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.
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 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.
Thank you so much Mary Pat for the time you gave to our sales force and for your helpful insights, it’s greatly appreciated. One of the things you said that surprised us was that you felt client testimonial videos were better received when they’re casual and taken on a Flip camera. We spent alot of money having professional client testimonial videos taken with our clients at last year’s MGMA national conference and we are very happy with how they came out. (http://www.youtube.com/user/transworldsystemstv). I’d love to see you do a poll on that topic!
Hi Karen,
It was my pleasure! It would be a wonderful test to show two testimonials by the same person, one casual and one professional, and see what managers respond to. My thought is that the casual video reflects a true, spontaneous, from-the-heart testimonial, versus something that has been scripted and prepped and edited and packaged.
Any readers have an opinion?
Mary Pat
Dear Mary Pat,
I echo Karen’s sentiments…the talk was very informative and I agree with you about the webinars vs in-office initial meetings. I have found that administrators in the Pacific NW have been much more receptive lately to online initial presentations than in the past. Of course, it’s still a very personal preference and I like to give them the option of telling me what they feel most comfortable with. Along with the casual vs professional video poll, I’d love to see one on webinars vs office meetings to see how many folks out there still prefer ‘the old fashioned way’.
Hi Lisa,
I will definitely have to work on some polls!
Best wishes,
Mary Pat