96% of executives believe innovation — the development of new processes, products or services that increase business value over existing offerings — will be a primary source of achieving growth over the next two years.
However, according to NTT DATA’s Innovation Index research findings only 21% of executives definitively met their innovation goals as reported in the research of 1,000 North American executives across a wide range of industries and company sizes.
“A failure to achieve innovation goals leaves organizations at a disadvantage,” said Tanvir Khan, Chief Digital and Strategy Officer, NTT DATA Services. “When faced with big tech leaps like (strategic social media), generative AI, most organizations are ill-prepared to handle or implement this or other technologies into existing infrastructure to reap the full benefits. What I think is most critical is the speed of adoption of these new technologies. Waiting is not an option. If you wait, you’ll be playing catch-up.”
Four significant challenges hinder innovation initiatives:
- Workforce Challenge: Organizations need top-shelf talent and skills to innovate, but the number one challenge for both innovation is lack of employee skills. 88% say lack of employee skills holds back innovation efforts. Furthermore, organizations are not investing enough to build innovation capabilities for their workforce:
- 44% are reskilling existing resources
- 42% are enhancing the extended workforce through contractors and service providers
- 33% are recruiting new employees
2. Technology Modernization Challenge: Technology is the backbone of innovation initiatives, but 86% of executives say their technology is outdated. Outdated IT infrastructure is a barrier to:
- Delivering high-quality customer experiences (32%)
- Providing exceptional employee experiences (31%)
3. Customer Experience (CX) Challenge: Customer experience drives business growth, but when we asked what hinders their CX efforts, executives listed in order:
- Inefficient processes (40%)
- Lack of resources to deliver products and services on time (37%)
- Rapidly changing customer demands (34%)
- Outdated IT (32%)
Organizations are not performing in innovation and speed to market either, both critical elements for CX. 54% said they were average or below average in product and service innovation and 63% said the same for speed to market.
4. Leadership and Culture Challenges: Leadership, accountability and cross-functional collaboration can go a long way in driving a culture of innovation, but:
- 78% of executives say poor organizational culture holds back their innovation efforts.
- 58% rate the level of their organization readiness in culture as “weak” or “mixed” as it relates to fostering innovation.
- 40% report that their culture is not conducive to fostering enriching employee experiences and retaining talent.
“It’s not a winning strategy to rely on the marketplace to change the skills in your workforce,” said Kim Curley, Vice President of People & Organization Consulting, NTT DATA Services. “All of us — from the highest level of leader to the folks early in their careers — need to be learning constantly. Investing in-house is a no-brainer.”
Thanks to Constellation Research for the data.
One way you can look at innovation and customer experience is to transform your sales and marketing to digital. As you can see from the benchmark below, there is a now a clear business case as well as competitive advantage.
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.
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