Linkedin has shared what they see are 4 trends in buying and have come up with their response, I have also added my comments.

Trend 1: Educated buyers will only connect with prepared sellers — so, be prepared.

"Almost seven in 10 buyers (68%) say they’re unlikely to engage with a seller who reaches out with information that’s irrelevant to their job, according to recent LinkedIn research." 

I do realise that people have said in sales that if throw enough mud at the wall some of it will stick, I really don't think it's helpful for any business to do this.  You know as well as I know that if a salesperson or a marketer approach you with some offer that is clearly irrelevant, you will just delete it.

I create rules in email so if you spam me with something irrelevant, forever your emails will go straight to the wastepaper basket.  If you spam me on Linkedin, I will connect from you and I know many people that will just block you. 

In our social selling and influence course, we teach and coach people to have a buyer-centric profile, this is a profile, which is afterall a shop window to the 950 million people on LinkedIn, which they will find attractive.

We have clients that are closing $ multi-million deals because a buyer has seen them on Linkedin and reached out and asked "can you help me?".

Trend 2: Buyers are consulting their peers before engaging with vendors — so being buyer-first is more important than ever.

"In 2022, the majority of buyers (77%) said that once they identified a need, their first step was to do their own research, whether checking review sites, conducting a Google search, reaching out to a peer, or seeking advice from a consultant or analyst. Only 23% contacted a sales representative (down from 43% in 2021)."

The great thing about the internet and social media is that we can research for products and services without having to deal with sellers.  What we love as buyers is we can short-list companies or even not shot-list companies and they will never know. 

We discussed above, the need to have a buyer-centric profile so that buyers are attracted to you.  The other thing that sellers need is a wide and varied network.  Think of it as a digital territory.

The Linkedin quote above is spot on, but it's only any good if you are being found in searches.  In our social selling and influence course we teach and coach, not just on how to look good to buyers, but how to be found by buyers.

(If you are interested in cold outreach, then we also teach and coach how to do that on social, see our benchmark below.  Note this is NOT "connect and pitch", which is spam and does not use automation.  We get a 9% response and 33.6% request for a next action.) 

LinkedIn nail it when they say

"That means focusing on three things: 

1. Help your buyer understand the problems they face, ideally better than they currently do.
2. Focus on solving their problems rather than selling your solutions. 
3. Consistently deliver value by helping your buyers solve the challenges they are facing, even if it’s not with your product."

Trend 3: Buying committees are getting larger and slower – so multithread early and often to build a groundswell.

We are working with a supply chain software company who say that there are 100 stakeholders for each sale.  So how do you cover all those bases, and meet each of them, have a conversation with and build a relationship with all of them.  Not by annoying them in the first instance by annoying them with cold calls and spam emails. 

In our social selling and influence course, we teach and coach on how to connect to people at scale, without the need for "connect and pitch" and automation.  

Our SDRs, using social selling only on average get 10 meetings a week.  Meetings that people want, which is why we have a 33.6% agreement to next action.  See the benchmark data below.

Sales cycles are getting longer ..... really? 

LinkedIn quotes Gong that says sales cycles are getting longer, we find this fascinating as we see that sales cycles are getting shorter.  We can imagine that for Gong users who are still stuck in the analog world, this is probably their reality. Working in the digital world, we don't see that. 

Trend 4: Cold-email and cold-calling are becoming less effective — so experiment with new channels.

"One quote that I love by Matshona Dhliwayo is, “The world accommodates you for fitting in, but only rewards you for standing out.” 

Standing out in the business world means doing what others aren’t doing. And that often includes the channel you pick — it’s hard to stand out when all your competitors are going after your customer in the same way."

Check out the benchmark data and you decide if you should be cold calling or social selling. 

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 head to head with the DLA Ignite methodology for social selling and create a benchmark (and business case) for our version of social selling.

So we took a team of "cold callers" cross trained them in our methodology for 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.

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, that is, before we trained them on social selling.  I'm not sure what results you get with cold calling but they did whatever they could in terms of warming up the calls with emails or webinars, etc.  And the results, they 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?

The DLA Ignite definition of social selling 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".

(Please note these figures are for the DLA Ignite methodology, we cannot speak for other suppliers, please check with them, before signing any contracts.)

I need to say, before I get any comments. 

There is no spam and no automation in the DLA Ignite social selling methodology!

The DLA Ignite social selling methodology does not use connect and pitch!

The DLA Ignite social selling methodology does NOT use inmails, which are spam. 

In fact the program is now back and certified by the Institute of sales professionals (ISP), the only such methodology backed by a sales professional body.

Let's get onto those results for DLA Ignite methodology of social selling

The team are getting a 9% response (on average) to social selling 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. 

As we mentioned above, with every "call" based on cold outreach, there has to be some sort of next action.  For your own company, you will know what your next action is, it will be a demo, a discovery call or something. 

We have found that with DLA Ignite social selling methodology 9% of the people (on average) that agreed to a call, 33.6% are converting to a next action.  

This is exponential growth when compared to cold calling. 

Each salesperson is averaging 10 calls / meetings per week.

Just think if you scaled that across your sales organization! 

(The most successful SDR complains he has got too many meetings, which think is a great problem to have!)

Just think about that being rolled out across your sales team(s).  

It's time to work smarter not harder. 

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, DLA Ignite 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, 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.