You might have missed it but Floyd Mayweather is a formal professional boxer, note the word "former" and Logan Paul is a Youtube star and last night they had a boxing match.  So what, it's 2021 after all.

Let's think about boxing, there are many stars that are household names, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Sugar Ray Robinson, George Foreman, etc.  These people are athletes, they have trained all their lives, they were at the top of their game.

And Logan Paul is a .... youtube star.

What on earth is this all about? 

Money.  The boxing match went out on pay-to-view and it's an exhibition match that will have pulled in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

Exhibitions are not unusual and Mayweather has taken part in them before, fighting the kickboxer, Tenshin Nasukawa in Japan in 2018. 

What has this got to do with sales?

Logan Paul isn't a boxer, but he has a following on social media and a following on social media can fast forward all the years of training and hard work the boxers mention above will have put in.

Paul creates content.  Content is what drives the world today, it's what your buyers are looking for day in day out and if you're not providing it day in and day out you are invisible. And your buyers will have gone else where. 

Paul have followers and an audience. As a salesperson you need followers and an audience.  Why? Because these people, will know you, like you and buy from you. If they are not doing it from you (today) they are doing it from the competition.  The wider and varied your network, the more likely you will be influencing your accounts and also getting recommendations and referrals. 

Why?  Because this is the world we live in (whether you like it or not) by having a following and an audience na having content is what wins in sales today. 

In sales you don't need millions of followers, you just need to move your territory online and you will already be ahead of your analogue competition. 

There is no differentiation between brands, they all go-to-market with the same message "buy our products, because we are great".  The only thing that a company has to differentiate itself today is its employees.  Each employee has their own set of experiences and skills, this is what will differentiate a business today.

Which businesses are doing this?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling

The article states...

"Merrill on Monday rolled out a revamped adviser-training program that prohibits participants from cold calling and directs would-be brokers to use internal referrals or LinkedIn messages to land clients instead. The decision comes after the program’s 3,000 trainees were told to stop outbound recruiting efforts to find new customers last year after problematic phone calls."

Why?

"The revamped program is intended to bring the firm’s prospecting techniques into the digital era and boost completion rates."

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling?  Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

What are the clever consultants saying about this?

A recent McKinsey report announced that, those companies that sell digitally are out performers, see article here.  

You can see that the market has flipped from analogue to digital.  From cold calling to social selling.

Maybe it's time for you and your leadership team to join the dots...

With Bank of America Merrill Lynch and McKinsey both saying that digital selling is the way to go, how long will you go keep ignoring this?

Thank you to Eric Doyle for raising this subject with me.