What does success in a social selling project look like?, Tim Hughes

We were asked the other day "what does success in a social selling project look like" by one of our clients.

Adam Gray from the DLA Ignite team, who's running that transformation, shared this and I thought I would share this with you.

What does success look like in a social selling project?

Obviously the answer to that is to get more revenue and profit and if you are interested in how you measure that, read this blog here. In that blog I take you through all the leading indicators that you can measure. At the end of the day, your business can pretty much measure the profit generated from every keystroke.

The following blog is more process and outcome related and takes you through how to transform your business to social.

Step 1

We would expect everyone who has been through the programme to have a distinctive, interesting, content rich profile that makes them look “better” and more interesting than their opposite number in competitor companies. This footprint is crucial.

They also need to be exhibiting certain behaviours going forward:

- connecting - growing their network within their target accounts and industries and also starting to forge relationships with influencers and thought leaders in their relevant spaces.

LinkedIn allows you to connect to 100 people per week, this is your sales people's opportunity to have 100 conversations. After all, conversations drive sales.

Many people say that social selling takes a long time, this is just not true, sales teams can be creating conversations at scale on social, by having a great profile and by having these conversations.

- publishing content - they need to write their own unique (authentic) content, some of this will be based on the corporate story (not simply sharing corporate content as we know) and some personal content to add variety and the human touch.

Research shows that people are on social to read insightful, educational and entertaining content not to read brochures.

- following-up on engagement - messaging everyone who engages with their content to say thank you (and if they are appropriate targets to try and turn this into a conversation) and also connecting with people not currently within their network.

Humanised content will drive the most engagement and is a great opportunity to prospect at scale. We teach you this in our social selling and influence course. We do have examples of this in our blogs, one example we use from a post that took ten minutes to create, drove 6 c-level meetings, 2 proposals and 1 purchase order. Now there is not one demand generation method, cold calling (telemarketing), advertising, conferences or emaIl that can get that level of return.

- messaging - sending (direct messages) DMs to connections who are within target accounts and following up with new connections.

NB: It's conversations that create sales.

This provides the sales teams with the ability to proactively prospect, to nurture and accelerate their existing pipeline, it will reduce ghosting, reduce the sales cycle and increase the win rate.

We would expect each salesperson to be able to sell one additional sale per quarter, with an average deal size of $100K, each salesperson would sell an additional $400K with social selling. For a sales team of 100, that's an additional $4M.

Step 2

We would see this effort manifest itself as

- an increase in network size for each participant, this is your digital territory

- better account coverage, less likely to be ghosted and increase win rate

- an increase in engagement on posts, the more conversations the more sales

- an increase in conversations with prospects, influencers and amplifiers, you should be getting "inbound" and being asked to sit on the "top table" by prospects and clients. We often are awarded business with no competition, because we have proved we are the natural choice of the clients problem.

- an increase in Linkedin social selling index SSI (and DLA Ignite) score

Note: DLA Ignite have created their own social selling index score, the LinkedIn SSI is restricted to LinkedIn, where as the DLA Ignite score covers multiple social networks so is truly a measure of social selling.

Step 3

- increase in pipeline & revenue

- reduced deal cycle time

- reduced dependency on individual client contacts

- better visibility

- better access to networks

- increased credibility for both the individual and the business

We would also expect "spin off" benefits such as

- greater employee sense of purpose

- the business becomes the employer of choice in the chosen markets

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"

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.