Vimal Rai is one of the team here at DLA Ignite (based in Singapore) and he wrote a post on Linkedin.
Here is some context. He used to work at Jet Airways, they are selling the crockery. Anyway it got picked up by the press. Which is some nice "free advertising" for Vimal and DLA Ignite. I explain more in a bit.
This is not a post of "buy my product, because we are great" which is what every company says and everybody ignores. It's humanised, it's fun. It's not corporate content.
To give you some idea of what I'm talking about, based on our research here is our "Maslow's Pyramid of Content". As you can see, paid media, advertising is at the bottom because everybody ignores it. Then corporate content, or branded content. Again, this is ignored because it's the same as everybody else "by my product because it's great".
Then we move onto employee advocacy. Now Danielle Guzman of Mercer, states in this video interview with her, that they get 3 to 4 times the amount of business using employee advocacy than just the brand. So while Mercer, unlike 99% of businesses has a strong brand, this will generate some inbound. Employee advocacy will generate 3 to 4 times what the brand can do. This is brilliant and a great result, and Danielle is a star for working hard and getting this results. But she knows, she can do better. She also has people creating humanised content. At the top is humanised content, which we are showcasing some examples in this article. Let's get back to Vimal.
Vimal says
"A bit of background: I used to work for Jet Airways back in 2008. They went belly up last year. I saw a random listing for an auction of their crockery and did a post on it. I shared my story about having worked on the design.
I’ve had more than a few messages from aviation folk, ex-Jet staff of course, but also loads of other airlines execs. And then this journalist (and her editor and chief of bureau in Mumbai, India, who checked out my profile and connected). My profile views are up about 145% week on week. I’ve just came off a call where I was introduced as the “person who wrote the LinkedIn algorithm” and am (therefore) being asked to guide the comms folk at design agency Priestman Goode (!!!) on how to promote their events."
This is great, but there are no real leads. I'm sure Vimal (or Vim as we call him) will get some leads and deals off the back of this, but you are reading this to get leads. Let's look at another example.
Here is Another Example
James Stirk, another of the team here at DLA Ignite he did this post
It has 77 likes and 23 comments. That's 100 opportunities to have a conversation.
(Conversations lead to proposals and deals, right?)
From a Marketing perspective the average person on Linkedin has 930 connections. When you like or comment on an article that means that the network of the person who likes or shares can see that post. That means 100,700 people could have seen this content.
Think of that as an email database of 100,700. Pretty nifty.
That is also a "shed load" of people who will look at your profile, if you have a great profile, not a CV, not I'm a quota killing sales people as nobody likes that. But a profile that shows who you are as a person. Then all of those profile views are like "free" cold calls. But warm calls.
After all as cold call is where you ring someone up and tell them about your product and service. A profile view is where somebody, (without interrupting them) checks you out. It's the same thing, but better.
This is where our social selling methodology is different. You will see cold callers saying that social selling doesn't work, it's about posting content and hoping. We all know hope isn't a strategy.
This is very old thinking. What we do is give you a methodology and take all of those likes and comments and have conversations with the people. We all know that conversations, turn into proposals and proposals turn into deals. Another example.
Here's Another Example
Eric Doyle, he's a partner of ours. He posted a piece of content, it currently has 165 likes and 37 comments and has been viewed 18,292 times.
It's created for him 124 leads.
28 outbound connections.
13 new inbound connections.
6 meetings (1 CEO, 1 COO, 2 MDs, 2 FDs)
1 Proposal
All from 10 minutes of work.
The Challenge - Can Your Advertising, Email Marketing and Cold Calling get Results Like this?
(I wonder if you can create 6 new business meetings in 10 minutes from advertising, cold calling or email marketing? ... I doubt it, but let me know if you can).
Social Selling Better Results Than Your Paid Media?
One of our clients sales guys as created the same number of "clicks" with a single Linkedin post (for free, it took him 20 minutes) than the whole of his marketing team created last quarter with paid media. OK I lied, it was a few clicks less, but almost the same .... so when we scale that across the sales team of course, the sales team is creating more qualified meetings, for free, than the marketing team on paid media. There are clear winners and losers here in sales and marketing ... it's time to decide which way your business is going to go. It's time to switch your budget from paid media into social.
Social Selling Wil Bus Prospects To Your Sales Team
As one client said to us "I cannot believe this, you are in fact just busing prospects to have meetings with my sales team". Now I know I'm biased and there are millions of people on Linkedin with a quick fix to your pipeline problem. What you have to do as a leader is pick the one that will make your business survive.
Let's Think About This
There are a bunch of social selling gurus in the US who say you cannot teach sales people to create content. Wrong! - Just Look at the money they are leaving on the table!
We tried social and it didn't work. Really? This isn't witchcraft this is real people, getting conversations, proposal and deals. We have research and data to back all of our training up. Literally it's "do this" and "do this" and you will get this result.
Social selling is about posting content and hoping! - Anybody who says this is a dinosaur, they don't know what they are talking about. You can see this from the above. There was a job advert where the person said "social sellers need no apply" what an idiot!
It's 2020
So what are you going to do?
Cold calling was created in 1980, email marketing was created in 1990. Some people using these techniques were not even born.
You run a forward thinking progressive company and you are proud of making your number, year after year. Are you really going to sink your budget into 30 year old technology? I bet you don't still have a fax and video recorded in conference rooms. So why are you sales people still using 30 year old sales techniques?
Yes they work, but this works a whole lot better!
How are you going to pull back this year, how are you going to make your number in 2021?
If you want more information about how we turned social selling from being an art into a science contact me here.
former employee Vimal Kumar Rai. In a LinkedIn post, he shared, “This is bittersweet for me personally...painful even. I distinctly remember sitting across from William in Jet’s Hammersmith office till late one evening back in the summer of 2010 getting inspiration for all of these designs. We were exhausted but decided to give it one final go. We were looking at the ‘waves’ on the letterhead, the designs on the corporate stationery and bingo — it suddenly became clear what needed to happen.”
