When I ask sales teams today about what they are doing to build pipeline, they talk about activities in the physical / analog world. Cold calling, email marketing, advertising and paid media.
Again everything you are doing in sales is in the physical / analog world.
Some sales teams are still trying to master the move to digital, but it will mainly be spamming people on social media. If Linkedin has it's way it will be bringing this to and end soon, see my blog here.
Let's be generous and say that your sales team is 20% digital.
Let's look at the world today.
There is a famous article by McKinsey that came out in June 2020, while the world was deep in lock down, called "the quickening" see article, here. It talks about how the world saw 10 years of digital transformation in 3 months. We can all look back to the days before Covid-19 and see how the world has changed.
Before Covid-19 pandemic working from home was a thing, but it was an outlier, now it's seen as normal.
Before the pandemic, we were told that doctors and church services and piano lessons had to take place face-to-face, now they are all run online. We live our lives online, it's natural now.
This is the way that your buyers see the world.
In this article from Gartner from 2019, so before the pandemic, they state that prospects and customers are 57% of the way through the buying process before they make contact with a salesperson. That means that even before the pandemic and the shift online by society and business, buyers were 57% digital.
In my blog here, IDC and SAP state that your buyers are on social media looking for solutions to their business problems. Research here. There is also an article about it from MarketingProfs here.
Let's repeat that.
67% of buyer will engage in social networks and communities to get information about a vendor, product, or service
That means that this research shows that the buyer has moved from 57% digital to 67% digital, I don't know about you I pretty much buy everything online.
Can you see the problem?
“Fish where the fish are.”
Can you see the mismatch here? Your salespeople are 20% digital, your buyer is 70% digital.
Your buyers are using social media and your sales teams are not.
Until you empower your sales teams to "fish where the fish are" by using digital, you will always have poor pipeline. It does not matter how many cold calls you make, spam emails you send or how many people you spam on social media. You can buy tools to increase the amount of spam, it will make little difference until you understand that there has been a fundamental shift in the world of business today.
Want to know more about social selling, check out my new book
"social selling techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition".
In this brand new edition, I have updated all the text, I have also got 15 practitioners, so people who are doing this already to explain how they are get (practical) business benefit. From the CEO that has been running a digital business for over 18 months to sales leaders who use social selling every day.
Articles on how these business have and are implementing digital, from Mercer, Telstra Purple, Ring Central, Cyberhawk, Namos, Ericsson, Crux Consulting, DLA Ignite and more.
It's available on Amazon worldwide. Link to Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here.
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