Can I use social selling as a small business, Tim Hughes

Just seen this post by Gary Vee

I often speak to business leaders in small companies and they say "social selling is for big companies" and my response to that is, "I totally empathise and agree with that, after all DLA Ignite is a small company and we use social selling".

As a small business we have built everything on social. We have never cold called, we have never sent spam emails, we deleted the email list in 2018 to comply with GDPR, we have never placed one single advert.

Why?

Because social selling gives us the speed of execution

There seems to be this view in the market that only cold calling and spam emails can you you leads fast. This is totally untrue.

The Managing Director of one of our clients tells the story of how I "contacted" him on the Thursday and we were sitting in front of him, his head of marketing, his head of PR and his head of Alliances on the Tuesday.

The problem with cold calling and sending spam emails is

- The process is slower than social selling

- It makes you look old fashioned

- It pisses the prospects off, not a great way to start a relationship

- It does not allow you to sell high

- Nobody answer the phone anymore

With cold calling and spam email you are just another salesperson.

This is where social selling comes in.

Worth saying that social selling, is not spamming people on social, that's called spamming people on social.

How can 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 need a buyer centric profile, this shows you are not just another salesperson but a person that can help your target business. It shows you are human have the business acumen, all that stuff in your head. Don't forget, people don't like being sold to, you need to talk about your "why" not "what you do".

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 as a small business 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 do have the time, I'm the CEO of a small business and I write all my content. Why? Because I want it written in my tone of voice and as a business leader I set the example of what good behaviour looks like.

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.

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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