Thanks to Brandon Lee for sharing this article, we had been talking about it on our weekly podcast the digital download, available here.

As a business we know we have to move to digital, but how?

In this article I talk about the "digital hope" strategy, this is where leadership .... hope something happens with digital.

We often see leaders hiring a "digital native", they are supposed to understand digital afterall and the leadership hope something will happen.

Or leaders hope the salespeople, will figure it out.  I have lots of sales people reading my articles sent by their leaders.  I can imagine the conversation "we need to be digital, go and read Tim Hughes's articles and see if you can figure it out".  Again, a digital hope strategy.

Or leaders throw the problem at sales enablement / sales development and while there is nobody with any digital presence, they hope that somehow the team will come up with a strategy. A "digital hope strategy".

I remember having a call with a CEO of a large social media tool and I asked him why wasn't his team social?  First the CEO, hadn't looked and then had expected his team to be social, just like that.  His comment was "they know they need to do and they will do it". We pointed out that if they did know, they weren't doing it.  Again a "digital hope strategy".

This is all digital hope.

What can you do to move away from digital hope and get the talent you need?

To quote from this article.

“We are seeing the early battles that will quickly become the next big war for talent,” says Jonathan Sears, Principal - Americas Solutions and Technology Leader, People Advisory Services, at Ernst & Young LLP (EY US).

He then says

"Transformation efforts will slow down to a crawl if you can’t get and keep the right talent in the door over a multiyear period.”

What is the recommended solution?

Enable a culture of continuous learning. The growing need to upskill and reskill existing employees to address the skills gap, coupled with employees’ interest in advancing their own knowledge, highlights the importance of continuous learning.

It's critical that you get outside digital experts into your business to empower your team.

This is not about "hints and tips" or getting third parties to do the work for you. You are wasting your money.  If you want to get fit, you don't go to the gym for an hour or a day, you start going regularly to the gym.  You also don't get somebody to go to the gym for you. 

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.