How having fun hammered the last nail in the cold calling coffin, Tim Hughes

It's worth saying before I start this article I'm not saying that cold calling is dead.

This week, I wrote about Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, an intelligence officer with the Imperial Japanese Army who was sent to the island of Lubang in 1944 to hinder an Allied invasion expected to take place in early 1945.

While Japan surrendered on the 15th of August 1945. Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda did not.

Even in 1974, Lieutenant Onoda was still stubbornly fighting the Second World War nearly thirty years after everyone else had packed up and gone home.

I'm totally sure that, backed by all the cold calling gurus, people will be still cold calling in 10 years time, after everybody has packed up and moved to digital.

We all know that digital can give is more revenue and profit than legacy analog methods

The vast majority of businesses have now transformed to selling digitally and are getting the benefits of getting 30% more pipeline and closed business than analog legacy methods and reduced the sales cycle by 40%. And what is not to like about that! And of course, some people will continue to fight a war that does not exist.

So what on earth has having fun got to do with prospecting in sales?

I've talked before about how in the past, salespeople used broadcast methods of selling. Cold calling, spam email and even spam on social media; of course this pisses people off and we run away from sales people and their manipulative methods.

What if we could get prospects and customers to walk towards our salespeople?

Wouldn't that be transformational?

Wouldn't that make an impact on your business revenue and profit?

For us here at DLA Ignite, to be honest that is all a bit 2018, things have moved on.

Using our social selling and influence course this is already happening.

How about if we could get prospects and customers to post on social media, that other prospects and customers to should talk to salespeople?

Think about it, when most people post on social media, it's passive. You post and hope people will read your content. We know, if we post boring brochures from some employee advocacy application we will get little to know engagement, if we post insight and educational content then we will get more engagement.

It's totally radical to think that people will post on social media, telling their network to talk to your salespeople. But it is already happening.

So while you keep banging your heads against the cold calling brick wall, hoping that something will happen in your analog world, digital is accelerating past you.

There are now two questions for your business

How far are you prepared to fall behind?

Do you think you will ever catch up?

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.

Here at DLA Ignite we don't do "hints and tips sessions" we don't want you to waste your money. Our social selling and influence methodology will provide your sales team with the stable platform for growth. It is also the only social selling program based on 70:20:10 change management principles which gives your business the mindset change and habit change they need in this digital world.

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