Today ABM (account based marketing) has become a key strategy today, we know that finding new customers is hard and expensive in time and resource, so why not keep the clients you have.  Better still, grow the work you achieve from these clients.

Especially in any downturn or recession, understanding your cash flow from key clients, can enable your leadership team to make key decisions, by having financial stability.

1. Authentic content

As part of any ABM strategy, taking generic content and posting it and hoping somehow your clients will see it has never been a strategy.  We know from the data in the book "The Jolt Effect" that salespeople today need to have a personal brand.  Customers are looking for an expert.  You content as a salesperson needs to reflect that. 

I know many people were shocked when some recent research showed that sharing brochures on social media extended the sales cycle by 21%.

Your salespeople need to be taught and coached how to create their own content and this needs to be supported by marketing and measured by their leadership as this is modern prospecting.

2. A wide network in your ABM accounts

The days of being connected to one or two people in a focused account are long over.  Every sales leader, as part of their QBR (quarterly business review) process must inspect each salesperson's number of contacts in each of these accounts.

Back in corporate, we did some research on why 7 of the 70 salespeople did their number and we found they had 200 contacts per account.  But key is that salespeople don't "connect and pitch", salespeople need to be taught and coached on how to connect to people in a way that creates conversations.  Afterall, is that what you want? Conversations in these target accounts?

3. Be that expert

We know that buyers and customers want to cut through the sales BS, they want long term relationships, with experts and people that can help them.  They want to know, if not think that these people are going to be around for a long time.

That's why it's key that salespeople have buyer centric profiles, I will mention the books research "the Jolt Effect" also backs this up.  Your Linkedin profile is your shop window to the world, when people "walk past it" they should be saying "that's interesting" not hurrying past. 

Salespeople need to be taught and coached how to do this, because they will insist on writing about the company and it's products, which of course, nobody is interested in. 

By being authentic, writing about themselves, demonstrating their expertise you will find that buyers will walk towards this.  

Imagine that, buyers walking towards your salespeople.

We have many clients who are closing $multi-million deals on social as buyers walk towards them.

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.