It's always the advice we are being given, work smarter, not harder. 

Afterall we should all be looking for efficiencies to make our life easier and to give us a higher output and edge. 

In this article, I use data to prove that cold callers have to work 9 times harder than social sellers.

Now clearly there are those out there that will tell me they love cold calling and it works for you and that's excellent, but when you are so far behind, that's a lot of work and revenue you are going to need to get. I do wonder if it's physically possible, of course, maybe you can double your team to keep up.  But that is going to play hell with your margins.

Don't believe me? Then let's look at the data. 

Let's look at our data cold calling vs our 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).  It's time to work smarter not harder. 

I need to say, before I get any comments. 

There is 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 sales team of 10.

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.

If you have 10 salespeople that gives you a total addressable market (TAM) of 15,000 new people to have conversations with.

With our social selling methodology, (note: we cannot vouch for anybody else) based on our measured benchmark, you should be able to get, on average, meetings with 9% of this TAM of 15,000.  This means your sales team can have 1350 new conversations every year. 

(As we know, conversations create sales.)

As we discussed above, with any cold outreach the objective is to get a next action and using our social selling methodology and using our measured benchmark we can get 33.6% of 9% of our TAM to a next action, which is 454.

Let assume you win 1 in 3, that's 151 new sales a year using social selling, average order value (AOV) $100,000, that's 

$15,120,000 = $15 million

That's an additional $15 million that you are missing by cold calling rather than social selling.

or $1,26 million a month you are missing out by each month you delay. 

Of course, if you have more than 10 sales people, you can scale the figures up. 

Couple of things to add to this, which will be of interest if you are a sales leader or leader as we keep running the data, week after week.

1. As we work through the TAM, while 9% say yes to a meeting from cold outreach, the other 91% don't feel burned by us.  So while they may have said "no" today, we are still connected to the person and have a "relationship". These buyers are always seeing are content, which means we are always "front of mind" and who are these buyers going to turn to, when they are in the market?  Us of course. This means we are building a future pipeline and will mean we will be into those deals earlier and therefore control those deals ahead of the competition.

2. Following on from point 1. we are now seeing that we are getting one piece of "inbound" a week. These are people who had said no in the past, but are coming to us direct to buy.  Inbound is "interesting" as these companies will have always done research online already and will mean that they are already a long way down the buy cycle.  They will have already checked out the competition and it will mean you are already "qualified in" as far as the buyers are concerned.  In our experience this is about empowering the buyer to buy, rather than closing. Clearly increasing the number of "bluebirds" across your sales team is the "icing on the cake". 

What is this worth to you in dollars? One piece of inbound a week, would mean say 50 new pieces of pipeline every year, or win 1 in 3 of these at $100,000 AOV (average order value) and that's an additional $1,666,666 in new business booked. As you are getting inbound the win rate could be 1 in 2 or even 1 in 1, well 1 in 2 would be an additional $2,500,000. Roll this across the 10 sales people above and that's an additional $25 million. 

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.