The top challenges B2B sales reps face early in the sales cycle and how to resolve them, Tim Hughes

According to this research from Lusha, which was provided by MarketingProfs, sales people are struggling early in a sales cycle, so let's walk through this and see if we can do something about it?

The research is here, the MarketingProfs article here.

The report was based on data from a survey of 500 sales representatives who work for B2B firms with more than 50 employees.

The key findings show that, sales enablement and sales tech is not delivering

1. 60% of salespeople have to supplement the tools given to them by their company to get the job done.

2. The tools they use don't create the conversations the salespeople need. And we know conversations create sales.

3. This is impacting on 97% of sales people, 12% experience burnout, 27% feel frustrated, 28% feel unprofessional. When people are demoralised productivity takes a hit. At least 20% of a salesperson's outreach does does not materialise into sales, that's 45.5 hours, per person, per month.

4. Wrong targeted outreach damages the salesperson and the brand and wastes everybody's time.

Top challenges from starting a sales cycle

77% of sales professionals admit that have difficulty in starting sales cycles, this is because they are still using antiquated techniques and processes. Buyers don't want to be interrupted with cold calls and in fact iOS14 (on Apple) meant that I no longer need to take cold calls. The same with Gmail, Google have recently tighten the algorithm so that all emails from bulk emailers sales enablement tools now goes to junk, freeing up the our inboxes of spam email.

Social selling provides sales people (well our methodology) provides sales people with a natural way to start conversations and as LinkedIn allows 200 connections per week, that means that salespeople can have 200 targeted conversations with prospects per week.

38% of sales people have a problem personalised pitches. In the second module of our social selling and influence course we teach and coach sales people how to have conversations. It does seem that in sales we have lost the art of conversations, well now we have found it again.

What's taking its toll on salespeople?

The biggest issue raised by salespeople are being treated unfairly by buyers. If you like me are annoyed by the constant onslaught of cold calls, spam emails and interruptions, it does not surprise me. In fact i would have thought it was higher.

You, like me and the modern buyer knows that these interruptions from cold calling and spam email are not needed. We all know we should be use social selling, so stop using these medieval methods and the salespeople will stop being told to "!@£$ off". It's as simple as that.

The same with 28% of people reaching out to irrelevant prospects, come on it's 2022, you can see who you want to target on LinkedIn, why waste your time elsewhere?

I'm not surprised that 38% of SDRs feel unprofessional, our social selling and influence course provides all people with an understanding non how to have a profile that will look good to buyers. We call it a buyer-centric profile.

Now Imagine .....

How about if I said, I can take you to a place where all your prospects hang out, would you go?

I can pick you up in the car tomorrow and you can hang out there, having conversations with them.

When you arrived, what would you do?

Grab a coffee and go up to the first one and start a conversation? Of course you would.

Or would you walk in and say "buy my stuff, because we are great". Of course you wouldn't, as somebody would call security.

That's the difference. Selling on social is ...... social. You have conversations with people.

You don't go up to people and pitch to them as people will call security.

The great thing about social is that there is no "prime selling time (PST)", you can have as many conversations as you want. One of my customers, does his prospecting between putting the kids to bed and when he goes to bed.

It's time to bring your demand generation into the second decade of the 21st century and it's time to "start fishing where the fish are" ...... on social.

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". Here at DLA Ignite, engagement is important but we are about driving revenue, EBITDA, for your business using social media. This is about you winning business from the competition and having a competitive advantage.

Social is about having a strategy and there are two key drivers

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?

Posting and hoping or posting random stuff is not a strategy, in fact I doubt it's driving anything for your 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, and DLA Ignite customer, 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, Vanessa, Lorena, 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 sponsored by the Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP).

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B2B salespeople say their biggest challenge early in the sales cycle is personalizing their pitches to individual prospects, according to recent research from Lusha. The report was based on data from a survey of 500 sales representatives who work for B2B firms with more than 50 employees. Respondents say the top challenges they face at the start of the sales cycle are personalizing pitches to individual prospects (38% say they struggle with), qualifying leads (27%), and finding prospects (12%).

https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2022/47569/the-top-challenges-b2b-sales-reps-face-early-in-the-sales-cycle?adref=nlt071222&spMailingID=47092442&spUserID=MTA0ODUyODI4NzMyMgS2&spJobID=2281208126&spReportId=MjI4MTIwODEyNgS2