Social media is killing your sales! While social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs can be very effective marketing tools for sales professionals and new home builders, they are limited in ways that prevent them from being effective sales tools. Social media is limited to passive conversation and lacks elements of complete communication.  As a sales professional, I am alarmed by the trend of substituting such passive forms of communication for a sales professional’s most valuable asset—the human connection.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for using social media to create awareness—I blog regularly and have active Twitter and Facebook accounts. Social media outlets can be very effective at creating awareness and may sway people to buy when consumer confidence is high. But relying on marketing alone is risky and unprofitable, especially when consumer confidence is low, there is little interest and you actually have to create urgency in your buyers. By all means, use social media to spread the word or get someone into your office, but don’t expect it to create urgency in your buyers. In other words, use it to create an opportunity to engage in a complete conversation rather than as a replacement.

Complete communication is face-to-face, real-time dialogue. According to Albert Mehrabian, psychology professor at UCLA, the combination of your tone of voice and body language accounts for 93% of the listener’s interpretation of your message. That means that how you say something is 13 times more influential than what you say. Social media communicates the words (7% of the message), but lacks the benefit of complete communication. Even social media conversation (such as comments and written responses) only tells part of the story. You can’t hear your clients mmm hmms or humphs. You can’t understand the voice inside someone’s head or the whys that drives them. You don’t hear a client’s hesitation or see their excitement. Sales professionals must be able to influence the outcome of a conversation. Relying on social media to communicate your message prevents you from being able to explain and help them see things differently. Passive forms of communication have their place, but relying on 7% of the equation minimizes a sales professional’s ability to influence their customer’s paradigm. Just transferring or providing information puts all the pressure on the customer to form opinions about the constant flow of data they receive. What clients really need is an expert to help them sift through and interpret that information. What they need is a sales professional.

Too often, social media is an outlet for passive monologue that provides one-dimensional feedback at best. The information alone can only change someone’s view of to an extent.  An active dialogue that occurs in real time allows participants to influence the outcome. Selling is about helping people see things differently. It’s about communication. There is no substitute for live, active conversation, so the closer you get to that, the more effective you’ll be. When you can hear “no” rather than read it, you can hear the tone. “No, leave me alone,” is very different from “No, but thank you so much for calling.” The whole point of selling is talking to the customer and hearing what they’re thinking.

I will always recommend a phone call as the first option for following up after a visit. Aside from face-to-face conversation, a phone call is the best way to engage and thank prospects for visiting. There is a hierarchy of effectiveness. When those methods are unavailable, I’m all for trying a text, personal email, tweet, or handwritten note. When none of those work, stick a marketing piece in the mail. Just don’t make passive forms of communication your priority.

Sales is an active profession and true communication is active as well. Social media alone is 7% of the equation and lacks the human connection that comes from a complete conversation.  Sales professionals get 100% of the equation through live interaction. I’m not against social media as a marketing tool; I’m against enabling sales professionals to substitute technology for the human connection.

As a sales professional, author, professional speaker, and consultant, Jason Forrest helps home builders increase closings and profits through leadership sales training. His books include Creating Urgency in a Non-Urgent Housing Market and 40 Day Sales Dare for New Home Sales. He can be reached at jason@jforrestgroup.com and www.jforrestgroup.com.