I saw a number of posts today on Linkedin, about how a company has invested in a sales methodology to increase it's win rate.

Have you ever heard of the saying "garbage in - garbage out"?

I understand why a company would make this investment, typically they don't have many leads being created, the problem is seen as "we have to win every deal" to make the number.

So they invest in a sales methodology to give them the rigour.

This is somebody treating the symptom not the cause. 

Where as, the problem is, there isn't enough leads.  What leads you have are probably rubbish and you should be walking away from many of them rather than throwing everything at the to try and win them.

Let's get into a situation where you have "quality in and therefore quality out".

If you change your prospecting method from one of legacy sales to use modern selling the output will be so much higher.

Let's look at out cold calling vs social selling research

Here at DLA Ignite, we are always wanting to push forward the boundaries of sales, so we decided to put cold calling and it's results, head to head with social selling.

So we took a team of "cold callers" cross trained them on social selling and here are the results.

It's worth shouting out the team, Alex, Jordan and Jensen and they work for a company called Supero.

If you want to hear the team talk about it then watch our digital download here.

The results with cold calling

When the team were cold calling, this is before we trained them on social selling, they did whatever they could in terms of warming up the calls with emails or webinars and got about 2 calls a week.  As with any call, your job is to take the call to a next action, which might be a demo, discovery call and they averaged 0.3 of these calls.

The results for social selling

The team is averaging 11 calls per week, the week I am writing this blog, this week, they have got 24 meetings. And the amount of calls that go to a next action is 33.6%.

No spam and no automation!

This is NOT connect and pitch!

This is exponential growth!

Let's look at this with a business case

Let's take a small sales team as an example

Sales leader - 3,000 followers

Salesperson A - 357 followers

Salesperson B - 1146 followers

Salesperson C - 646 followers

Salesperson D - 310 followers 

We know that the average person can grow their network by 3,000 people a year, let's assume of these 50% are going to buy, this gives you a network of 1,500, with these 5 people gives you a total addressable market (TAM) of 7,500.

Using our average of 11% above, this means your sales team can have 825 new conversations every year.

And we know of these we can get 33.6% of these to a next action, which is 277.

Let assume you win 1 in 3, that's 92 sales a year, average order value (AOV) $100,000, that's 

$9,200,000 - $9.2 million.

That's an additional $9.2 million that you are missing by cold calling rather than social selling.

Just think about that scaled across the whole of your sales team!

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.

What does Mark Schaefer, Marketing guru think of the book "social selling - techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition"? watch the video here

It's available on Amazon worldwide.  Link to Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here.