What I Told Transworld About Using Social Media to Market to Managers

Last week I gave a talk to a group of Transworld salespeople from across the United States. Transworld is the top name in collections across a variety of industries and they asked me to give a presentation on “How to Use Social Media to Reach Your Target Audience,” with the target audience being…people like you and me: managers, administrators, healthcare executives, and pretty much anyone in healthcare dealing with patient accounts receivables.

I described how much harder it is for today’s manager to make time to meet with salespeople. More than ever administrators are pulled in a million different directions, and it is not unusual for a manager’s priorities to shift from day to day and hour to hour. This must be incredibly frustrating for the salesperson who is trying to keep things flowing, but it’s a fact of life in healthcare.

Chris Brogan

In my talk I featured the work of two gentleman who really get how social media can positively impact sales. Chris Brogan is a prolific author and consultant who always has an interesting perspective on social media. I discussed his ideas around the sales circle as opposed to the sales cycle. You can read about it here.

Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is another prolific author who has worked twice for Apple and created the wonderful alltop.com. He recently spoke via webinar about ground rules for social media in a way that I thought would speak directly to a sales team.

Here are his rules for social media:

Be likable

Be trustworthy

Be transparent

Be approachable

Be thankful

Create value

Needless to say, these rules work for social media, sales, and life in general. As my partner Abraham says about the rules, “Just do what your Mama taught you.”

In the Q & A, we explored some innovative ways to communicate with managers and talked about how to work for the manager instead of making him/her work for you. It was a fantastic conversation, and the audience from Transworld had a lot of insightful questions that made for a great exchange.

I look forward to hearing what they come up with!

If you are interested in a presentation to your sales or customer service team about marketing to medical practices, or understanding medical practice operations and workflow, please email me here, or call me at 919.370.0504.