It's a question I ask people often.

Would you buy sky diving lessons from somebody who has never skydived?

Would you buy driving lessons from somebody that doesn't drive?

Would you buy sailing lessons from somebody that has never sailed?

Of course you wouldn't, so why is it OK to buy lessons in social media from a person that doesn't know how to use social media?

A friend of mine contacted me the other day and asked me what I thought, his US parent had invested in a "sales enablement" person whose job it was to roll social selling out across the business.

I asked him the name of the person and looked them up on LinkedIn.

My response was "based on the person't Linkedin profile, there is nothing that I can see that demonstrates this person knows anything about social selling".

Often I hear the excuse from people in social media "I'm too busy with clients to update my social profiles". Really?  Are you too busy teaching people to skydive to go skydiving?  Of course not, every wants to stay ahead of their area which they teach and coach.

Here at DLA Ignite, we lead from the front, we believe that if, as a business, you are going to get an outside company in to support you, then that outside company has to be the high water mark of social selling.

I was asked last week, how much business do we get from social selling.

My answer 100%.

We have never made a cold call, never sent spam emails, (we deleted our email list in 2018 to comply with GDPR) and we have never placed an advert.  As a business we are 100% social. 

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.