Are you playing on social or selling?, Tim Hughes

There has been many changes that have taken place over the last two years due to the Covid 19 pandemic. One of those is the merger of home and work.

In the past we had home and we left there and commuted to work and did stuff in the office. And while you may have gone for drinks and socialised, it wasn't until covid where we now all sitting at home and working.

Now we see into people's homes, we see their pets, their children and the bookcase behind them.

There is another work convergence taking place

There is another transformation in the workplace, this is where social and work are merging.

Research shows that before Covid, social media was a destination, we went there, now we live there.

You want to research a product, where do you go? social media.

Have a meeting with somebody, what do you do? You look them up on social.

We use social everyday, Facebook, Whatsapp, FB Messenger, LinkedIn it's how we work.

When we went in the office, often people felt guilty and didn't use social as it was seen by leadership as "a waste of time". Now we are at home, we can dip into social media without anybody looking over our shoulder.

This thing is, for most people, social is now where we live, if we are in sales, we have to be in social and still leadership is concerned we are wasting our time.

The other day I was pitched a product and the business issue it was trying to solve was "salespeople spend all day in LinkedIn and not the CRM". So I guess for sales leaders it's clearly an issue.

The work - social media convergence

Here at DLA Ignite we have a weekly training session for our Associates and partners / resellers and one of the partners, Lenwood Ross, raised this very subject. He said

"where we work is social and social is where we work" and he's right.

He went onto say that "here at DLA Ignite, we help people walk over the bridge to get comfortable with this convergence".

You're wasting your time on social

We often hear leaders say that "your wasting your time on social" even when the data shows that social sellers sell more and create more revenue than non social sellers.

If you think about sales in the past, "sales efficiency" was defined as visiting maybe two prospects in a day and doing the discovery or pitching. Let's assume there is a 12 hour day and there is travel time. It was seen a a great use of time, but now...

Each key press of a salesperson can be linked to revenue

Now social media provides you with a platform to have literally 100s of conversations in a day and I'm not talking about spamming strangers with inmails or connection requests and pitches. I'm talking about real conversations with people who can actually buy or influence a purchase.

These are the social selling techniques we teach and coach in our social selling and influence course. This is where we show you how to create those conversations.

There is also the case study below of where a prospect walked towards one of a client and they closed a $2.6 million deal, taking revenue off the table for the competition.

Connecting social selling with revenue - measuring your time on social

Now all that above was fluffy, about people change and organisational change.

But as a CEO and sales leader I want data about how my sales team are doing.

The great think about social is it's there right in front of your eyes.

Obviously sales people will continue to use the CRM, but social allows you to see leading indicators so you can see if they are doing the right things.

How many connections people have, how many conversations they are having. It's all there.

Which means you can go to leadership meetings with the exact data of which salespeople are contributing and which are not. Hard facts. None of these CRM hopes and dreams.

How can I find out about this?

Talk to any of the DLA Ignite team and they can walk you through the companies that are doing this and what they are doing.

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.

Another example?

This is Andrew Ferrier, he's Managing Director of Display Technology.

Here's his first blog, not written by a marketing agency which you can see a mile off and people ignore, here is a MD of a company finding time and writing authentic content. He has just finished our social selling and influence course, delivered by our partners Crux, I have to, at this point name check Nick and Eric from Crux.

It's a great article about how a business today needs to stand out from the sea of sameness and what better than the MD leading from the top.

You mean there is more examples?

Yes. 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.

A classic modern buyer, they were on social looking for an answer to a business problem. They spotted the Namos salesperson and walked towards them, asking them if they could help them? That turned into a $2.6 million deal. Now think if you are a competitor to Namos missing out on that deal?

This all happened, just weeks after attending out social selling and influence course.

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