What would life be like if you and your team were the global digital leaders in your field…?
What would life be like if your team were the recognised, ‘go to’ people for their technical or commercial expertise, on the planet…?
What would life be like if whenever Google, Yahoo or Bing were asked a question that you should be the answer to....that its not just a website hit but page after page of your teams profile information and content that was offered response…?
The world has changed.
There was a time when none of this mattered, now it is business critical.
There was a time we just did what we did and got on with it, now we need new skills.
There was a time when terms like ‘influencer’ and ‘being famous for…’ sounded ridiculous when put alongside your business, now its normal…
We meet Management teams from a wide variety of sectors and geographic locations every week. It never fails to amaze me how far apart organisations in the same sector can be in terms of their approach to demand generation.
Some are advanced in mapping out and applying their new routes to market, with diverse and encompassing digital strategies and internals plays. One company spring to mind, who are remapping their entire management system to incorporate a digital ‘lead to purchase order’ system designed to accommodate Social Selling. This is a business that was, until recently, completely analogue in their thinking, they thought it was all about cold calling, email, and adverts.
Then there is the opposite end of the scale with teams that are visibly worried, confused and in ‘hope mode’. They think that digital is a fad and doesn’t apply to them, their business, or their sector. These are ‘Analogue’ companies.
In the middle ground, no man’s land, are those that are fumbling around trying to make it up. These will usually be the toughest meetings. They will tell me they are all over it, “we are all over Social”, at some point usually someone tells me how many connections that have on LinkedIn…when I turn the discussion to how they’ve monetised being “all over Social” and the tone changes.
There is a ‘Digital share of voice in your sector’, you may not know about it or even understand it but there is a section of Social devoted to exactly what you and your company do, you should be leading that conversation. This puts you in a such a different place that one of my clients recently described it as “an unfair advantage…”.
Organisations like Gartner are giving us all the clues for free!
“80% of b2b transactions will be completely digital by 2025”,
“33% of buyers don’t ever want to see your Sales team”,
“We need to be changing our Sales Motions to match modern Buying Motions….”
The 2021 LinkedIn-Edelman B2B thought leadership impact report is an excellent report which saw Edelman and LinkedIn collaborate on the fourth annual B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study to examine how thought leadership influences perception and buying behaviours among B2B decision-makers (link below).
The report says…
"64% of buyers say that and organisation thought leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities and competency than its marketing materials and products sheets".
I’m a b2b business owner and all that we do in terms of strategy and preparation is in line with this.
This isn’t some other persons or other industry problem; this is yours and mine, its front and centre right now.
We need to pick up on this information and do something about it…
Let’s look at 2 fictional companies for example…
‘Legacy Co’ are stuck in Analogue mode.
‘Modern Co’ decided to become a Social Organisation during lockdown.
Legacy Co:
Before Covid, AB were a typical b2b company, using typical demand generation, lead creation, pipeline/funnel management and forecasting techniques.
The Marketing team organised adverts in trade press and made sure they were at all the big shows and some smaller ones every year.
Success measures?
One year they gave away 2000 brochures!
All the Management team needed to hear was that they got some leads from these shows, and they were happy, nobody ever dug too deep. The head of Sales could dress it up well for the board and it would be forgotten about in a few weeks. Nobody ever really checked as to the value, but hey… “it was great for visibility”.
They did mass email campaigns every quarter and then had the usual internal arguments about how many of the emails had a real live person at the end of them. Every quarter they would ask Sales to keep them up to date with email changes. They debated things like “is 5% really a good open rate?”.
Social Media was run by one person at AB, they are in Marketing. They put corporate content out LinkedIn twice a week everyone got an email to like and share the post. It was “all about the Company page because that is where we need to push”.
Nobody knew too much about it so didn’t challenge it. They were convinced the ‘gold’ came from the company page, so everything else was missed, they all believed they were ‘doing Social Media’ really well.
Sales were out doing what Sales do. Setting up meetings, pitching, following up, proposing, and trying to convert.
The CRM was a lottery, no consistency. The Sales VP wasn’t bothered as long as they hit their numbers…” I know exactly what they are doing. They need to be hitting their numbers, not messing about on the CRM to keep accounts happy”.
Things got tougher in 2018, they all noticed things were getting harder. The answer they came up with was to do more of what they were doing already. More spend, more people….
Then Covid hit: Cold calling and email campaigns now completely ineffective for prospecting, no trade shows to scoop up those leads, adverts ignored. Nobody answering the phone and people sitting twiddling thumbs whilst still pulling healthy salaries.
Legacy Co are holding on.
They made it through 2021 but, are much smaller. They are holding on for things to go back to normal. They tell you about “green shoots at the back end of Q1 2022”, they say things like “with the rub of the green” and answer market questions with “hopefully” and “with a bit of luck”.
When you ask what they did to address the fundamental change in buying motions for their products and services, they tell you about everything other than what they have done to change.
Modern Co decided to adapt.
