Today I got an email addressed to "Alice", my name is "Tim".

What did I do?

Of course I deleted it, didn't even read it.  Also with all spam, I always create a rule that means that all future emails from that email address will go straight into the wastepaper basket.

What we want is personalisation - Really?

Question: Who's the most important person in the world?

You are of course.  If you look at an old school photograph the first person you look for is yourself.

I spoke at the B2B Marketing ABM (Account-based marketing) conference this week and the presentation on before me, spoke about "personalisation" and the audience nodded.

Accept when a marketer hears the word "personalisation" they think "one to one", where as in reality it means "one to many".

Now, I don't know about you, but "Alice" mentioned above could have been the same persona as me, but we have different names.

For example the persona could have been

Divorced

Lives in London

Over 50

Dislike of Manchester United.

Persona don't work

Persona is a way of trying to create a compromise.

Because I, (which is a metaphor for all businesses) cannot be bothered with building a relationship with me, I create a compromise and hope that somehow.  By grouping people together, this will work.

As a buyer, the fact you are cutting corners, means you don't actually care about the relationship. 

Were as, creating one to one relationships is one of the simplest things in the world, but we will come to this.

The fatal flaw of persona is that they are based on a process that I want to sell you something.

That, isn't the way, as a buyer, I want to work with you.  Why?  Because currently I know nothing about your company, in fact I don't care about your products or services.  I certainly don't want to read your brochures and I certainly don't trust your salespeople.  Why?  Because they look and sound just like all the other salespeople.

What can you do?

First thing you can do is throw away all this crap on buyer journey's and persona, because, as I say, it's flawed assumption, based on selling, not buying.  Then do this.

1.  Empower your sales people to have buyer-centric profiles on social media.  This means they look like people your buyers DO want to work with.  They look human, they look like people that can solve your buyers problems.  We cover this on module one of our "social selling and influence course".

2. Then get your salespeople (even better if you can empower everybody across the company) to build 1 to 1 relationships with the people you want to influence.  Connect to people on social media.  These will be people you want to sell to, people who have influence in your industry.  This isn't about sending spam messages "hey buy my product, because we are great". This is social, so be social, start a conversation.

After all, we know that conversations create sales.

We teach this in module 2 of our social selling and influence course, we find that at this stage as people find the lost art of making conversations, they get meetings, which convert into sales.

As I said above, creating one-to-one relationships and having conversations is the simplest thing in the world.  So let's get out of the compromise business and get into the conversation business.

3.  We also know that buyers are online looking for insight, to be educated to be entertained.  Then why not, do this?  Rather than post brochures and brochureware, which you will note gets little or no engagement and therefore little or no conversations (and conversations create sales).  Empower your sales people to give your buyers what they want.

Authentic, humanised, insightful, engaging content.

I had some feedback from my talk on Wednesday as follows

"I saw your session on Weds and was provoked by what you had to say. It's completely intuitive that emotional messaging moves people yet the crap we put out on social is mostly corporate BS. I thought I'd test out the difference on my own profile - in short you were right that human content gets massively higher reach. Not really a surprise but how to harness that authentically is the challenge. And one I hadn't really thought about until you spoke on Weds."

Sums the situation up nicely. 

We cover this on module one of our "social selling and influence course".

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.

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. 

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.