My friend, Robert Tearle, is a headhunter and he shared this post on LinkedIn yesterday.

Let me first show you Robert's data, this is all for the UK and the data is from LinkedIn.

So it's data and not his opinion. 

The first line shows you how many people are employed in the UK.

There are 30 million people on Linkedin in the UK, pretty much everybody in business.

Of these there are 2.3 million that have set their Linkedin profile to "open to a move", this if you didn't know is a standard feature and let's head hunters know they can approach about a job role.

There are 720K vacancies on LinkedIn in the UK, of course there maybe more than this, but this is what is available on LinkedIn.

This means there is are 3 people for every vacancy.  In this case it's an employers market.

Let's now look at the software market

Robert now, puts some filters on the data and looks at the software market, here the picture is very different.  There are 340K people in software, 38K are looking to move and there are 64K vacancies.

That means there is one person chasing 2 roles.  This is an employees market.

Let's look at sales

In sales in tech there are 28K people, of these 2,600 people are chasing 13K roles.

That means there is 5 roles for every candidate.  This is clearly a employees market.

Let's think about the implications

If you are looking for sales talent, this is going to be like looking for rocking horse shit

This will drive up salaries and the need for you to offer more money and benefits to recruit that team of A-Players you want and need

Your current team can just quit if they don't like something, because they can just walk into another job.

Your business can waste a lot of money on-boarding people, training them all for them to just quit. 

Robert suggest the following

"Inferences: Employers need to:

1) Re-prioritise hiring and all things people management

2) Get smarter about how they source

3) Onboard with quicker time to productivity

4) Show their employees a new level of love, in order to retain

5) Prioritise people development

6) Be creative! Cover vacant seats, jobs with no job holder... do you outsource, workaround, contract out etc

7) Plan!"

I would add...

I would add to this, that companies need to invest in their teams, giving them new skills. After all, research shows it's not about the money.  If you know you are going to get the best skills, this will attract people and retain them.

While I'm biased, we know that with social selling, this will be apparent to your competition, when you start using social, apart from selling more which is cool, you will also attract the best talent. 

Based on the figures above, if you are in tech, you had better start now! 

This does not just impact us as sellers, it also impacts the people we are trying to sell to

In recent LinkedIn research, "80% of sellers said they lost or delayed a deal in the last year because one of their champions switched jobs, and that number is likely to increase over the coming months."

Another reason to have conversations and build relationships at scale to cover all the bases in a sales.  We teach and coach this in our social selling and influence methodology. 

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.

I don't believe you Tim!

If you check out this video of Chris Mason CEO at Oracle reseller Namos, fast forward to 19 minutes 55 seconds. Chris talks about a $2.6 million win from being on social, after completing the DLA Ignite social selling and influence course. 

Here at DLA Ignite we don't do "hints and tips sessions" we don't want you to waste your money. Our social selling and influence methodology will provide your sales team with the stable platform for growth. It is also the only social selling program based on 70:20:10 change management principles which gives your business the mindset change and habit change they need in this digital world.