There is a clear gap opening in business between those companies that have a pipeline problem and those that don't ..., Tim Hughes

I was talking to a client this week and they complained.

It's always a concern when a client complains, this one complained they had too much pipeline.

This client has gone full in on social with us, they have cut advertising, Google ads and all of that marketing spend that nobody can attribute to anything, but people are too scared to stop.

They started a pilot of our social selling program, now they are up and running and the leads are rolling in (they have too much pipeline) they have decided to make cuts to the existing marketing.

They have gone through an audit of all marketing spend and unless they could attribute it to lead generation and revenue creation they cut it. What about "brand" I hear you say, they are getting that from the social selling. After all, they are now in contact with their clients daily on social.

That sounds risky!

Risky and trusting, but it's paying dividends for them.

There is more facts and figures that this client went into which I'm happy to take you through one to one if you would like. They haven't done this in one go, (as I said) they ran a pilot with us and as social selling kicked in they were able to switch the other stuff (and the budget) off.

But it got me thinking, there is a clear divide opening up in business.

We have no pipeline

All businesses that I talk to use legacy forms of sales and marketing, such as cold calling, emails, maybe marketing does a bit of tactical social, some Google ads. All, certainly all the ones I talk to struggle with pipeline.

We have too much pipeline

I often get clients of ours complain they have too much pipeline.

Is there a correlation? Could social and digital organisations be taking all the pipeline?

Has the world changed, we think so

The world has changed and it's changed a lot even in the last 24 months.

But just think how things have changed since the 1980s and 1990s. Walkmans, Faxes, Backberries, iPods all of these pieces of technology have come and gone, some of you reading this, won't even know what some of these things are.

Let's look at the legacy world of sales and marketing

Cold calling

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"

Email marketing

Hubspot (and don't forget they sell email marketing so they have a vested interest to talk this subject up) say in this article

"Thank you Covid-19, we just broke the record for poor performance. According to Hubspot, the response rate to emails fell to a record low of 2.1% ...... Said differently, 98% of our efforts to reach new prospects failed.

With conversion down, what did we do? You guessed it, we increased the number of emails sent during the same period by 50%, according to Hubspot’s survey of 70,000 customers. We are playing a zero-sum game, and it’s literally a race to the bottom."

When a pro-email marketing site is writing articles like this, you know there is a problem.

Let me just reiterate this, Hubspot say that email marketing has a 98% failure rate.

If you think social selling is about sending spam messages on social, you have it all wrong

Social selling have been proved to increase revenue in an organisation by 30% and reduce the sales cycle by 40%.

This is not my opinion, there is data to back this up.

I don't believe you Tim!

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.

Increase the return on your discovery calls

Yesterday, I wrote about how social selling was increasing the conversation rate on Director level calls by 42%. Again, not my opinion, this is all data 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.

So who's social selling?

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.

Other articles you might be interested in ....

Would you buy social selling training course from somebody that doesn't use social selling?

How to create budget and build a business case for your social selling project