Putting together a proposal for a client, they wanted a comparison, cold calling Vs social selling.  And why not, a business has to decide which prospecting method.

After all a business needs to decide which method is the most efficient and most effective.  What I mean is, which one will generate the most revenue in the shortest amount of time. 

Here's my data feeding in the same metric and based on our benchmark data, which I outline below. 

What's interesting to see is that for every $1.5 million a social seller create a cold caller creates $160,000. 

Now, I've had companies tell me on social media they are happy with cold calling, and they are very successful with it.  This is brilliant.  But at least you know how much you are behind.

There was a time when people used to get around on horses and then the car was invented, clearly many people continued using horses, when the steam engine was swept away by the electric engine, many people stayed wedded to the steam engine.  When Nokia phones and Blackberries got swept away by the iPhone, I know somebody who still uses a Nokia phone.

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

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 and create a benchmark (and business case) for 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 cold 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.

Anyway, you will have your own figures. 

The results for social selling

The team are getting a 9% response to cold outreach, so that for every 100 people they ask for a call, 9 say yes.

Now with every call based on cold outreach there has to be some sort of next action.  You will know what your next action is, it will be a demo, a discovery call or something. 

We have found that 9% of the people that have agreed to a call based on cold outreach, 33.6% are converting to a next action.  Which is exponential growth when compared to cold calling. 

The team is averaging 11 calls per week, the week I am writing this blog, this week, they have got 24 meetings. Just think about that being rolled out across your sales team(s). 

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 growth of 1,500 per person per year, with these 5 salespeople above gives you a total addressable market (TAM) of 7,500.

With our social selling methodology, based on the figures you should be able to get on average, meetings with 11% of this TAM of 7,500.  This means your sales team can have 825 new conversations every year. Let's not forget that it's these conversations that will create sales.

And we know from the figures above that using our social selling methodology we can get 33.6% of these to a next action, which is 277.

Let assume you win 1 in 3, that's 92 new sales a year using social selling, 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.