I was recently approached by a salesperson who looked at my Linkedin profile and she asked me the question

"I was looking for inspiration and tricks on how to fill the slow summer gap - do you have any tips on how to make the best of this slow sales period?"

What a great idea for a blog!

With social selling you can prospect 24 hours a day! (even in summer)

One of the many problems with old fashioned sales methods like cold calling (tele-marketing), advertising and email marketing is that you are restricted to working at only prime selling time (PST).  What do I mean?

If you are going to cold call somebody, then you will normally do it during office hours, you certainly don't do it at 03:00 AM.  Because you need the person to be awake and able to answer the phone.

With social selling, you can prospect anytime, night or day.

I have a client who prospects after his has bathed his children and put them to bed.  There is a routine for his children's bedtime, which he has folded into a routine for his prospecting.  After the children are asleep he prospects.  Why am I mentioning this?

Your prospects can be on holiday and you can still prospect them with social selling.

Social media is a medium when the buyer will decide when they use it and for how much time.

Your prospect might be lying on a sun-bed getting a tan at a Mediterranean resort and you can still prospect them.  They will choose when they answer. 

All this talk about social selling, I forgot to explain what it is.

What is social selling?

How about tomorrow, I pick you up in my car and I take you to a place where all your prospects hang out?

There is no time limit on how long you spend there, you can have conversations with your prospects all day.

When you arrive at this place with all your prospects how would you approach it?

Grab a coffee and go up to the first one and start a conversation? Yes?

"Have you travelled far?" "How did you get here?" you would find areas of commonality, yes?

As sales people, we all know why.  Because people will know us, like us and trust us.

The other great thing about having a room full of our prospects is that ..... it's a room full of our prospects. 

Let's talk about me coming to pick you up tomorrow

What you going to wear?

12 months ago people would have put on a suit, now we've been working from home for so long it might be jeans and a t-shirt.

The thing is, it reflects you, yes?  Flats or heels? Who cares it what you feel comfortable in.

I doubt you will come network in your pyjamas.

So it's smart ish but reflects you.  

This is a metaphor for your LinkedIn profile.  This is exactly what you need to do during quiet time is invest in yourself and re-write your LI profile.  Why?  When you arrive at the networking event, people can see who you as a person and not a walking brochure.  LinkedIn is not a CV or a list of achievements, it's about you and how you can help people.  

We teach you how to do this in our social selling training and coaching.

Let's get networking

Before you walk into the room, you will approach it as we discussed above. Yes?

Or would you walk in the room with all your prospects and go "I'm Tim Hughes and roll up, roll up and buy some social selling and the first 5 people in a line will get a discount".

Like dur Tim!  Of course I wouldn't say that, somebody would call security.

Exactly! 

Did you know that this place I can drive you to, where all your clients hand out is LinkedIn?

If you wouldn't walk into the room where all your clients are and shout "but my stuff", why do you think it's OK to walk onto social media and do just that? A social network is about being social, not spamming people.

Your number is achieved the other side of one of these conversations.

We teach you how to do this in our social selling training and coaching.

Why you need to build your network during the slow summer months

Looking for something to do during a slow summer period?  LinkedIn will allow you to connect to 100 people a week, so use them.  Build your network, transform your analogue network to digital.  Move you analogue territory and move to digital.

Connect to all of the people you want to sell to, don't forget, this is not about selling, it's about having a conversation.

We teach you how to do this in our social selling training and coaching. 

Want to over achieve your number? - let's get writing.

Something else you can do, during slow summer months is to build up that writing "muscle".

We know all of our prospects and clients are on social media and we know they are looking for content, insight, they are looking to be educated, they want to learn something new.

So give it to them.

This blog is a great example.  It is providing you with ideas to help you sell during the summer.

Of course, if your company wants to implement full blown social selling (would a 30% increase in revenue and a 40% reduction in sales cycle be useful?) then I hope you will choose DLA Ignite to support you in your social selling journey, because you read this blog.  So while it would be great if you purchased from us at some time or referred us, the idea is to provide you with practical advice. 

You can tell we know our stuff on social selling just by reading this, it has also been useful to you.

If you have time (during the summer) then mix up your content, create the written word, create video, create posts, etc, etc.  If you check out the DLA Ignite profiles Eric Doyle, Adam Gray, Vanessa Gartell, Lenwood Ross, Mike Garrison, Priscilla McKinney, Thomas Ross, etc, you will see we all put out a mixture of content.

The more content you create, the more you are visible to your clients, the more engagement you will get, the more conversations and the more you will over achieve your number. 

Let's not forget, if you don't put out content you are invisible to your clients. 

So whose doing this?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

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"

Advertising, cold calling and email marketing isn't fit for purpose in 2021, the world and the buyer has moved on. It's time to switch your budget to social selling.