Should we run a marketing campaign or empower our sales team with social selling, a comparison, Tim Hughes

This week I was party to a conversation about a marketing campaign.

Like most, if not all marketing campaigns the idea was to create "desire", top of the funnel stuff.

The marketing campaign

The idea was to run a webinar and a marketing agency was going to be employed to find and get people to the event. They were also going to create the landing page so that prospects could register. As part of the registration process, your supplier would get access to the emails.

The vendor working with the agency has done this before and has found the "leads" if you can call them that, to be weak. To be fair, I wasn't surprised, after all if you use a third partner to find and get people to the event then you lose an opportunity to have a conversation and build a relationship.

I totally get that, this is no different from thousands of marketing campaigns that are run across the world. After all, how do we get strangers to become aware of our products and services?

Enter social selling.

How about if we used social selling?

Rather than doing the above campaign, how about if we used social selling?

For less money than they were paying this marketing agency, they could train and coach 10 sales people. What does this mean?

Linkedin profiles that are attractive to your buyers

We would empower them to have buyer-centric profiles, so this means that their buyers will be attracted to them. So what?

In 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. What happened was that a buyer found the one of the Namos team on social and then walked towards them and asked "can you help us?". Chris will explain in the video.

Conversations and relationships with our target market

We will also coach the sales team to connect with, have conversations with and build relationships with, the target market. The trick always is not to sell. I'm not being anti-sales, you know as well as i do that we all hate being sold to.

So instead of the marketing agency owning the customer relationship, the vendor does. This also means that sales are able to qualify the people being invited to the webinar. In many cases the people may not be ready now and it will be done to sales to nurture.

The difference is with social selling is that you as a vendor will know who these people are, you will be connected to them. Which is way better than "just" having an email. Emails have a shelf live, a connection on LinkedIn is for life.

Being able to wave at your prospects every day

Finally, the sales team will be activated to create content, this means their network will have insight shared with them on a daily basis.

The problem with an event is that you are "front of mind" just leading up to the event, for the event and maybe if you email to the email list.

Where as, with social selling, you are front-of-mind every day, in fact if you go down the route of "digital dominance" which is what we can teach if you want. As a business you will own all the share of voice.

Finally, the event is a one off, social selling is forever.

Next time you want to run an event

Next time you want to run an event, maybe there is an option that is cheaper and gets you more leads, meetings and conversations?

What is social selling?

Here at DLA Ignite, we define social selling as

"Using your presence and behavior on Social Media to build influence,
make connections, grow relationships and trust, which leads to
conversation and commercial interaction."

It's not witchcraft, it's enabling your salespeople to work from home, (or the office) and create conversations with prospects and customers. Conversations on social media and conversations that convert.

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.

Andrew Ferrier who is the CEO of Display Technology Ltd and in this article it talks about why Display Technology have adopted social selling. His team have also created a social media strategy with help from our partner, Crux.

Their social media mission statement is

“We want to position ourselves as a forward-thinking, knowledgeable team of individuals who are all experts in our own right, therefore, collectively awesome!”

Andrew also says in that post

"Adopting this (social selling) strategy has taken all of us well outside of our comfort zones but the rewards we have seen in a short period of time have created an excitement within the business development team (new term for sales team).

Because of the nature of social media, quite often you can get instant results. Even if that is just a comment left on your post, or a like, or someone taking the time to want to connect with you.

The excitement around the sales team is infectious, it’s no longer a chore to reach out to the market place because the results can be instant and are there, right in front of you."

What sort of results can you expect?

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 work with our partners such as Crux, Little Bird Marketing, Funnel Amplified, Accelery, EDPE Consultants, etc. We are the only social selling and influence company in the world to offer a certificate provided by an independent qualification body (OfQual) and sponsored by the Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP).

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