What if your company is already having sales conversations every day—and not counting them?

Most brands assume inbound social activity is primarily customer support. Questions. Complaints. Troubleshooting.

But what happens when the data tells a different story?

In this episode, Brooke Sellas shares the surprising findings from a customer intent study with Brother International. After analyzing inbound customer inquiries, one division discovered that nearly 80% of interactions were happening before a purchase decision had been made.

Customers weren't looking for support. They were comparing products, asking about pricing, evaluating features, and trying to determine what to buy.

The discovery challenged a long-held assumption inside the organization and revealed something much bigger: customer-facing channels may be capturing valuable demand signals that never make it into pipeline reports, revenue discussions, or executive dashboards.

If your team is focused on engagement metrics, response times, and support volume, you may be overlooking some of the clearest indicators of purchase intent already entering your business.

In This Episode:

• Why most organizations underestimate the amount of buying intent already flowing through customer-facing channels

• The Brother International case study that changed how one division thinks about demand generation

• What purchase-intent data looks like in real customer interactions

• The buying signals hidden inside pricing questions, product comparisons, feature requests, and purchase inquiries

• Why leadership teams need a better way to connect customer conversations to pipeline and revenue

• How acquisition tagging helps uncover demand that traditional reporting often misses

Want to learn how to identify buying signals, uncover hidden demand, and connect customer interactions to business outcomes?

Check out the CARE Blueprint Course: https://courses.bsquared.media/courses/CARE

Use code SMCX for 50% off at checkout.

Connect with Brooke

Website: https://bsquared.media

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookebsellas

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brookebsellas

What we found stopped everyone within the company in their tracks.

Nearly eight out of 10 inbound conversations reflected purchase

consideration before a sale ever happened.

Hey, hey, and welcome back to the Social Media CX Podcast.

I'm your host, Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media, author of Conversations

That Connect, and your official guide to turning social media from

a cost center into a revenue engine.

Doesn't that sound nice?

This is week two of our June CARE series.

Last week we talked about C, or Conversations, and why they're

the foundation of everything.

Why that brands aren't having conversations yet can't

build anything on top of it.

And how an insurance company, yes, insurance, got over 3% monthly engagement

just by showing up differently on social.

If you missed that one, go back, because it's the foundation of

everything we're building this month.

But today we're talking about the A, which stands for Acquisition.

We tag all of those incoming conversations to see how much of it

is acquisition, so intent to buy.

And I'm gonna share a story that generally changed how one of our clients

thinks about their entire business.

Not just their social strategy, but their entire business.

So strap in!

Several years back, we started working with Brother International.

You probably know Brother because of their printers or their sewing

machines or their label makers.

They are a global technology brand with a massive product catalog

and a very active social presence.

We came on to manage their social care, and when we do that, we did what we

always do, which was we started tagging and coding every inbound conversation.

So we're responding to those, yes, and we're closing the loop or closing

support tickets, yes, but we also wanna categorize what people are saying and

why they're saying it to the brand about the brand and so on and so forth.

And this is where things get interesting Because for Brother, like

most brands, here's what they assumed going in: social's for support.

It's for those complaints.

People come to us on social when something's broken, when they have

a question, when they're frustrated, so they assumed that the majority of

the conversation would be support.

They didn't think that pre-purchase conversations or

acquisition would be there.

They said if anything, they thought maybe 5% of their inbound conversation would be

acquisition or pre-purchase conversations.

But that assumption is usually very wrong.

What we found for Brother in those early days was that almost 20% of their inbound

conversation was acquisition-related or buying intent related.

More recently, we ran a 90-day tagging intent study across their

inbound social care conversations for one of their divisions, Sews.

And what we found stopped everyone within the company in their tracks.

Nearly eight out of 10 inbound conversations reflected purchase

consideration before a sale ever happened.

Let me say that one more time.

80% of the conversations coming into their social channels around the

Sews division were happening before anyone had bought anything, and

they were about buying something.

Almost 40% were tagged as purchasing intent.

Almost 25% were price inquiries directly asking about the price

of the product, and almost 16% were features and spec questions.

