When we started DLA Ignite 7 years ago, Adam Gray and I knew that we needed to be able to offer people a certification in social selling.  

Surely anybody can offer a certificate in social selling?

Surley, you turn up and job done, you get a certificate? 

Now, I've been on 4 sales methodology courses and got a certificate, each time, at the end.  This is purley a certificate of attendance, it does not measure my competence in that sales methodology. It also does not measure my implementation of that sales methodology.  

Of all those 4 sales methodologies, only once did the leadership actually implement what was taught.  I still have the certificates, but have never used 3 of the sales methodologies, does that make me qualified in them?  Of course not! 

Anybody issuing a certificate at the end of a training course, that is self certifying, is this really worth the paper it's written on? No! 

The 3 elements needed for rigour and excellence in any qualification

What Adam and I wanted was 

1. Certification from an independent external body, no self certifications.

2. An exam.  The same exam that everybody takes and this exam should evaluate implementation of the teaching.  Afterall, we know that "knowing and doing" are two very different things.

3. An objective measure. Any company that does social selling, will say they are the best. That is a subjective measure.  Adam and I always wanted an objective measure and this position from ISP proves -- we are the best. 

Who are the ISP?

If you are not aware of the Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP), are an external body that is looking to create, excellent in sales.  They are a membership organization enabling business to implement excellence and best practice in their sales organizations. 

Why did ISP choose DLA Ignite? 

The ISP realised 4 years ago that they needed to have a social selling training provider in their recommended portfolio of training providers and they went out to the market and looked at a number of vendors and choose DLA Ignite. 

It's taken us 4 years to be an overnight sensation 

This has been a long time coming. For the last 4 years we have worked tirelessly with the ISP to shape our training and mentoring programmes to ensure that they meet the highest possible standards and best practice for educational programmes in the business space.  

Teaching people new skills is hard, so what's the secret sauce? 

We have even had the "social selling and influence" training and coaching, checked and approved by an external coach who has the  International Coaching Federation (ICF) - Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential.  

We wanted to be able to differentiate ourselves from people delivering, "a bunch of power points".  We learnt from working in corporate that this is about change, teaching and coaching people new things, which requires us to provide change management in the curriculum.  

What is being offered here?

On completion of a DLA Ignite, "Social Selling and Influence course" learners will now have the option of sitting an examination and assessment which, if they are successful, will earn them an ISP endorsed certificate of achievement.

The only social selling certificate in the world

We are THE ONLY social media organisation in the world that is able to offer an independently endorsed certification from a professional body at the end of a training programme.

Do you take the development of your career seriously

If you take the development of your career in sales seriously, speak to your company, your manager or your learning and development team about joining one of our programmes.

This means you will be able to earn a globally recognised award to prove your skills in this, the most relevant area of sales today.

In the meantime do you want to understand more about what social selling is and how it can impact your business? 

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.