We're back from vacation and there's no pipeline

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

If you want pipeline now then get social selling!

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.

How can programmatic social selling help me?

In our social selling and influence course we teach and coach your sales teams how to have

1. Buyer centric profile - We all know that buyers check us out on social, so can we look like a person they want to do business with? How is it that we don't look like just another salesperson and we look like a person they can trust? In our social selling and influence course, we will help you build a social media profile that buyers will walk towards and want to connect to. Rather than run away from.

2. A network - Most salespeople have a bunch of contacts on social media. X colleagues and recruitment consultants, which are not the people you are trying to influence and sell to.

In our social selling and influence course, we coach you on how to build a wide and varied network in the accounts you want to influence and sell to. We teach you how to do this in a non-spammy way. In fact, we teach you how to do it so that each connection request starts a conversation. After all conversations create sales.

3. The third thing you need is content. The days of you taking brochures from marketing and posting them on social media are well over. After all, nobody reads them.

For you to sell today you need content that provides insight and educates. After all, why are buyers on social media in the first place? They are looking for insight, looking for answers.

You need to create to content yourself and share through your network. This isn't about hope, this is a strategy on why you are using that content and then harvesting the engagement.

Social selling is not showing as many brochures under people's noses on social!

I've written before about an example where somebody got 6 c-level meetings, 2 proposals and 1 purchase order from one post that took ten minutes to post. There is not one single demand generation methods that can get those sort of results in 10 minutes.

Just think about how that would transform your pipeline, just think about how if you got all your salespeople social selling, how that would transform your business!

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.

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