How to Get to the C-Suite Without Burning Your Relationships

I've written before about the problems with legacy prospecting methods like cold calling and spam email.  For example:

Relationships and Trust: In B2B we sell on relationship and trust and you don't start a relationship by annoying people

Control: The essence of cold calling and spam email means you place control in the hands of the buyer.  Where as, with conversations you are always in control and can match what you say to your buyers needs

Scale: The problem with cold calling is that a human can only make so many calls and robbo callers are a race to the bottom. The same with email marketing, anecdotal evidence and data shows that sending more emails creates less business. 

Which is why legacy sellers are always being hit with the problem that to get high, to go around gatekeepers and to take to all the stakeholders, now something like 15 people is a massive effort.  In fact we know that sales people take the risk and don't “multi-thread” and hope that talking to a few people they win, even if all the bases are not covered.

In my book “Social Selling and Influence - Using Social Media for Cold Outreach and New Business Sales” I explain how with social you can build relationships with senior people, fast and do it at scale.

When we competed a Cold calling team with a social selling team (using our social selling methodology) we found the following: Contacting rank and file people using social selling we got 11% increase in meetings, senior technical people we got a 23% increase in meetings over cold calling, CXO/Director there was a whopping 42% increase in leads over cold calling and commercial people we got and 18% increase in meetings over cold calling.

Add that to the fact that the average social seller makes 5 x high quality ICP meetings a week and you can see why sales teams see social selling as a massive competitive advantage. To date we haven't seen companies using social selling laying staff off, but I cannot prove a correlation there. 

It stands to reason, legacy sales people look like .. just another salesperson a chancer. Modern salespeople, look interesting (to CEOs), look human, look like people you could trust, all from their social profile. They are connected to people of influence in their industry, industry peers and industry influencers.  CEOs can see that they don't share brochures and brochureware, but are sharing insight, industry news, they share articles that solve client business issues. Their social profiles show you have business acumen and they have similar interest to their buyers.