My work history is anchored in heavy industry and engineering. Every job I’ve ever had allowed me to work closely with brilliantly talented engineers, across a range of engineering disciplines.

In the traditional model we used to work in, the Marketing team organised events, interviews for magazines and trade journals, brochures, a website and a whole heap of other ‘stuff’ in the hope that someone people would see it and make an enquiry. The Sales team stepped in and took over the process, if it all fell into place and the stars aligned, you got an order…

Everything has changed.

Social Media has changed the world and its changed how we do business, but some organisations are trying to do the same as they did but doing it digitally….it doesn’t work.

Events

There are no face-to-face events right now so how do we replace those leads? There are some digital events starting up but its early days. We still need to figure out how to network and get the level of leads we used to get as out face to face events.

Digital Advertising

Engagement rates for digital advertising are falling.

1.61% Facebook

1.91% Google

0.35% Programmatic (this is where ads follow you around when you browse)

That means that digital advertising has a 98.81% failure rate and based on the amount of money that is spent on digital advertising, that means that $265 Billion is wasted on advertising every year.  

Is any of your cash included in that waste?

Email Marketing

According to Hubspot the response rate to emails fell to a record low of 2.1% in April 2020. Said differently, 98% of our efforts to reach new prospects failed.

Hubspot say in the report "Sales teams are sending about 50% more email to prospects than they were pre-COVID, but responses continue to drop. Last week, sales response rates hit an all-time low for 2020 at 2.1%, a lower response rate than Christmas week 2019."

Hubspot also said "These trends tell an important story. Email prospecting, to put it bluntly, is out of control. It's easy to send thousands of emails with just a few clicks, and in a chaotic time, we understand why sales teams are sending so many. But volume and quality are trade-offs — the time a team saves by sending out email blasts is wasted if that outreach is not personalized, relevant, and helpful. These gaps are clear in the data."

 Let’s take another minute on that…

Do you see any of your behaviour or that of you teams in that statement? We must fix this…

We know things have changed, the advent of Social Selling & Influence changed the game in terms of Sales, Marketing and Business Development.

It’s changed so much that its redefined the entire structure of what we believed was “how it all worked”. Its now no longer purely the responsibility of Sales and Marketing to build connection with prospects, with Social Selling & Influence we open up the opportunity for the entire team to connect, build influence and relationships.

Everyone in the organisation has a voice and has the right to own their space on Social, regardless of what they do. HR, Finance, Operations, Engineering…everyone.

I meet a lot of management teams on a weekly basis and I’m often asked if Social Selling & Influence ‘works for technical/engineering companies.

The answer is yes.  

The reason is that technical people like technical people and they like technical topics.

Engineers like taking about engineering and the beautiful thing that happens when we put Engineers or Technical people on Social is that they don’t sell, they talk about technical things.  

This plays beautifully into the ‘Influence’ area of Social Selling & Influence.

So, when a team of Technical people or Engineers start to produce content on interesting topics, Technical and Engineering prospects like it and engage. This engagement opens the opportunity to have conversations that would never have happened.

When Technical people or Engineers start to connect, they tend to connect to likeminded people and their technical/engineering network grows. When their network grows, more like-minded people see their content and more people engage. 

We often see Technical people and Engineers becoming bigger influencers in their chosen verticals than their Sales and Marketing colleagues – the world has changed…

I coach a Technical organisation on Social Selling & Influence, the COO is an Engineer.

He has a buyer centric, digitally optimised profile, he connects with the right people regularl and gets involved in right Social conversations and he posts daily content.

He posted this in between Christmas and New Year…

A nice post about an amazing engineering project. Well written, nice image, good hashtags and he tagged in a few key organisations.

The post got 13,310 likes and 778 comments. It has been shared over 600 times and has been viewed 1million times.

This brought huge attention to this Engineer and his organisation. A massive opportunity for connection and conversations, that could never have been had. 

He didn't sit back gloat or wait for all of this to blow over, he came back the next day and continued posting and connecting and getting involved in conversations.

You can’t buy that kind of reach and result with any other form of demand generation on the planet.

Oh, all of his colleagues work like this too. That’s what they do, they are a technical organisation who are Social.

Technical people and Engineers have the ability to be very successful in Social, its about building Influence, not selling.

Live Social ‘21

Eric Doyle

Crux / DLA Ignite