One of my colleagues here at DLA Ignite, Thomas Ross, has written this article and it is a great sum up about sales today

Please tell me you still do not have one of these?


”You might be an out-of-date sales organization if…”

1. You still have a sales bell that your sales team go up and ring upon making a sale
2. You hire salespeople who can out-talk everyone in the room
3. Your key sales activity is cold calling
4. Your second main sales activity is high volume emailing to prospects (**usually from a bought list of some kind)
5. Your third sales activity is trade shows and networking events
6. Your sales team are expected to meet with new customers in their offices
7. Your biggest hope every month is that you get more leads from marketing than you did the previous month
8. You rely on paid advertising to provide all the new sales opportunities you need
9. You think that next month everything will get back to “normal” and sales levels will return
10. You think your sales team turnover is due to the tough economic times and they will come back when things get back to normal!

Hmmm, it's worse than I thought...let's address each of these

1. Get rid of the bell and ship it back to the 90’s
2, Hire digitally skilled salespeople, not analog (another article!)
3. Learn how to engage with prospects and customers online
4. Learn how to engage with prospects and customers online
5. Get professionally trained and certified in Social Selling … THEN, have your teams trained and certified as well (ALL customer facing...)
6. Salespeople can still meet with customers when meeting Covid guidelines but now only when necessary and in most cases it's just not necessary
7. If Sales is still following a sales process from the 90’s it’s likely marketing is not much better so I would not be counting on those leads!
8. Organic inbound leads and opportunities will take you into the future via digital marketing & Social Selling, while more paid advertising will devastate your budgets with catastrophic sales results
9. “Normal” is not coming back, EVER. The new normal is “Digital”, virtual, online, and social...period.
10. Your employee turnover is high because your sales team are leaving to join a sales organization with a certified social selling program in place for 2022

This is budget season for 2022, seriously, enough with the old analog sales routine...

You have 3 months to get digital for 2022, let’s get started!

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.