Can Social media be used to shorten sales cycles?

Viktor,

Salescult is a job career portal powered by TooStep, with that what I understand is TooStep might be providing a CRM dashboard to Salescult which will tell user preferences & their behavior to them. With that kind of Dashboard, it will be easy for Salescult to put targeted jobs or to reach particular user set which in turn will help in right conversion & reduce their sales cycle.

But still the onus of user engagement will be there on Salescult which will help them to understand the user preferences better......

I will share some dashboard images with you later.....

Viktor,

I don't have the Use Case as such but it should be something like the career site of this platform e.g. Salescult

I think TooStep has given this facility to some recruitment firms. I hope this should be clear..........

@Makrand - Good point, the e-form thing can also be done but it should not be cumbersome & integrated pretty well....

Yes, definitely. When using social we are involving the people supposedly propects to talk about your solution, however when it comes to influencing B2B we tend to forget that companies are also made of people. So if we can find out the target organizations employees internet usage patterns, we can make sure that the populace could be targeted in social media pattern as well.............

It can work....

Sales departments should have been taking advantage of these technologies long ago. As a matter of fact, Sales and Marketing should be sharing these internal solutions and collaborating much more.

Social media can level the playing field for businesses, however, as Mr. Makrand astutely points out, one should definitely use this tools to create buzz about your product / solution that prospective users just can't live without. I believe the key is to successfully integrating social media with conventional marketing at every stage of the buying process which in turn will help the sales process. However companies & salesmen still have a long way to go when it comes to using social media to improve knowledge management and sales in the sales department.......

By implementing social tools on a site, the quantity, quality, and type of user data can be collected and analyzed and we can gain access to previously unavailable information that can guide us in targeting, customizing and delivering content delivered to users right as they realize that what we have delivered is exactly what they need.