What do you mean, you have no relationships in that account?, Tim Hughes

How many times have you heard this if you are in sales?

"What do you mean, you have no relationships in that account?"

The same if you are in leadership, how many times have you said this?

Here's a real world example

Many of our clients employ us to de-risk their pipeline.

We use "social techniques" to analyse their pipeline and forecast to increase the accuracy and certainty of their forecast.

At one forecast meeting, the salesperson for Dominos Pizza was talking about how this was a done deal and as the management team had met the relevant leadership, it was pretty much waved through and was forecast.

I had to stop the meeting and said, I would accept the deal as "upside" but not "forecast", why? Because the salesperson was not connected to anybody on LinkedIn within Dominos Pizza.

The deal didn't happen.

Here is a blog on how you can run QBRs with social selling.

Can I run QBRs with social selling?

What do you mean, you have no relationships in that account?

We all know that relationships in an account are critical for a win, trying to start relationships with cold calls and cold emails is frustrating and totally inefficient. After all, with a 98% failure rate and starting relationships by annoying people off isn't the way forward in the modern world.

Remember that the goal of efficiency is the maximum possible output for the minimum possible input.

Bragging about how many cold calls you can make or how many spam emails you can make is bragging about maximum input, which is, by definition, part of the equation for inefficiency

In our social selling and influence course we train and coach to create digital relationships.

Creating relationships and having digital conversations is straight forward today.

You need a buyer-centric profile, this is your shop window to the world. You also get taught how to have digital conversations with people on social networks.

A client of ours, who is a supply chain software company, tell us that there are 100 stakeholders in any one sale to a client, so it's not about the ability to create one relationship and conversation. But the ability to do this digitally, at scale.

How to have digital conversations on social networks

There are three mistakes that business make with social.

1. They treat social as if it's a cold call - We've all had it, the connection request on social which is a pitch or the connect and pitch. Both are just spam. Social networks are ..... social.

2. The marketing echo chamber - This is where Marketing put out corporate brochures and ask the employees to like them. This is just corporate spam. I certainly doubt this is creating any leads or meetings or revenue for the business.

3. Social is a tactic - The other mistake is where a business traest social as a tactic or add on. Examples of this are "hints and tips" training, giving the responsibility to training to a team that are not digital, such as sales enablement or allowing teams internally to block the move to digital.

Now Imagine .....

Imagine, I pick you up tomorrow in my car and drive you to a place which is full of your prospects and customers. All you have to do is go up and have a conversations with them.

In a social environment like this, walking up and pitching to somebody doesn't work, as it doesn't on a social network.

There has never been an excuse not to be connected to people within an account and in this digital age, even less so. Our social selling and influence course, will teach and coach you to be having conversations with prospects and customers at scale. Whether this is a new business or account-based marketing (ABM) approach.

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.

What happened? They buyer was on social media looking for a solution to their problem, spotted one of the Namos salespeople, who had a buyer-centric profile and asked if the salesperson could help them. That turned into a $2.6 million deal.

Contact any of the DLA Ignite team, Eric, Adam, Nick, Vanessa, Lorena, Brentney, Priscilla, Lenwood, Alex and they will be more than happy to help.

Go and look at their LinkedIn profiles .... look how they can have digital conversations, create insightful content. This could be your company!

We are the only social selling and influence company in the world to offer a certificate in social selling 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