“We know all our customers so there’s no point using social media to get more.” We’ve heard that many times over the past four years. But is it a fair point? Jake Waterhouse from DEKOMTE de Temple thought he knew all his potential clients but considered social media too important to ignore. He asked Status Social to deliver LinkedIn training for him and his senior team based in Gloucestershire. DEKOMTE supply expansion joints to many of the world’s largest power stations. Jake explained how LinkedIn had helped him make new inroads… “I only joined LinkedIn about seven months ago and that’s why we had the training six months ago, just to make sure we were using it in the right way. “First of all we started adding contacts, using our contact database we had to find all the people that were using LinkedIn from all the power plants and OEMs we were dealing with. I’m quite surprised by how quickly that has grown, we have over 500 contacts already, which is quite amazing. “I was sceptical at the beginning whether or not we would actually gain any new business from using LinkedIn but we have already received a couple of serious requests, one specific enquiry, which we followed up. That initiation wouldn’t have arisen if we didn’t have LinkedIn. “One of my roles in terms of managing more international markets has been introducing and referring contacts from different countries. So in terms of bringing about a better cohesion across all our offices and for people to see what contacts we have in other countries it’s been quite interesting. “The thing which I think we struggled with (which you helped us with on the LinkedIn training) was making sure we gained regular bulletin material and regular status updates. We’ve now found a way to get bulletins that really focus on new products, new seminars, presentations and trying to look at new things we’re doing in the business. We’re now looking internally at how we can produce better bulletins. “Overall it’s been a really good experience. We just hope to try and build on it and hopefully do some more networking and get some new enquiries from it. “We are a very small, niche market which is very much based personally and on relationships. There are only 150 customers for us in the UK, so you’d ask ‘What good is social networking when you already know?’ But the thing with relationships, unless you’re speaking to them on a regular basis, you don’t know how things change. “Using this extra media actually takes pressure off the relationship because it allows a connection with the customer which isn’t all about me contacting them at the wrong or inconvenient time. They can actually see what we’re doing and things crop up that people didn’t know we did before because maybe we didn’t always consider it as applicable. “I definitely think it’s interesting for every type of company, whether it be business-to-business or more consumer-focused to think about social networking to give a new dimension to the relationships they have with their customers.”
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 10:36:00 +0000
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