How are you going to build pipeline and prospect now that all the low hanging fruit has gone?, Tim Hughes

I was talking to a business leader last week and they said to me

"All the low hanging fruit has gone"

Maybe, it was just in her market, but it got me thinking, if we need to work harding to get business, what should salespeople be doing in this digital world?

The world has gone social and digital

We know that world has gone digital this great research from we are social and Hootsuite and compiled by Simon Kemp says that 4.48 Billion, that's 57% of the world population are active on social media.

In this Forbes article, Kate O'Flaherty said

"Facebook’s outage on Monday 4th October 2021 outage was met with outrage: in some countries the digital economy was effectively wiped out because its services are integral in speaking to employees, friends and family. Other services related to Facebook didn’t work either, such as Sign in with Facebook."

Social media has changed the world

Social media has changed the world, it's changed society and it's changed the way we do business.

We are totally reliant on it, both from a day to day life prospective and a day to day business prospective.

This has been accelerated by the pandemic. Whereas, once people saw social media as a destination, we went there. Now we live in social media and we do this regardless of age or demographic.

How has this impacted the world of sales and marketing

This has meant there has been a wholesale transformation of sales and marketing, whereas we once were able to get hold of prospects through the telephone through cold calling and via email, through email marketing. Now these methods are deemed legacy and the results have flatlined.

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"

What about sending out more and more emails?

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 sites 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.

Companies have transformed to social selling sometimes called digital selling, sometimes called virtual selling, sometimes called remote selling

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 recently 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.

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.

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