Can cold calling and email marketing kill my business?, Tim Hughes

I read the other day an article about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communications. First of all, I had to Google what synchronous and asynchronous communications meant.

Maybe I missed that day at school.

Put simply, asynchronous communications is where you communicate and don't expect an answer.

synchronous communication is where you communicate and expect an answer. Like a conversation, you speak and I listen, then I speak and you listen. Just like the goal we all drive for in sales, a face-to-face meeting.

Sounds like a load of posh words Tim, why does this matter?

It's a good way to group forms of communication

1. Examples of asynchronous communication is brand marketing, often called "push marketing" where brands push out a message, hoping that somebody will pick up on it and like it. It was used a lot in the 1930s to 1980s, before the internet was invented. Examples are all forms of interrupt and broadcast selling and marketing, such as cold calling, email marketing and advertising.

If you think about advertising, a billboard or an advert in a magazine, you place it in the vain hope that somebody will respond. Research shows that there is a 98% failure rate, either way, you don't expect a response.

Email marketing is similar, you fire off as many emails as you can in the hope that somebody will answer. Here again, Hubspot (and they sell email marketing systems) proved recently that email marketing has a 98% failure rate. If you think about it, your prospects inbox is probably the most noisy thing there is in the world today. As you know, most people just give the inbox a cautionary glance, which is why there is so much "manipulation" in the market just to try and get people to open the email.

(I still think it's bizarre that people measure "open rate", it has no connection with revenue generated. Which is after all the only measure we should place on any sales and marketing activity).

Cold calling, is asynchronous communication, you call people up and pitch, again you know if there is a cold call, the caller will have some script where the answer will manipulate you to get to a "yes". You are not allowed to talk or have a conversation. So you are rude to get rid of the caller, or don't both taking the calls. If you are like me you let cold calls go straight to voicemail. Either way, it's asynchronous, a one way dialogue.

Your management and most sales gurus tell you to rely on asynchronous communication even when it is harming your ability to achieve your number and harming your business. Why? Because sales are driven from conversation and conversations are synchronous communication.

2. Where as synchronous communication is two way ..... a conversation.

Think for a second, of all the sales you have sold, what do they all have in common .... a conversation. One party speaks and another listens, the other party speaks and the other part listens. Think of all things we do in sales; meetings, discovery, closing. They all require synchronous communication .... conversations.

Conversations drive sales. As a salesperson and a business, your biggest issue stopping you get pipeline is your lack of conversations.

Our goal in sales is to always get face-to-face meetings, why? because that is a conversation. This is the best form of sales "forum", but to get meetings you must be using conversations to get conversations. Shouting at people through the phone, email or adverts, does not drive meetings.

So how do we create conversations? ....... social media After all, it's all in the name, social on media.

Here's an example

This is Eric, part of the DLA Ignite team and he posted this.

The photos are of Eric and his son Austin, it's was Austin's 16th Birthday and it was a lockdown Birthday. Eric posed the question in the LinkedIn post, what will happen to our young people because they are missing out on a social life. This created a conversation.

The conversation was so much so that 18,292 people viewed the post, it created 165 likes and 37 comments. (It's worth saying that this only took 10 minutes to create this post!)

So what? It created 165 likes and 37 comments = That's 202 reasons to have a conversation.

How come? Because if a person likes or makes a comment on your post you have something in common.

Remember, when we meet people we always want to share something in common. We went to the same school, my mother grew up in the same town as you, we support the same football team, we support rival football teams. Either way, if we have something in common, we start knowing, liking and trusting somebody.

Back to Eric's post, from those 202 reasons to have a conversation, once he had taken his mates out and people he knew, there were 85 new people to have a conversation with.

Filter that down, Eric got 6 C-level meetings, was asked to submit 2 proposals and got one purchase order from this post. That only took him 10 minutes to create.

This is how social media (and synchronous communication) is the only game in town when it comes to creating pipeline, fast and how you will scale your business. Fast!

But my local sales guru say that social selling is about posting and waiting. Really?

From the example above, clearly it's not. Not sure how your local cold calling guru knows anything about social selling, but for the above statement, clearly they don't.

As a business, we have never cold called, we have never placed an advert, we have never sent emails and we have never posted content and waited.

These people need to stop living in the past. Today's' challenges will not be solved by yesterday's processes and tools.

If this article has been useful and you think it would be helpful to your network or individuals then please share it. Please also tag in the individuals.

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