In addition to the increased use of social media, there are other reasons for expanding our profiles and our digital activities: The accessibility of contact persons has become more difficult due to more home offices and short-time work on the customer side via the classic channels such as telephone, mail and e-mail. A study supports our experience and states that since March of this year 60% more sales emails are written, but the response rate drops by 30%. It has become difficult to contact new companies without having contact details of the responsible persons. However, another study shows that the use of social networks has increased by an average of 75% since March.

The social media world offers many options. But how do you get the knowledge you need to make strategic sense? Gesa Gröning has been working for us as a service provider on online topics for some time now and is able to understand our situation well. We hired her for a workshop on "Social Media as a sales tool" to learn more about the best approach. We invited her via video-call to our conference room and asked all colleagues who support us in sales matters to join us.

Our first realization was that we use social media quite often without having an awareness of it. Because everything that makes interaction possible belongs to social networks, including rating platforms. We were surprised that company profiles are partly created automatically by social platforms. Without the knowledge of the owners, this means that information is available on the Internet that has come about without any action on their part and represents companies in a negative way. Of course, this also has an influence on customer acquisition and the image of a company.

The most important thing was to find out how the functionalities of the individual platforms differ, in which a paid profile is worthwhile or even a regular presence is a prerequisite for our sales target. We will deal more intensively with LinkedIn and Xing. The functionalities for research, networking and exchange with business partners are useful. Here we can find our industry-specific decision makers and accelerate sales activities.

The level of knowledge in our company was very different. Thanks to the workshop, we are on the same line and can exchange information more easily. The goal for the next weeks is to put the gained competence into practice. We would be pleased if you would join us at LinkedIN and XING network and our Company Profiles follow.