to ask for a testimonial shows
them that their opinion matters to you, which they’re certain to share with their
social circles.
16

18. Presented by Base
5
Making Your Social Media and
Sales Pipeline Work Together
Any business that hopes to stay competitive in today’s market needs to be
using both social media and a robust sales pipeline. Additionally, Base CRM
and the Base Contact Clipping Tool can make it much easier to maintain up to
date records of the customer data you gather through social media.
The sales pipeline has long been a standby of successful businesses, and
social media platforms have evolved into serious tools for sales and marketing
over the past several years. As these two vital business tools continue to
evolve, it is important to stay up-to-date with new techniques and technology,
but also to remember the basics:
• Relationships are everything: Treating your customers well on social media
will pay you back in multiples. Engage your customers’ communities and
build their trust!
• Learn everything you can about your customers: The more information you
can gather about potential clients, the more you can offer them at every
stage of the sales pipeline, from prospecting to closing and winning the
sale.
• Ask for recommendations: Customers that you have truly helped will be
more than happy to recommend you, but you may need to give them the
extra push to take that action. Asking for testimonials can immediately bump
up your sales.
17

19. Presented by Base
With those principles in mind and a rich, attentive social media presence, you
should be able to take your sales pipeline to the next level and boost your
business into the stratosphere.
18

20. Presented by Base
Brought To You By Base
This ebook is brought to you by Base, the next-generation CRM and
sales productivity tool specifically designed to boost productivity and
keep you on track - whether you’re at your desk on on the road.
Base CRM is an intuitive, easy to use tool that takes just minutes to set
up. You’ll get powerful features like:
‣ Customizable pipeline
‣ Unlimited contacts
‣ Automated tasks
‣ Sales goal setting
‣ Social media Contact Clipper
‣ Dynamic reports
‣ FREE native mobile apps for Android, iOS and Windows devices
‣ Integrations with other tools you use, like Outlook or Gmail
Inspired? Sign up for a no risk free trial.

21. hjhdskmks
nkn jnsn
jnndsjvnjfn
ndjnvjndfj
nvnvdjnvjn
fjdnvdjnjnj
nvdjnjvdjn
The CRM you will actually
want to use.
Available on web, Android, iOS and Windows devices
Base is the only CRM built for people and the first post-PC CRM
where your mobile CRM experience is just as important as your web
CRM experience. Base is used by tens of thousands of businesses to
manage sales and customer relationships. Our mission is to make you
and your team 10x more productive.
Try Base Free
14-day free trial

22. © 2009-2014 Base | getbase.com