A CEO told one of my team this week "we know something is wrong, we know the answer is social, but we don't know how to get there ..."

We know that advertising, email marketing and cold calling is failing.  I'm not saying it doesn't work, but the output (key result) you get from these activities falls every year.

To maintain the same level of results from these activities requires an increase of spend every year or you just force the salespeople to make more and more calls and send more and more emails to try and get the same results.  This is a business out of control.

The problem for many business is that they know there has been a shift to online and digital, this research from Simon Kemp backs this up. 

And this research shows that we have gained ten years of digital transformation in just 3 months.

As our CEO friend said above "we know something is wrong .." but marketing is stuck in traditional mindsets.  When this CEO asked his Marketing team to come up with a solution, they requested more budget to place more ads and send more emails.

As Einstein said

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Then Covid19 hit us.

Disruption Isn't new, we have lived through 9/11 in 2001, the the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, huracanes, tropical storms and tornadoes.  But Covid_19 is different. It does not impact one country, or one geographical area, a market sector, it impacts the whole world.  Running a global business, it's been amazing to talk to people in France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Peru, United States, Canada, Australia and they are all impacted in the same way.

We all went into lockdown and we are all trying to pull out of lockdown without a second wave.  While trying to create pipeline and close business.  It's like trying to fly a plane and fix the engine at the same time. 

How Can Social Selling Impact Your OKRs?

Many clients are coming to us and saying 

"We are operating in increasingly challenging market, suffering from declining pipe and increased pressure on margin"

"Previous strategies that relied heavily on cold calling and emailing for sales pipeline are no longer delivering the opportunity numbers to meet our revenue targets"

"The days of relying on Global / Regional Marketing to deliver  success alone are behind us" 

Objectives and Key Results OKRs

Social selling will allow you to go where your prospects and clients are, online. The key benefits of embedding social selling into your OKR strategy, is that it increases the transparency and greater focus and alignment. The OKR framework achieves these benefits by grouping employees and their respective responsibilities around accomplishing similar objectives.

Let's walk through an example

Increase your pipeline creation - We expect each salesperson who is using our social selling methodology to make one additional meeting per week, turning 4 meetings into 1 proposal per month and one additional sale per quarter.

Assuming an average deal size of $100,000, that is an additional $400,000 per sales person, per year ...... forever.

This is a deliberately very conservative figure.

We can set an objective that describes the main goal that a company hopes to achieve in the long run, while key results are the expected outcomes. We then work with your team to define the work that needs to be done to achieve the key results.  We then provide the methodology and the training to back this up. 

We can also use OKR as a method that constitutes a set of social selling rules that are meant to help your employees prioritize and measure the results of their work.

If you are using social selling throughout the sales process you will be able to 

Open up more sales conversations earlier, which enables you to control and influence the sale, ahead of the competition. 

Increase your win rate - We can show you how to de-risk your forecast.

Enable you to get new logos and provide the organic growth you need.

Increase your revenue through better pipeline conversation.

Reduce your cost of sale.

Either way, it's possible to create social selling OKR process links for company, team, and personal objectives in a hierarchical manner to the desired outcomes.

We can also show you how everybody in the business can contribute to this process, more sales at less cost.  But that is a blog for another day. 

So How Are You Going To Create Business?

Many business leaders say to us, "our sale steams are all over social".

I'm not so sure they are.  Social isn't about posting and hoping or bombarding people with LinkedIn requests, these are all random acts of social.  I've just read an article on Linkedin where the person "posted" and hoped.  Now he did get something from the post, but you cannot bet your business on this.  Which is why we came up with a methodology for social selling. 

Social, just like sales has always been, it's a process and for that you need a methodology.  One of the issues we have with social is that the barrier to entry to being a "guru" is low and many people seem to have the view that social works.  When you push back on them and ask them how does social work, they say "it just does".

We don't see how "social just does work" links to a business case and OKRs, which is why we have created Data Driven Social Selling.  We have tested, what were theories with our clients and we now know that "if you do this" and "do this" you get this result. No guesswork, no theories and no "gurus".  

Here is just one example of how somebody created a whole bunch of leads and meetings through a post that only took 10 minute (we all have 10 minutes in a day).

Social Selling Case Study

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, all for free!

(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).

Fancy a Discussion?

While we don't know your own position, but we are confident that we can make an impact on your team.  If you are Business to Business (B2B), selling to Enterprise or the Mid-Market we have experience of these situations and know that social selling can and will be a game changer for your business.

If you would like me or one of the team to take you through this then contact me here