Social Media is relatively new, I've only been on Twitter 11 years, but in that time, things have accelerated.
In this research by Simon Kemp there are now more people on social than, not on social. So where as in the past if you were not on social, you were in the majority, now you are in the minority.
This expands also into business that in the past the majority of clients were not on social media, now the fact is that the majority of clients ARE on social media.
Isn't Social Media Trickery and Witchcraft?
We often read on social media about the business benefits of using social and the results are often difficult to understand logically.
People often make claims like "if you post on social media you will win business" Really?
The Linkedin message that will win you a $1 million deals. Yeah right!
There is an organization in Germany that say that with their social selling program they will make you a millionaire in six months. The secret seemed to be that you needed a high SSI score. Must admit I haven't heard from them recently.
There are a number of "Sales Experts" in the US who state that "theory X is true, because it says so in my book". Unfortunately, just because somebody says something in a book, it does not make it so. I would love to say that the Story of Peter Pan was true because it says so in a book. It's just fairytale.
With so many "experts" and so many people stating that social media "works" without nothing to back it up, it makes the process for a business to review and decide to implement social difficult.
If you have a cynical business leader who is signing off the budget, they will say "show me the leads". If all you have is the word of a guru, many people don't get the budget and rightly so.
Social Selling Results
Eric Doyle, he's a partner of ours. He's posted about the fact that he has started riding his bike again.
At the time of writing Eric has 36 likes and 53 comments. That means with the average person having 500 connections on Linkedin that has reached 44,500 people. Think how long it would take you to build an email list of 44,500 people. We could assume that those 44,500 have 500 connections, so that connect could be seen by 22 million people. Who cares? You want leads and meeting after all!
Last time I spoke to him, he has got 6 new business meetings from this, it took him 20 minutes to create.
(I wonder if you can create 6 new business minutes in 20 minutes from advertising, cold calling or email marketing? ... I doubt it, but let me know if you can).
So What's Change?
We decided to turn social selling on its head.
Using our clients we have undertaken research. We know all the way through the stages of the buying process, what works with social selling and what does not. And it's back by data. Thus turning social selling from an art to a science.
This does not guarantee you success of course, as it is your sales team that will be doing the selling, not us. But assuming you have an average sales team then we would expect you to be able to get one additional meeting per week.
If you are able to turn four meetings into one proposal and three proposal into one new sale that means you should get one additional sale per quarter.
Let's assume your average sale is $100,000, that is an additional $400,000 per sales person or $4 million per year, every year, for ever.
Of course you might be above average and have a better closing rate, then the amount you make from data driven social selling will be higher.
Not bad for a small investment.
If you want more information about how we turned social selling from being an art into a science contact me here.
Nathan McDonald, global chief executive, We Are Social said, “Our lives are becoming increasingly interwoven with the digital world, and the acceleration of social media use globally is another reflection of this. It’s significant that so many of us are now on social media, using it in a variety of different ways; for news, opinions, information and entertainment; to socialise and, increasingly, to inform purchase decisions.”
