The following appears on digital printing.blogs.xerox.com

Do you hate cold calling?

Cold calling is seen as an essential part of the print sales routine. But I have yet to meet anyone who actually enjoy cold calling. Nevertheless, most people believe that it’s the most effective way to drive sales.

I’m going to ask you something that may cause you to question this:

How many effective cold calls can you make in a day?
Most printing salespeople that I have spoken to believe that they are lucky to make 10 truly effective calls. That means a lot of costly sales resources are spent if you really want to drive sales forward.

Even when you make an effective call, you are still a long way off from booking any business. That’s why it’s time for printing companies to look at complementary and supporting sales channels.

Social media can be a very efficient way to increase your sales
In our last article, we saw a case study of a printing company that increased its sales by 46% year-over-year because it embraced social media strategies. However, many companies are struggling to get real results from their social media activity. This is often because they have no real social media strategy.

There are three main ways to use social media to increase sales. The first is to use it to get prospects to come to you.

Social media is a great way to attract prospects
If you want to attract new prospects, you need to make sure that you have an engaging social media presence. Firstly, that means you need to be active in social media! But there’s more to it than that.

You need to offer something of interest to your prospects. You need an engaging profile. You also need to be posting useful information for your audience.

Naturally, not all prospects will come to you. You are also going to have to make the effort.

Social media helps you find new prospects
The search functions on all the key social media platforms allow you to find people you should be engaging with. 20 minutes of browsing on LinkedIn should give you a large number of people that would be worth connecting with. There’s also plenty of free tools on the Internet that help you find social media users in various industries and locations.

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