This was a question I was asked yesterday "do my SDRs need to become hybrid?"

Hybrid meaning, should my SDRs use cold calling (telemarketing) and social selling?

Yesterday we were presenting to a business.  Our discussion, take people through what has changed in the world with social media, look at some of the simple psychology that impacts buyers today (and what that means for you as a seller) and then we take the team through examples.  I don't know about you, but people love case studies.

It's great having a long list of logos and how their company has been transformed.

It's fun watching people's faces as they suddenly realise how much the world has changed and the type of results you can expect by using social selling.  Minds blown!

I was doing the presentation with Adam Gray, my business partner here at DLA Ignite. 

The question relates to the fact that people often seem to think that cold calling (telemarketing) is proactive and social selling is passive.  There was a time when all you got on LinkedIn was articles (from cold callers (telemarketers)) and they defined social selling as writing content and then sitting back and hoping.  It's never been that.  What does a cold caller (telemarketer) know about social selling anyway?  It's like me writing about tree surgery.  I work with business all day around social selling, there is nothing in what I do that means I would ever know anything about tree surgery.

In our social selling and influence course we teach people the fundamentals of being social, it does not matter which social platform you are on, just use these fundamentals. 

The fundamentals to prospecting in the social age

The importance of having a buyer centric profile, so that buyers see you as a business person that can help them.  A human being.  You have to remember that sales people look like .... salespeople and of course nobody trusts salespeople.  The logic flows that looking like a salesperson makes you look .... untrustworthy.  But what does buyer centric really mean?  We can help with that in our social selling and influence training and coaching.

The next thing you need to do is grow your network.  This is where the prospecting starts.

At this point, let's not forget, that nobody likes to be pitched at, this is a social network.  Be social.

In our social selling and influence course we teach people to connect with prospects and customers to have conversations.  Why?

Think about any sale, it all came about through a conversation.  So stop pitching and start having conversations.  You will suddenly find the pipeline start filling. 

Now if this isn't proactive prospecting I don't know what is?

In fact, by having conversations on social, this is the most proactive and most productive prospecting there is on the planet.  Once clients get a hang of this they drop all the legacy methods like cold calling (telemarketing) email etc, because they get that social selling gets people higher in an organisation faster and you will convert more of those "calls".

With a great buyer centric profile, you are also free to have as many conversations as you want online.  There are no restrictions like the time of day, prime selling time (PST) you can prospect 24 hours a day, 366 days a year!

The final thing you need is content.  

Not branded content, this won't get you very far, you need content (like this blog) which we call relationship building content.  Content where it demonstrates you know what you are talking about, it build relationships, it nurtures the relationships you have already.

It will accelerate those conversations.  And of course, conversations create more sales.

We of course teach this on our social selling and influence course, we even have a video expert who works for us, should you want to get into video as well.

Should your SDRs by hybrid? No.

Your SDRs need to use the most efficient and effective proactive lead generation methods ... which is the DLA Ignite social selling methodology.  Sorry cannot speak for other social selling people. 

Ask us to walk you through our results.