Are you still fighting a sales and marketing war that doesn't exist anymore?, Tim Hughes

Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, an intelligence officer with the Imperial Japanese Army was sent to the island of Lubang in 1944 to hinder an Allied invasion expected to take place in early 1945.

While Japan surrendered on the 15th of August 1945. Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda did not.

Even in 1974, Lieutenant Onoda was still stubbornly fighting the Second World War nearly thirty years after everyone else had packed up and gone home.

This story, reminded me of a situation that was told to us by one of our clients.

Our clients said they had a choice to make in sales and marketing

Everybody knows that the world has changed and that buyers are on social media but businesses seem to be stuck in the jungle fighting a war that doesn't exist anymore.

Maybe it's time to finally admit that banging your head against the cold calling and spam email wall just doesn't work anymore.

Look at sales and marketing today, cold calling, sending spam emails and even using social media as an advertising platform.

You are fighting a war that doesn't exist.

What you need is great social media profiles, a network of the people that you are trying to influence and engaging content. This will reflect well on the salespeople it will also look well on the your company.

As a client just said to me on a call "this is not about hints and tricks, this is about having a robust process, a methodology. Our salespeople have to be part of the conversation and the salespeople need to understand how to engage and what to do when they get engagement on social media."

I get that maybe you don't understand social, but that's where come in.

Back to those fighting a war that just doesn't exist anymore there is a happy ending.

After twenty-nine years diligently fighting the Second World War, Hiroo Onoda finally surrendered. He handed over his Arisaka Type 99 bolt-action rifle, five hundred rounds of ammunition, his knife and his grenades. The wiry figure, still dressed in his tattered 1940s Japanese army uniform, boarded a plane to Manilla where he presented his sword to President Ferdinand Marcos.

Marcos accepted the soldier’s surrender and formally pardoned him. For Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, the war was finally over. He was the second to last Japanese soldier to surrender. The last man standing, Private Teruo Nakamura, would finally hand himself in on the 18th of December 1974.

The world is digital, you should be too.

So who's social selling?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.

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