I like examples, especially simple ones that you get right away. My simple mind perhaps? Whatever the reason, because I have been researching successful B2B uses of Twitter lately I thought I would share this example of how Twitter helped at least one company make a sale.

It all started with a tweet (once upon a tweet?) from someone I follow.

I hadn’t heard of crowdSPRING so I checked them out. Now it turns out that I was a few days away from using their competitor 99Designs (who by the way I had used before with great results), but hey, if my colleague who I respect was using Crowdspring, perhaps they were better yet?

So I replied to him

And here is where it gets interesting. I did not hear back from him but within 5 minutes I got tweets from both 99designs and crowdSPRING, literally seconds apart.

Clearly they had staff running an ongoing search for any mention of their company, and both took the opportunity to try to influence my buying decision – good on them!

Takeaway #1 – every company should be using Twitter to search for opportunities to react to people who are shouting out that they are interested in their products.

It’s also interesting that while my tweet clearly referenced 99designs, I shortened crowdSPRING to cspring, which means they were searching, not just for their company name but for at least one variation of it – really smart.

Takeaway #2 – search not just for your exact company name but for variations on it, especially abbreviations.

Lastly, as I read their tweets it also occurred to me that a new skill is required from salespeople – pitch your product in no more than 140 characters, but more on that in a future post.

Both companies reacted quickly and well and I did end up buying a service from one of them, you gotta believe the ROI on that tweet was huge! You don’t need many people like me to justify using Twitter, at least for this purpose. By the way, I am curious – which one would you have picked based on the tweets from the companies?