We work with a lot of people who realise their commercial world has changed and they need to become skilled at Social Selling & Influence.

In the early stages of our programme most people are still looking upon Social Media as ‘yet another bolt on to everything else they have to do’.

If we look upon anything as a bolt on, its going to eventually fail. That’s why we talk about business transformation.  It’s not about chasing the latest algorithmic twist or that amazing new button or feature on LinkedIn.

Let everyone waste their time chasing that stuff....this is about having a concrete understanding of how to convert your teams Social Media presence and activity and into revenue and ebitda.   

A scalable and measurable restructuring of how to work and how to think about your commercial processes.  A mindset and behaviour change around how we worked before - how we work today and how we need to work in the future

Once that is in place, we have a solid platform for growth that can absorb and/or deflect all the noise about ‘this hack’, ‘that button’ and ‘this tip’…     

One of the most common mistakes we find is when organisations have been convinced by either internal advisors or external ‘specialists’ to see Social Media as something to which we simply squash our old processes, methods, and practices into…

For example:

A marketing specialist told me recently that they had developed a Social Media strategy for their company which was focussed on’ Visibility’ and Lead Generation’.

On the face of it, no problem. Pretty much exactly what all every marketing team and consultants are doing for their teams/clients across sectors and around the globe.

The problem is that it’s trying to force new thinking onto old problems.   Its taking a set of issues and old solutions and simply throwing them at Social Media.

Something else we see regularly is the difference in perspective and definition of success…. In this case the marketing team were pleased with the results, but the sales team had a toothless pipeline, the finance team saw reduced order intake and the board were seeing a dramatically reduced reforecast.

In many cases the problem case has changed so dramatically that any attempt to apply old school fixes, even if dressed up as digital, are destined to fail.

In this new commercial world, we must change our thinking from step 1 in the process. Some of the terminology needs to go and we need to rewrite the play book for details and social.

3 terms we need to phase out…

1.     Lead generation

If anyone tries to sell you this as a modern commercial solution, send them packing.   They are modern snake oil salesmen.

“What do you do for Lead Gen” “Buy this lead gen tool” “Are you getting enough leads?”

Its time to get rid of this term from our commercial vocabulary as it’s been used an abused over the year to the point where its now just a hurdle in the way.

Look in your CRM today and have a conversation with the team about the leads, what they really mean and what they actually mean to your pipeline attribution.

2.     Visibility

If you are spending a single Dollar, Pound, or Euro on what has been explained to you as being ‘good for visibility’, cancel it.

It means you are spending time, money, and energy on something that even the people who created it, don’t understand.

You are buying ‘maybe’ and ‘hope’ and ‘luck’ and ‘fingers crossed’

Chasing visibility is a waste of everyone’s time and throws you right back into the pot with everyone else desperately trying to have visibility.

3.     Marketing Materials

What do you spend each year on marketing materials? 

If you cancelled that spend, would it affect your order intake?

Would deciding not to produce any traditional Marketing Material change anything?

Are you doing it because you’ve always done it and now it feels like a security blanket?

Every Dollar/Pound or Euro we spend on anything to do with marketing should be traceable to some part of our pipeline or it’s a waste of money.

 These terms and phrases hold us back from the successes we can and should be achieving.

 This is all well and good but what takes their place...?

3 terms we need to focus on moving forward. 

Technical and commercial influence

Put your energy into becoming the leading Technical and Commercial Digital influencers in your sector.

Why?

1. Own the ‘Share of Voice’ in your chosen sectors
2. Become the trusted advisors
3. Pipeline, growth & inbound
4. Recruitment opportunities
5. Employee engagement & shared sense of purpose

Create demand

Instead of chasing leads, focus on creating demand for the value you bring to your prospect’s lives. 

Focus on truly understanding your prospective clients’ needs and how you will become the digital answer to all of their questions. Show them that you truly understand their business problems.

Focus on creating the desire to work with you because, it feels right…

Qualified relevance

Stop chasing visibility and work towards being qualified as relevant and valuable with your prospect base before there is a tender or a proposal to be submitted – before you’ve even met!

One last term that we don’t hear being mentioned or measured enough…

Pipeline attribution

Time after time we meet organisations who don’t measure pipeline attribution. This simple question changes the game…

“Can we have a look at all we are doing in Marketing and match it to a percentage of our pipeline?”

It’s a great start and will throw up, gaps, threats, and opportunities.

It’s the language we need to be speaking these days as the old terms are becoming problematic.

In 2022 its imperative you give your team all the digital skills they need to build influence online, prospect, network, and close business…all on digital sources.

It’s not about whether this 'works' anymore or whether you like the idea of Strategic Social Media for your business.... there is more than enough data and it’s for revenue and ebitda and critical for survival.

It’s now about whether you have the mindset to accommodate change, the culture to allow alternate perspectives and the hunger to win.

Live Social ‘22

Eric Doyle

Crux / DLA Ignite