For many businesses November is seen as the last full ‘sales’ month of the calendar (and sometimes fiscal) year. Recognizing that buyers move into holiday mode as soon as the first baubles are spotted, activity levels become frantic. 

Marketing rushes to deliver campaigns, the sales teams hit the phones, customers see special promotions arrive in their inboxes every day.

Is there a way that a little bit of calm can be introduced to the process? In the era of data-led marketing, can we take a more structured approach and alleviate the pressures that everyone faces.

Much has been made of the end of the cold calling era and the arrival of intelligent profiling.  We have access to information about prospects and customers like never before. Increasingly your own in-house CRM systems are integrating with social to develop a fuller picture of the customer and their needs.

How can we take advantage of this knowledge and hit those year-end targets? Create our own ‘social economy’?

1) Don’t lose sight of the targeting as you aim for your targets. It’s easy to adopt spray-and-pray when your numbers, or lack of them, are shouting to you. Throw enough spaghetti and some will stick to the wall. But when time is of the essence, as it is right now, less is more may be a better mantra. Reach out to a smaller group, but through more channels and your engagement will increase, faster and your returns will too.

2) Think about what seasonal pressures your customers are under. If you’re in a b2b business, your customers are probably feeling the same as you. Is your value proposition effective enough to make them convinced that they should buy sooner rather than later? Adapt it to address the current issues and needs. If you’re trying to increase your market share of seasonal trade, make sure that your proposition is compelling. Look at your prospects and see how their social profiles are describing those needs. Don’t go into a meeting unless you’ve understood this. If your prospect has just tweeted that they’ve closed their biggest ever customer, talking about how your product will help them overcome financial difficulties may not be wise!

3) Revisit the lower-scoring leads. Remember how you had that great rapport with a contact but they just didn’t have budget. Have you engaged with them on Linkedin recently? They may not even be in the same business. Or their business may have just grown and budgets are free again. Remember that social encourages the person, so don’t think always in terms of the corporate suspect.

4) Look at the trends. It doesn’t have to be an expensive outreach to find ways to drive customers to your site, your shop, your business. Joining in on some of their discussion – whether it’s a fun twitter hashtag or a lively debate on Facebook makes you closer to them. Remember that first rule of social about engagement, not just telling. Offer the answers!

5) Make your outbound marketing match all of this. If you’ve engaged through Twitter, your outbound marketing needs to be Twitter-friendly. If you’re showing up on social platforms, these channels have to form part of your marketing.

We are all obsessed with amplifying our presence through social. We’re all taking up the idea that social can make us more intelligent business developers. Let’s use this time of year to work out exactly how social becomes the new link between our marketing, sales and demand generation activities. Reaching out through more channels to the right people, rather than one channel to many people could make life more of a breeze as you head towards 2012. But if you are still feeling the pressure:

There’s an easy way to get those campaigns off the ground and drive those year-end revenues. Brief the Exchange now.