I was in Austria this week presenting to the Board of a customer of ours at one of their company retreats.
Sitting in the airport in Munich on the way home, I was with my co-founder, Adam Gray and as we were sitting there I remarked.
"My customers are not on social" and we laughed.
Looking around the terminal gate, everybody (and I mean everybody) waiting for the plane had a mobile phone out and was looking at it.
We know that our customers are on social and we know we all hate being sold to.
One of the questions we asked the Board of this company was "can any of you recall an advert that you have seen in the last 24 hours?". Of course, nobody could.
We have built a resistance to advertising and ignore it, use ad-blockers or just dismiss it. Most adverts tell us how great a company or product is and we just don't believe it.
I showed the British Airways (BA) inflight magazine and it was "funny", advert after advert that harkened back to the 1990s. I'm amazed that people still spend money on these things.
I don't know about you but I now have the "no cold calling" functionality switch on my iPhone. Any callers that are not in my address book go straight to voicemail. Like You I'm sure, anybody that spams me, I build a rule so that in future emails from that address will go straight into the bin.
We know that our clients are on social, we know that interruption marketing (advertising, cold calling and spam emails) does not work .....let's embrace social and go where our clients are.
One Managing Director sent me a DM over LinkedIn the day before, he had made 14 sales over Linkedin in the last month ..... that's right a leader of a business had made an additional 14 sales, for free, using content marketing and social selling. What is your leader doing?
How do we do this at scale?
It's time to transform your business to social.
Our recommendation would be to start in sales, we see incremental (new) revenue increases of 30% and shortening of the sales cycle by 40%. The revenue created can be diverted into transforming the rest of the business.
Human Resources (HR), Finance, Procurement, Customer Services, Marketing can all be transformed with social.
(Note: Transforming Human Resources is NOT the same as employee advocacy).
Transforming HR is about getting to the talent quicker than your competition, retaining clients, reducing the cost of the HR department by making it more efficient and effective. (Stripping out of the cost of advertising and recruiters for example). This will enable you to build a platform that you will be the employer of choice for your industry.
It will also provide you with a platform to launch your employee experience program. We would expect employees to by 20 - 25% more efficient. Happier employees, means happier customers and more revenues!
It's time to reconnect with your customers and upskill your employees!
Digital natives were the first to grasp an important truth—that their future growth and success depend as much on redefining the customer experience as on offering better products and services. In the digital era, the ability to pivot nimbly to accommodate changing customer tastes is critical to maintaining market share, as leaders such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, and Airbnb have so potently demonstrated. Although most companies understand the customer experience imperative, many fail to see that adding to an already long list of change initiatives is not the best way to address it. Discrete incremental improvements won’t cut it.
