Recent research from SBI showed that…

"SBI Research finds that CEOs across several markets have been reporting falling or stagnating commercial productivity this year? Sales cycles have gradually gotten longer, and many companies are seeing smaller deal sizes and lower renewal rates."

Pretty much every business we talk to has a pipeline problem which they are trying to address (and failing) because they are trying to fix the bit they understand rather than the bit that’s broken.

Typically “we have no revenue or pipeline” is addressed by new marketing campaigns (or worse still new marketing tech) and more sales techniques or sales methodology training for the sales team.  We talked to a sales team recently that had been trained on MEDDICC but had no pipeline in which to use the sales methodology on.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the investment in the sales team is a good thing, but in my experience of talking to organisations of all sizes the salespeople can sell. They are driven and are keen to do a good job. The problem is that they have nobody to talk to.

Their calls are not being answered, their emails are not being responded to and the leads they get from the marketing team are not the hot/interested prospect that they had hoped for.

So, if these things aren’t working…what will?

For salespeople to succeed they need to be having conversations…lots of conversations. In days past (or perhaps days passed) these conversations would often have been stimulated by networking events. exhibitions, industry get-togethers… but today it’s very hard to make that central to your sales strategy because it relies on you and the prospect benign the same place at the same time and that you can do enough of these events to meet enough people to generate enough opportunities.

So what is the option?

For every buyer, a place they use to qualify a potential supplier (often the first place) is LinkedIn. Why? Because pretty much everyone is there and they are all forced to display in the same format. It makes comparison very easy.

Very few people challenge this assertion.

Yet, despite this, most people do not invest time in making themselves look attractive/ interesting / knowledgeable or in standing out.

The steps I need to go through in order to make my LinkedIn presence work for me are simple but I MUST go through them. Simply saying “I know that” and not doing it is not going to help me.

In a nutshell, here’s what I need to do:

 1. I need to create a profile that tells a good story and is interesting from both a professional and a personal perspective.
 2. I need to connect to the people I wish to influence. For example, if I want to sell to Acme Corp, my starting point is to connect to people within Acme Corp.
 3. I need to engage with people with whom I wish to have a conversation.
 4. I need to publish my own unique content regularly. By regularly I mean daily. Every day I need to publish something that encourages my audience to interact with me.
 5. I need to turn interactions in to conversations…but NOT “sales conversations” at this stage.

Then I need to repeat steps 2-5 because this change in behaviour is the thing that creates the conversations that lead to “commercial conversations.”

If you want to understand how social media can drive business for your company, read on.

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.