64% of buyers cannot tell your companies marketing materials from the competition's marketing materials, Tim Hughes

In this webinar by Gartner, they use some research from the gartner marketing team which is

"64% of B2B customers can't tell the difference between brands digital experiences."

That's two thirds of B2B, complex buying process, buyers cannot tell the difference between brands.

Does that surprise you? It does not surprise me.

Most, if not all brands go to market with the same message "buy my product because we are great" and of course if you are saying it and your competition are saying it, what is a buyer to do?

As Gartner say ...

"I go to your website and it looks like everybody else's website

I download your video and it looks like everybody else's video

Your infographic looks like everybody else's infographic

Everybody is running the same playbook when it comes to your digital experiences...."

Websites look the same

Let's look at the website, in this research 10,000 websites were analysed and guess what? They all looked the same!

What about search?

Over the last few years, buyers have shifted from search engines to social media, see this article here.

Of course, Google is still used, but it's dropping back as people don't want ads and people want context with the insight they consume.

What about the message you are offering the buyer on social media

Think about social media, we have a bunch of brands all pushing out brochures and brochureware and the message is the same. Buy my product because we are great.

In this post by Adam Gray, he shares one of the recent coaching session with one of our clients

Eric Doyle, part of the DLA Ignite team calls it a "thunk" moment, you can see his latest "thunk" images here.

It gets worse for marketers

After one of your hot prospects looked at your website and your digital experience, guess what happened?

Nothing.

76% of B2B customers did nothing after your digital experience

You wanted all those buyers to talk to you, but they didn't as you were not different and you offered nothing by of a way that they want to contact you.

Let's not forget that nobody, yes nobody wants to talk to a sales person.

All of your branding looks the same as everybody else and when you had the chance to actually get to talk to when of these digital customers, they just walked on by.

But hold on a moment ...

If you check out this video of Chris Mason CEO at Oracle reseller Namos, fast forward to 19 minutes 55 seconds. Chris talks about a $2.6 million win from being on social, after completing the DLA Ignite social selling and influence course.

Here was a buyer, surfing social looking for an answer to their business question. They spotted somebody who looked different from the rest of the sea of blandness and they walked forward to the salesperson and the company signed a $2.6 million deal.

Just think of what can happen if you offered a different buying experience on social?

But there is more

I Previously wrote about how social selling was increasing the conversation rate on Director level calls by 42%. Again, not my opinion, this is all date backed. I agree that we can only increase the conversion rate on rank and file people by 25% but either way scaled across your business this will make transformational difference to your revenue, profit and EBITDA.

Why? Because you look different and look like you can help the people.

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.