So this is where people asking things like, "Where can I buy this?" People

comparing models, people who were ready to spend money, and they were

landing in the social care queue.

So when we brought that data to Brother, they were shocked and

excited, hopefully in that order.

Because once you see those kinds of numbers, once you understand

that your social inbox isn't just a support desk, that it's also an active

sales pipeline, you can't unsee it.

And Brother didn't just file this away in this report that we built,

they're now figuring out how to roll out a social selling strategy across

every single one of their departments.

Starting with, obviously, the sewing products division, where the acquisition

signals are the loudest and the results might be the most dramatic.

That is what acquisition tagging does.

This is the A in CARE.

It doesn't just tell you what's happening in your social channels,

it tells you what's possible.

It tells you how to get to return on investment for social.

So let's talk about what acquisition tagging actually is and how it

works inside of the CARE framework so that you can do this too.

When we talk about acquisition in CARE, we're talking about identifying and

coding every inbound social conversation that signals pre-purchase intent.

So that might include things like purchasing interest, price inquiries,

feature and spec questions, setup barriers where someone's trying to

figure out if your product will work for them before they buy, or where

can I buy messaging, also product comparisons or competitor comparisons.

These are not support conversations.

They are sales conversation.

And the problem that we see is that most brands are treating

these things like support tickets.

They're responding, but with generic answers.

They're closing the loop and moving on, "Here's where you can buy it,

here's the link," and then moving on.

They're not tagging, they're not tracking, and they're not feeding

that data anywhere meaningful.

Which means they have no idea how much revenue potential is sitting in

their social inbox every single day.

The acquisition tagging layer of care fixes all of that because it gives

you a system for identifying those conversations, coding them consistently

and critically, building a data set that you can take upstairs to leadership.

Here is the truth about C-suite and social media.

They don't care about engagement rates.

They care about pipeline and revenue.

They care about return on investment, ROI.

Acquisition tagging gives you the bridge between those things.

I want to come back to that Brother number for a second, because I know

some of you are sitting there and thinking, "Okay, but that's Brother

International, big brand, big product catalog, lots of inbound volume.

That's not us." And here's what I want you to know.

We have seen acquisition percentages ranging from twenty percent all the way

up to sixty or seventy percent on specific product lines across our client base.

The brands that are surprised by those numbers are surprised because every single

one of them assumed they were sitting at zero or maybe five percent at the most.

Every single one.

Literally every single client we've ever spoken to has said zero to five percent

would be acquisition-type conversations.

So this is not a Brother International story.

It's an every brand story.

The question that I think you should be asking yourself isn't whether acquisition

conversations are happening in your social channels, because they probably are.

It's whether or not you are paying attention to the conversations

that are happening and labeling or tagging them in such a way that

helps you see that bigger picture.

If this is making you think, "I need to understand what's actually happening

in our social conversations," that's exactly where the Care Blueprint comes in.

The Care Blueprint is a course that I built specifically to teach you this

system, how to set up your conversation coding, how to tag acquisition signals,

how to build the reporting that makes your C-suite sit up straight.

You can find it at the link in the show notes, so wherever you're

listening to this podcast or watching this podcast, head on over to the

show notes, the transcript, and you'll see a link to that course.

And because you are listening to this show, if you use the code SMCX,

as in Social Media Customer Experience, at checkout, you will get 50% off.

That brings the course down from $97 just to $48.

$48 to learn the system that is now helping Brother International discover

80% of their social conversations were pre-purchase pipeline.

I mean, come on, y'all, pretty darn good.

Next week, we're going to be talking about the R in CARE, which is retention tagging.

So if acquisition is the C-suite wake-up call, retention is

where the real volume lives.

It's also where the most compelling cost math is hiding.

Because everyone knows it's cheaper to keep a customer

than it is to find a new one.

However, very few brands know exactly how much retention is actively

already happening in their social channels or what it's actually worth.

We're gonna talk about that next week, so do not miss out.

As always, if this show is helping you think differently about

customer experience or social media strategy, please rate and review us

wherever you're listening to this podcast, or watching, right now.

It helps us bring on more brilliant voices and keeps our

community growing with intention.

Until next time, think conversation, not campaign.