They too noticed the change in 2018, it hit them hard, and they reacted quickly. They brought in a Strategic Social Media specialist to help them develop a Social strategy and train the team in Social Selling and Influence.
Prior to Covid, Modern Co worked in pretty much the same way as Legacy Co in their approach to demand generation, lead creation, pipeline/funnel management and forecasting. Trade shows, emailing and cold calling /prospects and running adverts. They followed the same patterns.
Modern Co acted in 2019, they focused on data.
The put real focus on pipeline attribution – who, where, why, what and how much.
They analysed conversation rates and dug into the roots and branches of what worked, and what didn’t.
They didn’t keep this just in Sales and Marketing, the opened it up to across all functions – the whole team. All people with different perspectives and different mindsets but one thing in common, they loved this company and wanted to do their bit to help it. They took time to map it all out and looked at projections and options…
Modern Co decided to take Social Media seriously and strategically, to use this as the way to connect and engage with prospects, suppliers, and new recruits…to the world. They decided to become a Social Organisation. They trained their team, not just Sales and Marketing, the Management team, Engineering, Operations, Technical, HR and so on.
This wasn’t an afternoon ‘LinkedIn training’, this was real business transformation, and it was a team effort. This was a new language, and the rules and measures were different. They had a strong strategy and a clear mission, and they knew where they were going.
This changed the measures and metrics. They were now interested in numbers of connections and conversations. They were now all creating rich and engaging content, all of them and they were interested in what worked best and what didn’t, they did this together and it was improving their performance – first the first time in a long time, they had a shared sense of purpose.
The CEO knows as much about their Social Media Strategy as the Marketing lead, why? Because they were all in this together and the future of the business is a board issue. Their efforts started to turn the volume down on their competition and they started to dominate the digital share of voice in their sectors.
Commercial conversations increased, Visibility increased,
Inbound increased,
Pipeline increased,
Internal Culture improved…
This was never about tinkering with LinkedIn and just posting and hoping... This was always about achieving Digital Dominance in their markets, sectors and over their competition.
It included LinkedIn of course but had a much deeper intention and result. This was about enabling them to become the answer to those questions on Google, the questions that they wanted to be the answer to…globally.
Where are they now?
Legacy Co management team still believe Sales is about cold calling, email campaigns, adverts, and newspaper articles, they are stuck in an ancient rut. They say things like “Social Media is all well and good, but we like the personal touch with our clients…”.
We all do, Social Selling enables you to have more conversations!
The management team are still hiring Sales and Marketing people with no digital skills. More people to sit around, looking busy and adding more pressure to the overhead.
Legacy Co's order book has shrunk as the client base is no longer answering calls and emails pile up unanswered. They don’t have a marketing team anymore, it’s all on Sales who are now under extreme pressure. Their entire Sales framework was built on outdated models, theories and techniques that simply don’t work with modern buying motions.
How do you build relationships with a prospect that you’ve never met by cold calling and email, in 2022? How do you do that at scale...?
Legacy Co's management doesn’t understand Social Media, so they don’t see the benefits in Strategy. They’ve been left behind...
Modern Co has embraced Strategic Social Media with Social Selling & Influence as the main driver of their business. They are socially mature and light years ahead of their competition.
They own the share of Digital voice in their markets, their sectors and over their competition. They are flourishing with new orders in new territories from new conversations they could never have had by any other means.
They went into lockdown in Analogue, they came out as experts in Social Selling & Influence, as a team.
One significant different between the two organisation is that Modern Co work on this as a management, together. They work together to make sure their organisations profile and activity is dominating the Social space.
They realise from CEO, CFO through Directors and Managers that Social Media has changed the world and they needed to change. They understand that their Social footprint is so valuable to them that they give it board level status.
To them, Social Media is strategic not tactical.
There are 4.88 billion people of us on the internet today – 40% of us are using Social Media for work. Prospecting, looking for suppliers, customers, partners, investors, new hires – connecting and growing relationships.
You may be sitting here as a leader thinking “I’m just not into social media and I cant see it for my business..”. We meet people like you all the time…. you may not be into Social Media but I’m sure you are into revenue, market share, ebitda and growth…
7 key questions for you: -
- For your 2022 forecast you are going to need to prospect with more efficiency, how will you do this?
- How will you engage with your prospects in a world when you cannot reach them on the telephone or by email?
- Prospecting to people who are also concerned needs sensitivity, how will you do this?
- What are you going to do to set yourself apart from the competition?
- Without face-to-face meetings, how will you build the depth of relationship?
- With the future unclear about events and conferences again…how will you back fill this all the leads that would have come though these events?
- Your prospects and customers are going to look for friends in these uncertain times, how can you be visible as the helper and not be all about Sales?
The conversation about whether this all works or not is over - dead - in the trash.
The question now is if your organisation has the culture to accept change, the mind to accept alternative perspectives and the hunger to win...
I'm happy to walk you you through this, to show you how it all works and what you can expect in return for your efforts.
Live Social ‘22
Eric Doyle
unknownx500
