Thought I would take some time out to share what we have learned in 2023 and give some look into the future.
- It was our biggest year. I'm proud to say that 2023 was our biggest year yet. Why? Everybody “knows” that the old ways of cold calling, email marketing and advertising just are not working anymore. While many business still are stuck in their old ways or won't admit it, but everybody knows. 5 years ago running a social selling program meant convincing employees they need to be social. Not anymore, the VAST majority of employees are active on social media and in fact EXPECT their business to implement, not tactics, but a solid methodology. Social selling isn’t an option anymore. The opportunity cost of doing nothing is too great.
- Marketing continues to be disrupted. The proliferation of data privacy laws, platforms keeping more traffic for themselves, the continued tightening of marketing budgets, the focus on efficiency, changing buyer habits, Gen Z entering the workforce, etc. All this adds up to marketing as we’ve done it over the last 15 years (brand-centric, one-to-many) no longer being a viable strategy. People want to talk with people, social is THE channel, and authenticity is the currency for success.
- Distribution is top of mind for CMOs and CCOs. I talked with many marketing and comms execs this year and the one thing that kept getting a strong reaction was distribution. Given all the challenges with traditional digital marketing, how do you reach your customers, people, and other key audiences efficiently, effectively, and authentically? This is THE billion dollar question. The teams that crack this nut aren't only going to win at marketing in 2024, but they’re also going to have a MAJOR leg up on their competitors.
- Senior execs are getting active. Getting senior-level executives activated on social media is a priority for virtually every company we talked to this year — as it should be. Senior execs are the archetypal advocates because they build a large network quickly and they drive big results from their shares. We’re SUPER excited that DLA Ignite is the only company to be chosen by the Institute of sales professionals to be their social media solution with procsees specifically tailored to execs and the comms resources that support them. This trend is clearly going to continue in 2024.
- Proving business value is a requirement. It doesn't matter if we’re talking about marketing, comms, sales, or recruiting, to justify an investment in a tool or an initiative it HAS to show real business value. Forget about the vanity metrics of yesteryear, we’re talking real value: leads, opps, sales, talent attraction, etc. This is what our customers expect of us and their advocacy investments, and this isn't going away in 2024. We are the only company that can prove, revenue as an output from our social selling methodology.
- Partners are key. We love our growing ecosystem of partners, we have grown our partner network across the world, so that we are able to offer our clients, global rollouts in local language using a standard global metholofoldy that our clients know will drive them new business.
- social selling goals are getting bigger. Our clients are telling us they want to move from social selling pilots to rolling out social selling across the whole of the business. In fact, business are switching completely from historic sales methods to modern digital techniques. Certainly this seems to stop the layoffs. Or putting it another way, the layoffs will continue for those business with sales and marketing stuck in the past.
- Doing more with less is here to stay. Business have to find new innovative ways to sell and market and sticking to the past just won't cut it. We can see a correlation between layoffs and companies that are cold calling and sending spam emails. It's time for employees to rise up and demand a social selling methodology to be implemented across the business, for the future of their roles and the future of the company.
Thanks for reading. From our team to you and yours, we hope you have a wonderful new year!
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 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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