It's always been the problem for sales, how do we focus and close the deals we need to close, but also spend time on demand generation so we always have deals in the "hopper".
So often in sales, we don't get it right and we move from "feast" to "famine".
Many times we have closed a big deal, only to have no pipeline to fall back on. Big mistake.
Today, I was at lunch with a friend of mine and he said
"How do I remain focused on a few deals but keep up my demand generation at the same time?"
That's where the disciplines from social selling and the fact it provides process and scale, faster than legacy methods like cold calling and spam email.
What is social selling?
Our definition is
"Using your presence and behaviour on social media, to build influence make connections, grow relationships and trust. Which leads to conversation and commercial interaction".
How do I remain focused?
Let's go to the end of the sales cycle. Put simply, there is probably a meeting where they stakeholders get together and decided on a recommendation. The issue has always been, to find out who the stakeholders are, have we built a relationship with us, do they understand our value over and above the competition? In my world the term we have used is for this is "covering your bases".
Gartner reckon there are 10 people that are stakeholders in a sale, one supply chain software company we worked with told me they have 100 (hundred) people.
So how do we get around all these people, at scale? Build relationships with them and have conversations with them, etc, etc.
Well you can call them up or spam them with email. This has two problems, one cold calling annoys people and it takes ages. The same with sending spam email. When I was in corporate I got 120 emails a day, your spam email, and we are all bored of those "titles that get attention" means you are more noise and will just be ignored or deleted.
Where as you can connect and build relationships way faster on social media. I refer you to our definition of social selling above.
Now, it should be said that I'm not talking about connect and pitch, that is spam. And I'm not talking about using automation, gain that is spam.
In our social selling and influence program, we teach you how to build relationships and have conversations on social at scale. We also teach you how to take those conversations from social to face-to-face or Zoom / teams calls.
(NB: One of the (many) problems with cold calling is it's based on a one-to-one connection, where as social is exponential, for example, connect to somebody like me who has 30,000 connections, means the connect with me isn't one to one, you have actually pulled 30,000 people into your network.)
How do I keep up the the demand generation?
Let's be honest, we all need to find time for prospecting in the week, I always find that blocking out time is the best.
But here again, you do the same as above, but connect to the companies you want to sell to or influence.
You also be joining and starting conversations with your prospects and customers on social.
Or are you invisible?
Now there are some people that will read that and think "that seems like a lot of hard work?" it is, but it's easier than spending all you day calling people that don't pick up and spamming people that just delete your emails. I hear that the new metric in email marketing has moved from open rate, to measuring if the email actually gets to the inbox. Sad but true.
The thing is, if you are not connected to your prospects, your customers and the people that influence your prospects and customers you are invisible to them.
Let's now look at our benchmark data for cold calling Vs social selling
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
What is social selling?
Our definition is
"Using your presence and behaviour on social media, to build influence make connections, grow relationships and trust. Which leads to conversation and commercial interaction".
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. For your own company, ywill 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.
So really sorry but "crazy simple cold call openers to avoid getting hung up by your prospects" just proves that as a business you have fallen behind.
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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