Average attempts in cadence to reach a buyer for cold calling is 11.3, for social selling it's 3, are you still flogging the cold calling dead horse?, Tim Hughes

I was reading an article the other day and it shared this research

It states that the average attempts to get the attention of a person through cold calling is 11.3 and that's gone up from 7.3 in 2014.

Or looking at other research for cold calling ....

17-22 touches is the norm in Enterprise sales according to 6sense
Oh and DMUs have expanded massively
Today’s buyer teams can include up to 20 stakeholders - Gartner 2022
63% of purchases have more than four people involved - up from just 47% in 2017 Forrester

Now we all need pipeline and we can take this one of two ways, we can

1. Increase the number of touches. We can make more and more calls and send more and more emails.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" - Albert Einstein.

2. We could switch to social selling, where with 3 touches we are getting an (average) 9 % acceptance rate and 33.6% (average) to a next step.

Now in a world, where we want our sales team to be the most efficient and effective, to generate the most pipeline and the most revenue. There is clearly only one game in town. Social selling.

Just by simple maths if with social selling you only need 3 touches and with cold calling you need 11.3, social selling is 4 times more efficient than cold calling. Simple as.

Growth is not optional

"Do more with less" does not mean be more active, it is all about outcomes, so increasing revenue / employee hour...

So you need EVEN more pipeline as CEOs / investors still want growth.

Clearly social selling is your only option now.

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. Don't believe me? Please check the team 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

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!

It does NOT use inmails, which are spam.

In fact the program is now back and certified by the Institute of sales professionals (ISP).

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, Institute of sales professionals (ISP) backed, 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 you miss every month you delay moving from cold calling to social selling.

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.