I was talking to a small business recently and they said, we cannot social sell, because we just don't have the resources that big companies do.

So I showed them this.

This is an output from Brand 24, which is a social media listening tool that measures ACTUAL social media influence.  This is the list of the top 20 influencers for #digitalselling

It shows people from DLA Ignite are in the top 10 positions.

OK, so what?

David vs Goliath 

DLA Ignite, (my company) has 11 employees according to Linkedin and 1889 followers on our LinkedIn page, now compare that to...

Another company, according to Linkedin they have 534,564 employees and 10.6 millions followers on LinkedIn.  And they started using the #digitalselling hashtag, so clearly they want to be famous for it, but they don't feature in the top 20. Just think  

As a business, if you are a small company, or even a big company that wants to be famous for something and are not, we can teach you what we do.

Worth saying , that being famous for something is all about "owning" your category. You are wasting your money trying to get "visibility" in a digital first world. You need digital relevance.  

We have customers who do this, one customer is number 1 in the one for #powersupplies, because that's that's one of the key words they want to be famous for.  That's the category they want to be famous for. 

How do you translate this into revenue?

One of our clients, beat the company I mentioned above in a major opportunity. Now clearly, we cannot attribute exactly what we taught them, meant they won the deal. But if you agree in the practice of "marginal gains" in high performance teams, then clearly you need to talk to us. 

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. 

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.