Are you ready for spamageddon? 

According to this post from Alex Vacca, strict new spam prevention policies coming from Google and Yahoo have been announced.

Organizations sending over 5,000 emails per day will face potential blocking starting in Q1 2024 if complaint rates are too high.

Could this spell the end for Outreach and Salesloft?

This will spell disaster for many sales teams reliant on high-volume outbound messaging as the whole business is cut off from the outside world.

But as Alex says, “it's symptomatic of a larger trend - the old predictable revenue playbook is dying.” For the companies laying people off, I think we can say that it has already died.

Alex goes onto say "Inboxes are overwhelmed and buyers aren't responding to cold outreach like before. SDR teams have grown exponentially yet yield diminishing returns.

The problem? Too many tools have optimised for volume over relevance. Outreach has become interruption, not insight."
 

People miss understand the different between quantity at speed, for quality. 

The new playbook is not about tactics but a new strategy salespeople need a

1. Buyer-centric profile as backed by the data in the book “The Jolt Effect”
2. A digital territory, not built on interruption by insight.
3.  Insightful content, buyers are looking for it, so offer it.

Back to Alex, “For sales leaders, it's time to rethink outbound strategies for the modern buyer. Or new policies and deliverability limits could force your hand.”

The future is using social, not as a platform for interruption but for conversations.  You have time to make the change, before finding out you cannot make any cold outbound activities in Q1 2024.

What's your outlook on the role of outbound sales going forward? Curious to discuss if others see change on the horizon and how teams can adapt.

Want to understand how social selling will transform your sales and marketing, put you ahead and get you back on a growth trajectory. 

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.