This episode of the More Clients Podcast is an interview with Eric Quanstrom, Chief Marketing Officer of Social CRM vendor Nimble.

Before jumping straight in to the podcast I want to explain a little bit about Social CRM and how we can use it to help us win clients.

CRM or Customer/Client Relationship Management systems have been around for quite a while. They allow you to store client and prospect profiles, log any communications you have with them, plan activities with them and (on some systems) to plan and track specific sales opportunities.

What Social CRM systems do is add in external information from social media.

So in your CRM system you then get to see the latest Linkedin status updates from your contacts or their recent tweets all in one place. And you can interact with them through those channels right from the CRM rather than having to head off to Linkedin or Twitter or email.

On the podcast Eric explains some of the ways people are using Nimble (and of course, other Social CRM systems) but I want to say a little first about one of the big opportunities I see for Social CRM. I call it Social Nurturing (or sometimes, if I'm feeling frisky, Social Stalking).

We all know how important it is to nurture relationships with clients and prospects. You need multiple interactions with people before they'll be ready to buy from you.

But traditionally, it's been quite hard to keep those relationships up. You meet someone at an event. You send them a follow up email. You might send them an article you've written you think they'd be interested in. But what then?

I teach a simple system in Momentum Club that helps you think through what activities to use to add value to your relationships with clients and prospects. And I recently added Social Nurturing into the mix because it can make it much much easier.

The reason is that Social Nurturing bases your nurture activities on what's important to your clients and prospects right now. So rather than trying to guess what they would they be interested in and value and then sending it to them, you use social media to “spy” on them to see what they really are interested in.

Just 5-10 minutes every day or so checking up on what your top prospects and clients are saying on social media can give you a huge amount of insight into them both business-wise and personally.

I experimented with Social Nurturing last year and was surprised at just how much information it's possible to glean by looking at Tweets and status updates.

With one MD of a professional service firm I followed, for example, I quickly identified what his favourite foods and wines were, where he liked to go on holiday, his favourite football team and what he thought about their current form (in quite vivid language), his tastes in music, and some of the big things he was thinking about for his business (because of the articles he tweeted links to).

And we chatted a number of times too. I retweeted some of the articles he was tweeting. He did the same for me. And we exchanged @messages.

I'd met him face to face a couple of times before but this deepened our relationship and gave us something meaty to talk about next time we met. And you can use similar strategies to initiate contact with someone that then leads on to a face to face or telephone conversation.

You can do Social Nurturing the hard way by compiling private Twitter lists and looking at them, then jumping to individual Linkedin profiles (or maybe even Facebook). Or you can do it much quicker by using a Social CRM that brings all the data into one place.

And a new breed of Social CRM starting from scratch and based around these social features like Nimble is growing up.

In this podcast, Eric discusses some of these strategies you can use using a Social CRM system to make your marketing and business development more productive and more effective. He covers both social nurturing and the idea of “social signals” pulling out information from social media data that tells you when you need to be doing something pro-actively with your contacts.

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And if you head over to nimble.com you can get a free trial of the system and read more details on Social CRM.