Have you ever undertaken a "stop, start, continue" brainstorm?
- The point is, you stop doing the things that are not adding value
- start doing things that will add value going forward and
- continue doing the things are adding value.
Best to run them at an away day, or a sales kick off (SKO).
It's a great way for people to feel involved and enable them to contribute
It'a a great way to get people involved, to get the business to come up with new ways and methods to make the company better and helps break down silos in the business.
Make them fun, empower the people, show people that their ideas are wanted and supported!
How to run a "stop, start, continue"
You need to bring all the companies stakeholders together as this is about making the whole business more efficient and effective. Not just sales or marketing.
You have somebody in the organization who is trusted as the moderator, if you are running this in the sales department, don't get the head of sales to run it as they might be biased.
I have a friend, who always volunteers to be the "scribe" in a brainstorm and then only writes down the things he agrees with. Which is clearly not the point of a brain storm.
The "stop, start, continue"
The moderator then gets the team to write down on post it notes.
- processes that you think you should stop,
- processes you should start and
- processes you think you should continue.
Then you can compile them and debate them .... which is why you need stakeholders from across the business there, here are some examples from sessions I have run in the past
1. One department said they were losing money and it was all "sales fault". Often in these sessions people will bring emotions, which is why the moderator is key.
What we found was, a service we had given a way for free when we started the business now took 4 days and the department thought it should be charged for.
"Sales" said they didn't know this and why hadn't it been raised with them, (a key learning going forward to get departments to talk to each other) and agreed it should be charged for. It was agreed that going forward a charge for 4 days would go in all proposals and it was also pointed out that if the department invoiced, most customers would pay.
That department went from being a loss and blaming sales to be a happy department and being a profit centre.
2. Another example. Many sales people know they are wasting time making cold calls and sending spam emails and have no time to use modern sales methods like social selling as that isn't how they are measured. It was agreed (in a working party, which was signed off at the board) that the business would stop using old fashioned methods of measuring salespeople and using modern digital leading indicators.
Worth mentioning that once the CFO realised how these modern digital leading indicators worked, it was she that helped push this through the business.
3. One session suggested there should be new technology used for proposals, but on review it was agreed that there was no business case. But it would be reviewed going forward when certain criteria were met.
4. Use and updating CRMs is often raised and this should be reviewed. One company I worked at hadn't rolled out the mobile version of the app, which enabled salespeople to update the CRM on the move. Another company I worked with forced the sales team to come to the office to update the CRM, which for some team members was a big round trip and the business got around this by using VPN.
Thanks to Rob Durant for reminding me about this.
There no follows details of our cold calling Vs social selling benchmark
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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