In this webinar by Gartner, they share this research that talks about a rep free experience.

Where Gartner is wrong

If you read the Gartner research, Gartner make a number of wrong assumptions

1. Digital selling = is just the web, it's more than that, a lot more than that, social selling for instance

2. Buyers want a rep free experience, this isn't the cae

Actually if you ask buyers the issue they have with salespeople today is that they use old style sales techniques such as cold calling and spam email.  Who gets up in the morning and says "what I need today is to be interrupted in my work by some manipulative salesperson".  Nobody does.

Then you will have sales leaders saying, yes, but we use consultative selling.  Yes, but this is a methodology designed by you to sell.  The buyer still sees this as manipulative. 

Buyers today are looking for three things when it comes to salespeople

1. Do you have a buyer-centric social media profile?  Do you look like a person that can help me? Do you look like a human vs some corporate robot?

In our social selling and influence training and coaching we get salespeople to create a Linkedin profile that buyers will actually walk towards.  More on that in a moment.

2. Buyers will buy from people they know like and trust from within their network.  Which is why salespeople need to be connected to the people the people they want to influence.  If they are not connected then they are leaving money on the table.

One of our clients here at DLA Ignite told us how somebody from within their network approached a salesperson (that we had trained and coached) and asked him if he could help the business.  That conversation lead to a $2.6 million deal.  Not a bad return on investment from the training and coaching we had given.

Don't forget, buyers hate being sold or pitched to, your salespeople have to learn the lost art of having conversations on social media. In our social selling and influence course we teach sales people that lost art. Why? Because conversations are the sure fire way of getting commercial interactions.

3. Buyers are looking for insight, they are looking to be educated and they are looking to be entertained. 

Sellers have to be sharing content in 2021, this should not be brochures and whitepapers this is exactly the content buyers avoid.  Brochures should be on a website and nobody sits down a reads white papers because it will say "buy our product because we are great" and guess what the competition say? "Buy my product because we are great". 

If you are buying a $100K accounting system, you are going to go online and read up as much as you can on the pros and cons and benefits.  You will do this when you are drawing up a short list and you will do this all the way through the buying process.

You will remember the people and the companies that helped you, you will build trust with these people, you will have conversations with these people.  No manipulation, no forced selling, no commission breadth.

It's not true that buyers want rep free sales experiences, what buyers want are sales people that that are human, sales people that can help, sales people that are in the buyers network and sales people with authentic content. 

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.