How the speed of trust can scale your sales, Tim Hughes

One of the many things I love about DLA Ignite is the team we have.

We are also passionate about training and coaching. That isn't just making sure that all employees have the skills, the passion, understand our culture and vision. It's also about the team training each other.

When Adam and I set up the company 6 years ago, we didn't want to be a UK or US or whatever company, we wanted to be global. How can we take ideas from around the world from lots of different industries and share them? That's what we do. On Mondays the team gathers and we share our experiences, thoughts, theories with each other.

Can we learn from a professional services client in Peru? Of course we can.

Can we learn from a high-tech company is South Africa? Yes we can.

Mondays for us is "social learning" we all learn from each other.

In the meeting today, Mike Garrison made a great comment, which is, "speed of trust".

Speed of Trust

First you need a buyer centric profile, on your social media, for example LinkedIn. Social media is your shop window, open 24 hours a day, 366 days a year. You should set out your shop window, so that people want to walk in.

Second you need a network. A network is not the same as contacts. A network is a collection of people you "know" in varying degrees, people you have a relationship with and you may have had a conversation. This conversation could be voice or digital.

Finally you need content. Demonstrate your expertise with a variety of content, blogs, video, but they are all created by you, and they all demonstrate your authenticity and expertise.

The great thing about social networks is the "speed of trust", it's a term my guy, Mike Garrison said in a meeting this week.

If you want to build a reputation, you want this to scale fast, then social networks are the place to be and social selling is that technique that will get you there.

So who's social selling?

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"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.

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Speed of Trust

So who's social selling?

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