Can I gain an effective prospecting framework with social selling?, Tim Hughes

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I often read cold callers advice on social selling, which is a bit like me offering advice on how to sail a yacht. I've been on a yacht and listened to what people have said, and surely it's pretty simple. You put up, I think it's called hoist, a sail and off you go.

I'm creating a metaphor of course.

Sailing is very straight forward, once you know how, but not being a sailor I'm not qualified to say what is good sailing or bad sailing. I'm certainly not qualified to write on LinkedIn, my advice on how to sail.

Prospecting with social social and digital selling

Buyer centric profile

As part of our social selling and digital selling program we take the sales team through a process of understanding, why they need a buyer centric profile. We show them examples and guide and coach them so they feel empowered to write a profile that fits their market and territory.

Prospecting

We also coach the sales team in how they can prospect in an outbound way. Whereas legacy sales methods now have a low hit rate in terms of the number of people you can get hold of. With social and digital, you should be having conversations with 60% plus of the people you contact. Let's not forget that with cold calling, you phone the person up, you then broadcast your message, this is forced conversation. With social the conversation is natural and the prospects actually wants to engage with you.

Content

It's all now a given that your prospects are on social media and digital, all buying processes will take place on digital. It is then down to your business and your salespeople to offer the insight they are looking for.

It's worth saying that research shows that buyers are not looking for corporate content, in fact they see your business negatively if you are pushing that out.

We would of course, expect that with every piece of content you post, you have the opportunity for conversations. I've written previously about Eric Doyle, and the example where he got 5 c-level meetings, 2 proposals and one purchase order from one post that took him ten minutes to create. If you don't believe me, contact Ericand ask him.

Can I gain an effective prospecting framework with social selling?

Against that context and methodology, then yes, you can create a prospecting framework. We know of at least one competitor who trains people to use sales navigator before the salespeople are social. This turns the salespeople into the worlds best spammers and will not increase your pipeline as it's nothing more than cold calling on a social network.

On completing of our social selling and influence course, the attendees are issued with a playbook, that builds a prospecting methodology and structure. Agreed between the salesperson, the sales leadership and DLA Ignite it focuses on the account targets and the commitment the salesperson is going to make in terms of prospecting across their territory.

This means that the salesperson does not need to be thinking, "what do I do today", they will be thinking "today I do this". It provides them with a daily routine of what they need to do and when on social and digital.

This will have been created, by working back using your own sales ratios. To win one deal, requires "x" number of proposals, "y" number of meetings and "z" number of leads. Sales leaders therefore know that once this is implemented, if the salespeople do what they committed to, they will make their number. Better still, the figures are set up so the sales people, over achieve their number.

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