My friend Ray Wang sent me this article last night about how people should go about organising events in the age of the Coronavirus, so I thought I would write about prospecting.

We all know in sales the hierarchy of meetings.

At the top is face to face, followed by conference calls, then email or conversations via social.  A face to face meeting is by far the best way to run a meeting, we can see the person's body language, it's easier to detect sarcasm etc.  Conference calls are fine, especially over long distance, modern broadband enables you to have pretty good video.  It's still not perfect.  You can watch a live event on DVD or YouTube but you are not exactly "there".

We always coach our social selling students to take conversations you start on social, off social as fast as you can.  If you have created an environment for people to talk then they will be happy to take a conversation to a call or a face-to-face meeting.

But while we are living in the shadow of the coronavirus, it would seem that prospecting needs to change to a more social standpoint.

If you take this article from Ray for example, he provides great advice on what to do when you are organising an event, but people are going to vote with their feet and not attend.  If your marketing is based on the foot fall of events this could have a massive impact on your demand generation this year.

The problem we know is that upping spend on interruption methods of prospecting (advertising, cold calling and email) just don't hit the spot anymore.  It's not like cold calling somebody or email somebody more will help the situation.  In fact the opposite.

Providing you sales team with hope on social isn't going to cut it.  We see so many people try and take social tactics and then cross their fingers.  For example, turning to masterclasses or templates.  We have all been to a masterclass and we all go back to our desks and do nothing.  The same with webcasts, we attend and nothing changes.

What we need is a methodology that will provide the sales team with the mindset change and the habit change, that prospecting can go on.

As the band Queen sang "the show must go on" and to misquote that we all know that "the prospecting must go on".

Prospecting on social will enable us to get around the restrictions placed on us by the Coronavirus and should keep us on track.

Better still , we could empower everybody in the company on social.

Still not convinced?  This research from Hootsuite and We are Social Media https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2019-q4-global-digital-statshot shows there are 3.75 Billion people in the world active on social media. From a B2B Enterprise prospective, that is pretty much everybody you are going to need to sell to. 

Research by Accenture shows that we are spending 6.4 hours a day on the internet, which if we take out the time we are asleep, we are now spending half our lives on the internet.

Our clients, our prospects, our employee, our future employees are on social, lets go and talk with them.