Time flies, but it's the 7th year anniversary of this blog, on how to get 10 C-Level meetings a week using Twitter.

Getting meetings using social media, (without spam) and closing business because of your use of social media is not some "pie in the sky" future state, after all it was written 7 years ago.  Let's not forget, his is an actual case study of a friend of mine who was / is getting 10 C-Level meetings from using Twitter.  

It also isn't an article on how to mess about on social and hope something comes from it.  It's a process, follow the steps and it generates revenue. 

That's what we've done over the last 7 years is implement a social selling methodology, in company after company. Probably the only social selling methodology in the world and certainly the only one backed by the Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP).

Let's stop and think for a moment.  In the last 7 years my friend has generated 10 meetings x 48 weeks x 7 years = 3360 C-Level meetings in that time.  Just think if that was rolled out across all of your sales team?

All of a sudden those pipeline issues would go away and your growth targets would be back in sight.

Even if you generated 1 C-Level meeting from Twitter or Linkedin, that would transform your pipeline, your forecast and you ability to make target.

You maybe aware of that old Chinese proverb, 

"the best time to plant a tree was 7 years ago, the second best time it today". 

Let's look at the 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.  Please check them out on social and ask them about the results!

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 for cold calling in your business and you will know what they are. 

The results for social selling

The team are getting a 9% response (on average) to cold outreach, so for every 100 people they ask for a call, 9 say yes. This figure is an average, so we think somebody with intermediate skills or an expert should be getting a higher figure should be getting a larger response.  In fact, our benchmark for an expert is 13%, but I want to keep figures realistic and conservative. 

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 (on average) 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 / meetings per week, this week, they have got 24 meetings.  But the average is 11, again, let's keep the figures realistic and conservative. 

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!

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. 

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.

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