Pipeline growth and acceleration has been the #1 challenge for B2B sales teams who sell complex B2B solutions, since the beginning of time (well, since the last 20 years at least).

I’ve spent 22 years within a B2B sales environment, mainly selling marketing technology. From email marketing platforms to complex MarTech and AdTech solutions, often multi-million dollar deals (I use dollar as that was always the currency we calculated deals in, working with a number of US based tech firms). No matter what role I was in, sales rep, sales manager or leader the one constant focus through-out was pipeline.  How much, what stage, what quality and what is being done to generate net new pipeline. The how much question was always a challenging one depending on which company I worked for and the level I was at.

No longer do companies have the luxury of choosing the pipeline multiple they want. If leadership enforce a pipeline multiple of quota it encourages the system to be gamed. These demands create the wrong behaviours across an organisation that ultimately changes the entire trajectory of growth for a business. What ends up happening is pressure is put on a business function like ‘sales’ ‘marketing’ or ‘demand generation’ as opposed to focusing on solving the problem.

The problem being; a lack of skills.

Your people don’t know how to walk digital corridors and create conversations at scale. Conversations that evolve into relationships and commercial outcomes that are good for you and your prospects and customers. For most anyway, they have spent so long creating sales messaging in an effort to open new doors and the basic principle of building new relationships is lost in the depths of the sales and marketing pressure cooker.  

Things changed long ago, accelerated further by the pandemic;

• Cold calling, doesn't work (98% of it doesn't).
• Cold emailing, doesn't work (99% of it doesn't).
• Cold In-mails and connection requests/follows on Social Media, don't work (99% of them don't).
• Marketing brochures / collateral don’t sell your solution, a conversation does!

Having a solid, differentiating value proposition combined with an enablement program will get you so far. But, at the end of the day if your sales and customer success teams are unable to create new conversations, easily and at scale, whats the point!

I don't mean to sound like a broken record on this topic, but the world has moved on.

• Buyers and influencers are getting younger and switch-off to traditional sales and marketing methods.
• Buyers spend <20% of their time speaking with sellers in a buying process, and if there are 4 suppliers, you get 5% of the buyers time, WHAAT!
• Buyers buy from sellers they already know and trust, so if you haven’t built rapport and trust, don’t start selling until you have.
• If you sell to someone who isn't ready (which is 95% of your territory) you will put them into the ZOR (zone of resistance) which is v.hard to come back from.
• Buyers are between 70-90% through the buying process before they speak with a seller, then why try to cram 100% of your sales process in the remaining 10-30% and give the buyer a poor experience.

So what does your outbound, demand gen, prospecting program look like. Are you still measuring MQL's and SQL's or do you focus on more valuable leading measures like engagement levels, message exchanges and rapport building?

Do you have a Social Selling methodology used widely across your organisation? Ssh, don't tell anyone, but you sell conversations, not products!

If you don’t have a Social Selling methodology, then you shouldn't expect to be hitting your pipeline growth and acceleration objectives.

Three things you must do on Social on your way to developing your Social Selling strategy:

Have a buyer centric profile 

- Here at Supero we train and coach people to use social media to sell. First thing we teach you is that you need a buyer centric profile. Which means?

We know that buyers are doing their research and they use social media to review you, your product and services and it stands to reason that these buyers are not going to approach somebody who has a salespersons profile on LinkedIn or Twitter. Why?

Because nobody likes salespeople, we don’t trust anything you say!

If you look like a salesperson you probably are one and social selling will be of limited use to you.  

A wide and varied network 

- the second thing we teach people in our social selling methodology coaching is how to connect with people. We know that people hate being sold too, so we coach people how to connect without selling. 

This is a subtle difference. While I totally understand that you want to pitch to everybody, but you will find that you will get further by not doing this. When you connect to people, this is your opportunity to have a conversation. And it's conversations that lead to sales.

Your network needs to be in the accounts you want to influence (sell to) and the more people you are connected to in the these accounts the better.

Why a large and varied network?

The way search works on LinkedIn is slightly different to Google. Search is based on your network on Linkedin. The wider and variety within your network means you're more likely to show up on a search by one of your buyers. Then bingo! you get inbound. 

Insightful and educational content - We know that our buyers are looking for insight.

Buyers have business issues and you can solve them. Buyers are savvy, they are just like you and me. They know a company brochure or company content will say "buy our company because we are great", we know that, because everybody says that.

It's not original and it's not differentiated. We know it will be biased and so we avoid it.

As buyers, we are looking for somebody that can offer us insight, somebody who wants to help us, somebody who wants to educate us.

One of the companies we are coaching, the sales guy has just received an RFP, so we suggested, why not use the management summary you are going to write as the basis for a blog? 

One of the companies we are coaching asked us how they should measure their salespeople using social. Why not use that as a blog. If we have a client interested in measurement of social, then there must be other people wanting that knowledge as well. The blog is below, by the way. 

To quote Howard Tiersky "The ‘buyer-first mentality’ should be the core mantra! Digital companies that are thriving right now are customer-centric. The same goes for our social media profiles. If we want to utilize them to get sales, then we should always think of the buyer every time we post."

What results could you look to obtain?

Just taking what you are doing at the moment, cold calling and sending emails and transferring that onto social, isn't social selling. The results in doing that will be minimal.

It's time for you as salespeople to rise up and get trained on a proper social selling methodology, that will enable you to crush your number. 

Some clients that we have worked with have seen some truly staggering results which might make you raise an eyebrow, but they are true.

• one client generated over 100x as many qualified meetings from their social activity as they did from their marketing department
• a sales team generated over £400,000 in revenue and and additional £400,000 in open pipeline per person in just 6 months
• activated sales teams create great content and huge visibility - we have an instance where each salesperson in a team was generating over 350 engagements per month and over 100,000 views on their content
• sales and technical teams creating content provide the opportunity to produce a groundswell of micro-niched tactical documents specifically to target particular organisations & industries facing particular challenges. No marketing department is capable of competing with this mechanism.
• more than 40 quality candidates applying for a role as a direct result of a single post on social media

The results of doing this can be outstanding but this is not a tactical change. This is not a “training programme for some of the team” this is a significant transformation (in the truest sense of the world) in the organisation which not only makes it more competitive today…but every day from now forwards.

My company, Supero have partnered with DLA ignite, the most influential business in Digital Selling today. Co-Founders Adam Gray and Tim Hughes have spent 7 years developing their Social Selling methodology and I am proud to be their partner and official reseller, having spent 3 months learning the program and now delivering it myself! 

Any questions about this article or would like to learn more, DM me and I’d be happy to chat and introduce you to our team.