Time is often the commodity most overlooked

For a sales professional or account manager who spends time racing up and down motorways, keeping up with paperwork and generally trying to balance 8 plates on one, thin pole hearing sentences like 'take a while to get to know social media' is probably not a very favourable suggestion. In fact, though they'd probably never admit it to their bosses, that line probably wakes up a few internal neighbours with continuous expletives being held back from actually making it past the voice box.

Social media is not really a close friend of time, especially when it comes to debates around saving it. Being told to go through all of the sign in processes and the up keep to ensure your accounts remain fresh is not an ideal scenario. For a B2B account manager, social media is useful to watch from the outside, but not so much practically when it comes to participating. There's info on Twitter for example that's great to use, but needs to be fished out, rather than caught by hand.

The message here for sales pros is despite what you may hear, the truth is it's not essential to be a 'social media expert'. Like any influential medium it's important to understand how it ticks, and it's vital to appreciate where it adds value, but you can't possibly throw yourself fully into it and expect to have time to do anything else (in the same way just because you advertise on TV doesn't mean you have to be a Hollywood director).

As long as you know what's happening with your customers on these mediums, in a way that suits you, you still have time to focus on the real issue at hand and that's building personal relationships with your clients. Time is the commodity that many social media gurus forget. Business needs to go on as usual; make sure that social CRM works for your work flow.