In this article from Everyone Social, it starts off well, afterall the title is 

"How Social Media Helps Close Deals"

And then it all goes off the rails, it all starts to go fluffy, talking about "long term" and "partnerships", this does not feel it's going to help me to close deals with social.

The video from Liliana Christensen is great and well meaning, but as a salesperson it does not totally fill me with confidence.  Remember closing a single deal with social is luck, the same if you send a message on social and close $1 million deal, again that is luck.  We all know luck isn't a strategy.

What we need is a process, a methodology and this needs to be able to scale.  Closing $1 million deal a week isn't luck it's a process and closing a deal every week comes from a strategy. 

One of the issues with legacy sales

One of the big issues with legacy sales is that you need to do different things at different stages, we often get asked "what should we do with social, at this stage of the sales process?"  This is one of the great inefficiencies of legacy sales, we have to stop and think where we are and then implement the right tactic.

We actually what you would do at any stage of the process.  Be social.

At the top of the funnel

At the top of the funnel you need a buyer centric profile, no need to worry about that, we can teach and coach you so you have one.  This is a profile that a buyer will look at and see you are the expert you are.  The person that can help them and guide them.  It also shows you for who you are.  Not somebody that pushes and product or a company, buyers run away from those people.

After all your Linkedin profile is your shop window, 950 million people walk past it everyday.  How do you get people to stop and say, that person looks interesting, I wonder if they can help me?

A wide and varied network - The second thing you need is a wide and varied network, a digital territory.  If you are not connected to people in the account(s) you are trying to sell to you are invisible.

This isn't about being connect to one person, but multiple people.  Again, no need to worry about this, we teach and coach you how to connect to people in a non spammy way.  A way to get conversations.  As we know, conversations, create sales. 

The third thing you need is content, after all we know that our buyers are online looking for content.

Not brochures, in fact data shows that sharing brochures on social media extends the sales cycle by 21%

Buyers are looking for insight, tell them something they don't know, tell them the mistakes they will make if they do something a certain way.  Look at this article, I'm explaining how to use social selling to close deals.  It's helpful.

In fact anywhere in the funnel

In fact you use your buyer centric profile, your wide and varied network and content anywhere in the funnel.

An example

Here's an example.  One of our target accounts was a private equity company.  We found out that they needed to expand into international markets as Covid had meant they were not able to make a return in the timeline they expected.

Now, as a business we have buyer centric profiles.  So we connected to the people within the P/E company, we did NOT use connect and pitch, this annoys people, we did not use automation as this annoys people too.  We connected all the way up to and with the Managing Director of the P/E equity company.

We then put out an article on the Monday how how P/E companies can expand in international markets and exit earlier.  On the Tuesday, the Managing Director of the P/E company contacted us, on Wednesday we presented to their Board.  On Friday we presented to all of the Boards of all of the various P/E companies.  The next Monday we picked up a Purchase Order (PO). 

Think of it strategically and it will be that simple.  You can use content to close business. 


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.