The competitive advantage you gain by having sales people that can walk digital corridors, Tim Hughes

I'm talking to a number of CEOs and Sales Leaders about if and how we can get back to some sense of normality.

Pre-covid, many of us, would get signed into a business and then "walk the corridors" dropping in on people and asking for a "quick 10 minutes". Or we would set ourselves up at a coffee shop over the road from a prospects office and have back to back meetings. I recall, in the early days of DLA Ignite, my business partner, Adam Gray and I got a table in the canteen at the Oracle office in Amsterdam and had 8 meetings back to back over 6 hours.

There are lots of "ifs", will we go back to the office?
Will we work in some form or hybrid?
Will prospects and customers allow people from outside of the business to come in for meetings?

And while as sales people we have spent the last two years at home, while the pendulum will swing back to some level of face-to-face, I wonder how far?

It depends what hybrid work means, Chris Herd recently said on Twitter that as soon as a company publicly announces a "back to the office" policy the recruitment consultants descend on that business and suck out all the talent. What does this all mean for sales?

In the past we could walk physical corridors, now we must walk digital corridors

Regardless what we think about working in the office, regardless of what we think about working from home. We have to put our opinions aside and realise that having a sales team that CAN work in the office, but also has the skills to work from home, must be a competitive advantage.

The virtual selling myth

The cold calling gurus will like you to think that "virtual selling" is calling and emailing people, but not sitting in the office, but sitting at home.

We all know that cold calling and cold emails have limited use and is especially ineffective in the B2B enterprise world.

Empowering the work from home salesperson to walk the digital corridors

In the modern world of business, a company wants it's salespeople to sell on digital, to make digital connections, walk digital corridors and have conversations.

To do that you as a business and your sales team must be empowered to go to social media and to create those conversations.

Afterall every sales person has a voice that should be heard. How do we do this?

How do we walk the digital corridors?

1. You need to look the part. In the past, when you went to visit clients you would look the part and have an introductory speech or patter. Explaining to people who you are, what is your area of expertise, you would also share something about yourself.

This is how you LinkedIn profile should look. Buyer centric. It should not look like a CV, that means you are looking for work, it should not look like your manager says, or what marketing say, it's what should be attractive to your buyer. Just as you would when you were in a client's office.

2. Second you need to connect with people, just as you would walking those digital corridors. You wouldn't walk into an office and pitch, so don't do it on social media. Social is about being social. On our social selling and influence course we teach people how to be social and not spammy.

3. Finally, as you walk the corridors, your prospects and clients don't want to waste their time, they want to deal with experts, and content is how you can show your prospects that you are an expert. That you are human. Your sales teams must be having quality conversations on social. Because conversations create sales.

LinkedIn now has 800 million people, which is why you have access to a digital company of 800 million people.

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.

The problem with the name "social selling" is that people think that this is selling on social. All these pitches that you get on social are not social selling, they are spam.

The other thing you need to know about social selling is that this isn't about "putting out some videos" or "putting flowers on your profile" or "going viral" this is about revenue, EBITDA, you winning business from the competition and having a competitive advantage.

With anything you do on social there are two questions you need to ask

1. How many leads / meetings / conversations will I get from this post / blog / activity?

2. How much revenue / EBITDA am I getting as a business?

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