In meeting rooms around the world, people are sitting having a meeting.

As they talk, they realise they need a new accounting systems, payroll system, CRM, or whatever it is you sell.

The team decide they will do some research and come back.

They all leave that meeting and go and search on the internet and social media.  They might even come to your website and you might pick them up as an MQL.  

When you reach out to them, they will ignore you.

After all, they are not ready to buy. If they acknowledge you, they know they will become a line in a CRM and you will call them every month.  This annoys them, so they ignore you. 

Over the coming weeks and months this “buyer group” come up with a short list and they start to understand their requirements.

You are not party and not in control of the creation of this short list.

They then decide it's time to enter the “shark pool” and contact some suppliers.

If you believe Kerry Cunningham's research, they will have already made a decision and this is now 70% of the way through the buying process. 

So who do they contact?  How did they draw up that list?  When we purchased a CRM system. One of the team liked Pipeliner, at the time Microsoft were courting us and we were a reseller, that ruled Dynamics in.  I had used Salesforce and Oracle CRM in the past.  We purchased Nimble CRM. Why?

We are not experts on CRMs, we cannot tell the difference, in fact we thought and still think all CRMs are the same.  We were sitting in a meeting and we had this list of CRMs and we thought which one? We looked at each other.

Then I said, I know the CEO at Nimble, I'll contact him and have a chat.

We've been a Nimble user for 7 years and are a reference site for them.

How about a different sales cycle?

One where you are in control?

By using Social Selling you could actually be the person that is the catalyst to them thinking about changing.

Rather being invisible, you can be found on their searches.

Better still you are already front of mind and on the short list.

Often we find with our customers, that because the buyers already trust you, our customers are invited in for “art of the possible” board presentations.  They become trust advisers. 

Using social selling you will be on the short list for sure.

That said, because they trust you, the customer may even make you the decision, without even talking to the competition. 

If you are a clever social seller, you will have connected to all the buying team so you are the natural selection for the whole team.  Just like Nimble was for us. 

We often hear from clients that they have been approached by buyers on social and this is turning into $multi-million deals.

You could say that by not social selling you are leaving money on the table.

How do you do this?

By looking credible online, buyers will see you as a friend, an expert, somebody that help them, they don't see you as a threat or an annoyance.

You then have to connect to your ICPs, without spamming them. Please don't send them brochures or try and “add value” this just annoys buyers. 

This means that when short lists are being created you will be on them. 

And finally, you need insightful content.

Nobody, let me repeat that, nobody, is interested in your brochures, product overviews, these are the digital versions of flyers.

We are are interested in you, after all we are connected to you.

Social media is a human to human network. 

Of course, you don't have to change. You can carry on as you are.

You know exactly how this is working out for your now. 

Or we can talk to you about prospecting in 2024.

Let's look at some context about social media today

Linkedin is the world's biggest network site.

So let's take a step back for a moment. How about if I could pick you up tomorrow and I drive you to a place which is full of your prospects?  All you have to do is grab a coffee or a tea and go up and talk to them.  You can stay as long as you like.

Now, you wouldn't walk up to these prospects of yours and pitch to them.  You would have a conversation.  Maybe ask then how far they drove to get there? Had they been caught up in the traffic?  You would have a conversation.  You wouldn't pitch to them, in fact they will probably ask you at some point, “what do you do?" but more on that in a bit. 

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 on 1st January 2023 (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, the good ones are getting 25 meetings a 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. 

Imagine you are at a conversation and. the day before the event, there is a drinks in the evening, you have a call and so you are late by 30 minutes. As you enter the bar, you see all of the conference delegates and you realise they are all your ICP (ideal customer profile).  You also see that each ICP is talking with, and laughing with a salesperson.  Now is that salesperson they are laughing with, your salesperson or is it the competitions? 

That is going on out on social media, day in and day out and if your ICPs are laughing and talking with your sales people, will be if you have trained and coached your salespeople in a sales methodology. 

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.