Selling in the Social Media Age: Birthday Messages

Tomorrow the Sales Is Not For Sissies blog is one! To celebrate the blog, I thought this post was appropriate.

When I celebrated my birthday in November, I received a flurry of messages from well-wishers on Facebook and LinkedIn. One stood out—and not in a good way. That’s because this message wasn’t a sincere wish for a happy birthday. It was a canned sales pitch.

If this message arrived in the mail, I wouldn’t have minded. But it showed up on my Facebook page. As I read the first paragraph, annoyance crept over me. I read no further, deleted the message and shook my head.

Sales professionals need emotional intelligence to succeed. That means you step outside yourself and look at the world through the eye of the customer. And trust me on this—customers and potential customers won’t like you more if you springboard off birthday wishes to launch into a sales pitch.

Wishing a customer happy birthday should be about them—not about you selling to them.