You may have entered the lock down in analogue mode, the world has changed and its important you move from analogue to digital, regardless of your sector.
How was Q3 and what does Q4 look like? Still hopeful of "green shoots..."?
How are you generating new leads and securing pipeline? How solid is that 2022 forecast....really.
The KPIs and OKRs have all changed…. the focus is budget and pipeline generation.
The message is coming from upstairs…."more calls and more emails!"…we know this isn’t helping and the team are already stressed.
Social Selling & Influence allows you to go where your prospects and clients are, on Social Media. The key benefits of embedding Social Selling into your KPI / OKR strategy, is that it increases the transparency and gives greater focus and alignment.
The latest stats from Simon Kemp and the team at DataReportal's - 'Digital snapshot':
- 7.87 billion people on the planet
- 4.80 billion are internet users
- 4.48 billion are active Social media users
Take out the kids and the retirees and who's left?
You, me our investors, our bankers, our future colleagues, our clients, our partners, our suppliers...and our competition,
and..... 41% of internet users use Social Media for work purposes.
The OKR framework achieves benefit by grouping employees and their respective responsibilities around accomplishing similar objectives.
Objective: 2022 pipeline!
Increase pipeline creation - Each salesperson who uses our Social Selling methodology, makes at least one additional meeting per week – Let’s say they turn 4 meetings into 1 proposal per month to one additional sale per quarter.
Assume an average deal size of 100K...
That is an additional 400K per salesperson, per year, every year.
…these numbers are deliberately conservative.
Then, further strengthen this by training your Technical people in ‘Social Influence’ and have them engage with all the Technical people within your client base….
We can set an objective that describes the main goal that a company hopes to achieve in the long run, while key results are the expected outcomes. We then work with your team to define the work that needs to be done to achieve the key results and provide the methodology and training to support the effort.
We use OKR as a method that constitutes a set of Social Selling rules to help your people prioritise and measure the results of their work.
The evidence is data driven, if you are using Social Selling throughout the Sales process, you will:
- Open more sales conversations and open them earlier: which enables you to control and influence the sale process, ahead of the competition.
- Increase win rate: de-risk your forecast.
- Enable you to get new leads: provide the growth you need.
- Increase your revenue through better pipeline conversation.
- Reduce your overall cost of sales.
Social Selling & Influence works best as a team sport - we will show you how everyone in the business can contribute to this process:
More activity - more sales - less cost. ebitda sense...
Pipeline – Criticise, stabilise, or maximise?
How much longer can we use the line-item excuse on the forecast "due to Covid..."?
It’s all hands to the pumps to create pipeline in 2022, or at least it should be.
Gone are the days of being precious about who is bringing in the work – everyone in the organisation is in the pipeline creation business right now.
It’s time to make some hard decisions, things might need to change… more than you first thought…
"What got us here, won't get us there…".
We know that business has changed due to Covid and the international reaction to it, we must change our Sales and Marketing models or run out of cash, without the right pipeline.
In conversation with a Chief Revenue Officer last week, they said
“we still can’t travel anywhere near as much as we need to and, we don’t have a clear view on when that will ever return…so we must have another way of meeting and growing relationships with new clients…”.
Targeted prospecting matters more than ever.
Advertising and Email Marketing are not fit for purpose in the Covid19 world, switch spending in these areas to creating pipeline.
To quote Hubspot:
"As buyers have moved their purchasing online out of necessity, businesses with an established digital presence have reaped the rewards."
To quote Gartner:
"We cannot send a 2019 salesperson into a 2021 firestorm. That is a kill-box right there".
To quote DLA Ignite:
“Social Media has changed the world and businesses must recognise that a digital first strategy is a winning strategy”.
To quote Crux:
"The conversation about whether this all works or not is over - dead - in the trash. The question now is, does your organisation have the culture to accept change, the mind to accept alternative perspectives and the hunger to win...".
Content is king...
With all this now making sense, how about we move our marketing to content marketing?
This is not new or a Beta trial, this is established tested and proven. In an article from May of 2020 of this year Michael Brenner said:
That’s why B2B businesses need to take advantage of the online digital "space" through content marketing. The top three content marketing priorities identified by B2B marketers, according to the Content Marketing Institute are:
- creating more engaging content (72%)
- gaining a better understanding of what content is effective (65%)
- finding better ways to repurpose content (57%)
And we know "Content Marketing ROI is 7 times greater than paid ads."
Crux are partnered with DLA Ignite. We developed the ‘hierarchy of content engagement’ through our research:
Corporate content all looks the same. Its homogenised, sanitised, and dull. If it’s all about the brand, we switch off as we want to engage with real people not sanitised brand feeds.
The other issue that brands face is they still deliver content in the ways of the past, through interruption. Traditional marketing has always been about, interruption and broadcast. You interrupt me with an advert, email or cold call and then broadcast a message.
The message will be "buy my product because it's great" and nobody is interested, and we all get annoyed because of the interruptions. This does the brand damage, so why would we do it?
In this Social world, it also makes your company look desperate, because we are all aware this sort of marketing is old fashioned.
Real ROI on content...
Conversations lead to proposals and deals....
When you like or comment on a piece of content you are pushing that content into the feed of your followers.
If your followers find it interesting, they will interact with your content pushing it further out into the feeds of their followers and so on.
This means a lot of people looking at your profile.
If you have a great profile, not a CV, not grey, bland, 'same as' profile.... a profile that shows who you are as a person, all those profile views are like calling cards.
A profile view is where somebody, (without interrupting) checks you out and leaves a trace. All of those likes and comments are gold dust!
What we do is give you a methodology and take all of those likes and comments and have conversations with the people. We all know that conversations, turn into proposals and proposals turn into deals.
Unless you sell products off the shelf, it’s likely that you need to speak with and connect with humans during the process of a sale.
More conversations = more direct interaction with your prospects
We all have content in us...
There is no excuse for 'lack of content' - Your people will know what your network wants, work it out together.
Your single most unique selling point is your people, their history, their life, and experiences.
Get them to share their experiences in an authentic way...
Have your marketing team co-ordinate all of this and suggest "keywords" to add to that content. This takes trust and your people won't create it unless you trust and empower them.
People make mistakes, so they need a framework, training, coaching and support.
What do you need to do?
Give your people the digital skills they need to be able to network, prospect and close business that originated on Social.
It’s important that you train them and give them the environment they need to put Social into practise for profit.
Live Social ‘21
Eric Doyle
Have we given our people the skills and the ability to have profiles so they can be recognised in this digital world, to be trained how to engage with these prospects and customers?
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