Who is responsible for generating revenue at your company?

We took SocialToaster on the road to SXSW last month and made many good connections and are actually still following up on many of them (if you haven’t called back yet, we will find you…). Seriously, though, a thought occurred to me during the second half of the exposition/trade show while things were slow and we all started to wander the aisles to talk to other exhibitors. Who is responsible for generating revenue at these companies and any company for that matter?

While walking the aisles of the SXSW trade show I noticed that exhibitors had all sorts of representatives in their booths. Owners, founders, investors, sales people, tech staff, general employees, paid reps, models and more were working the booths in hopes of finding a contact that could lead to a sale. Companies were leveraging everyone and anyone to help them generate leads in hopes that those leads become sales/revenue.

Fast forward to today. The trade show is over and everyone has gone back to the job they had before the trade show and the only people working on sales/revenue are that small percentage of employees and upper management in sales and marketing. Why?

We recently talked to a company that had 400 employees in the mid Atlantic/East region of the US and their sales staff is about 20. This means that 5% of their staff is generating essentially all of their revenue (not counting the small percentage generated by national accounts sold in other regions). I am not suggesting that this must change. What I am asking is why leverage everyone possible within the company to generate leads only during certain times, such as while at a trade show? Why not leverage these resources all the time?

I know what you’re thinking – there are too many barriers to engaging all employees as members of a sales team all of the time, which present themselves in the areas of message integrity, rewards and tracking. These barriers may make you conclude that this kind of activity is not feasible. I would argue that with social media and tools like SocialToaster, organizations can take advantage of that resource while keeping control of the message and tracking results. Every organization has a core group of followers, including employees, that are willing to share information and help that organization generate revenue provided that you make it easy for them to do that. Find ways to engage them and make it easy for them to help and I think you will be surprised by the results.

Rely on SocialToaster

SocialToaster allows organizations to leverage that core group of followers by creating an opt-in ambassador pool that can in turn be used by the organization to promote content through the ambassadors’ social networks. Control the message, reach many people, drive traffic and track the results. If you’re curious to learn how advocacy marketing can help you, contact us at 855.62.TOAST, send us an email, or request a free demo!