Yesterday, my colleague, Kevin Milne, wrote an article "Social Selling gives you opportunity all day, every day" and he's right.

I wrote about how you can keep selling during the "slow" summer months, in fact, summer is a great opportunity for you to get ahead.  My blog on how to keek selling while everybody is on holiday is here.

What is prime selling time, or what was it?

Here is an article from Hubspot, which discusses the best times of the day to prospect.

In the days when I cold called, you knew that a person would be at their desk from 09:00 until 17:00 to be able to take that call.  Many of us would start calling at 08:00 to get around the fact that gatekeepers would get into the office at 09:00 and by calling earlier you were more likely to get through to the decision maker.  I have to admit that most businesses knew salespeople did this and just turned voicemail on.

Now of course, your clients and prospects are on social media and its open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

A customer of mine tells me he prospects (using social selling of course) between bathing his children and when he goes to bed, in the evening.

You can do it at the weekend, it's up to you.

This notion of prime selling time, like many of the legacy notions of old selling methodologies such as cold calling, know as telemarketing, spam email etc is dead.

These methods have held us back for too long and it time to take a proper prospecting attitude to sales and move to social selling.

If you liked this, there is also this article I wrote back in 2018, "Why I Prospect at Night – The Death of Prime Selling Time (PST)"

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.