Why the great resignation will stop you making your number and it's not what you're thinking, Tim Hughes

A lot has been written about the great resignation over the last two years.

There is even a Wikipedia page, here that defines it as

"The Great Resignation, also known as the Big Quit, is an economic trend in which employees voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse."

How does this impact sales?

We all know we can lose sales people a lot has been written about that.

Let's walk through the 4 ways this can impact your team or impact you making your number and what you can do to de-risk the situation.

1. You are not connected to the right decision maker

Way back in March 2020, when the pandemic first hit, one of our large US SaaS provider clients mentioned that a number of deals in the quarter had slipped.

They, like many B2B Enterprise companies are selling at C-Suite level and their target person is the Head of Human Resources. What this software company found was that for the level of spend they needed, (because of the pandemic) the sign off had shifted to the CEO.

Of course the pre-pandemic sales playbook did not foresee this. From that quarter onwards they adjusted the playbook so that for a deal to be forecast they salesperson needed to have met the VP of HR and CEO. I think the post pandemic sales playbook requires as much "de-risking" as you can get.

What's the resolution for this?

Simple resolution, you need to be connected to more and more people within the organisation. But not just connected; but have a relationship with them and had conversations with them. Legacy sales methods such as cold calling and email will get you so far, but it's time consuming and inefficient. Not a great start to a relationship by pissing people off with an interruption.

We teach and coach on this on our social selling and influence course, how to have relationships and conversations at scale. We have also found that when benchmarked against meetings achieved with cold calling and email, social selling converts more discovery calls. In fact we found that the conversion of C-Level discovery calls via social selling (compared to cold calling) went up by 42%.

2. The number of stakeholders involved in the sale has increased

One of clients is a supplier of Supply Chain software to the B2B Enterprise space and they tell us that they expect there to be 100 people involved from the buyer side.

This means that at some point during the sale there will be a vote and these 100 people will have a say on who the vendor of choice is. We all know that 100 people as all "bases" that we need to cover. That's a lot of people we need to get around to speak to, but how do we do that.

Same method as detailed in 1 above.

3. You contacts leave before you sign the deal

In any sale we need a sponsor (internal salesperson) and have spoken to the economic buyer. Now you, need to be searching for multiple sponsors and multiple economic buyers. Why? Because if one of these leave in the middle of a pursuit, that can kill your sale.

Same methods needs to be deployed as in 1, social selling will allow you to build relationships and have conversations at scale. It allows you to walk to digital corridors.

4. Your renewals are at risk

In the past renewals were straight forward. The deal was signed, your renewals person flew out to see the person, took them for lunch and then checked in with them on the phone every week or month. This enabled you to build a relationship with them. All set up for the renewal.

It's now common that through the great resignation that your client contact leaves before signing the renewal. The other issue is that they were often the person who made the decision, which places you are into a resale situation. You are back to the start, with no people coverage in the account, often open to competitive attack.

In many cases the renewal person isn't the same as the new business person. They don't have the skills to start a brand new sales campaign.

This places your renewals business at risk.

The solution is straightforward and I cover the that in option one above.

4 ways that you are at risk, I now walk you through what social selling is in more detail.

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