We often get contacted by salespeople desperate to sell digitally to the modern customer, but feel they are being held back by their leadership.
Often the leadership either think they are social selling already, or they just think that social selling isn't really a thing and cannot see how messing about on social media all day can generate business.
We get salesperson after salesperson asking us, "why do our leadership keep asking us to make more calls or send more emails, when we know this doesn't work?" I cannot answer that, but I do agree.
Yesterday in a meeting, my colleague Helen Mackenzie, told the story of the fly that keeps banging against a window to try and get out, when a door is open. If the fly just took a step back and thought that maybe there is, a different way, it would be free.
What if all this Social Media stuff is just about vanity...?
Last week, Eric Doyle wrote a blog called
What if all this Social Media stuff is just about vanity...?
Here is a quote ....
He also goes onto to say
Social selling (from DLA Ignite anyway) is about revenue and profit
So tell your boss, everything we do in our social selling training is rooted in generating your business revenue. We find it amazing, but we are the only social selling training and coaching company that talk about this in our go-to-marketing.
I was talking to a business yesterday and they told me they had a days LinkedIn training and it was shit. Of course, we don't offer LinkedIn training, yes, we do use LinkedIn, but this is social selling training. And you can take this to any social media platform and use the skills we teach you.
After all isn't giving your sales team digital skills a great thing today?
So how do you convince your boss to buy a social selling program?
In chapter 7 of my first book "social selling - techniques to influence buyers and changemakers" I answer this exact question. With different people within the business, I make suggestions how to approach the ask differently.
What things will the the average CRO look for?
- Pilot - Start small and ask for a pilot to be run. We are more than happy to be benchmarked against your current demand generation activities.
- Budget - You are going to need to think about where the budget will come from, so think about where money is spent, like events for example, that don't generate anything and ask for it to be swapped. Moved budget from events to social selling. By making a "sacrifice" shows how much you want something. Just yesterday, on completion of the presentation, the management team, in front of us, moved budget around to have monies available for social selling as a priority.
- Present - Get us to come and present to your boss or better still your management team. A risk I know, but better you show leadership now, than get fired for not making your number. We are more than happy to present to you first, so you can see what we will present. Trust me, every management team blows their mind when they realise how far they are behind.
- Revenue - Explain to the CRO about how social selling will fix the pipeline gap.
- Measure - One of the great things about social selling Vs say, cold calling or email marketing, is that you can measure, measure, measure. You can therefore get early indicators if the pipeline creation or deal velocity is working. If it doesn't go the way you want, pull the spend and go back to cold calling and sending emails, it's as simple as that.
Next step, would be to get one of the DLA Ignite team to talk to you and walk you through some of our case studies. But I offer a world of warning, we will .... totally blow your mind.
So who's 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"
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