HubSpot, Boston area marketers extraordinaire, just published an eBook titled, “From Prospect to Evangelist- Optimizing Relationships With Social Media”.  Since the title combines sales and social media, I decided to give it a whirl.

Here are the three, key concepts from this eBook that the Sales Operations Blog audience should find valuable:

1) Social Media Extends The Traditional Sales Funnel

In the traditional sales funnel model, the process ends at the time of the sale, or right after, by asking for a referral. By using social media you have an opportunity to engage your customer(s) beyond the actual point of purchase and create evangelists for your brand.

Instead of adding a single referral to a follow-up list, your customers can tell their hundreds or thousands of friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook about you and your product.  Your customers can become “content creators” or “informal marketers” taking action to generate leads.

However, in order to make this happen, the sales experience must be outstanding, the product or service must be of very high quality and salespeople must continue to build and improve relationships after the sale.

2) Don’t Forget To Protect Your Social Media Data

If you and/or your company are having “business building” conversations on social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, it is important to back up those conversations for future use. There have been many reports about hackers getting into social media accounts and deleting critical data, even on “unhackable” sites like gmail.com. You don’t want that to happen to you!

HubSpot recommends a Boston area company called “Backupify” who describe themselves as “an all-in-one archiving, search and restore service for the most popular online services including Google Apps, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and more”. For more info check out http://www.backupify.com/.

I also found a great, 2010 article on Inc.com, which compares all of the social media back up services: “How to back up your social media accounts”.

3) Super Cool Stats

HubSpot’s 2011 State of Inbound Marketing report, based on a survey from 644 professionals, indicates that inbound marketing-dominated organizations (companies that use internet marketing, blogging, social media) experienced a 62 percent lower cost per lead than organizations dominated by outbound sales and marketing techniques.

Companies that blog, generate 55 percent more website visitor traffic and get 79% more Twitter followers.

To download HubSpot’s free, 27 page eBook, click here.  (Note, this was not a sponsored blog post.)

For fun, you might like an earlier Sales Operations Blog post, “8 Ways To Reduce Sales With Twitter”.