by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
We have seen a number of changes in social selling over the years.
One change is the way people have moved from “I suppose we must do it” to some sort of “combo prospecting” sometimes called the “social phone”. Which is where people cold call and use social selling. To now where social selling has become selling. That is, they have dropped all the legacy sales methods which people soon find are inefficient and ineffective. Social selling is now the way people sell, hence the reason we drop the word social. It is “just” selling.
Companies we work with have moved social to the front and central to their demand generation / prospecting methods and in fact using it as a method to get competitive advantage.
Using social media and using social selling to prospect and get more leads and meetings is nothing new. The same as using social media and social selling to accelerate deals is nothing new. This is what we do and teach clients. But we have also seen a change especially amongst the cloud and SaaS (Software as a service) providers.
One SaaS vendor came to us and admitted that they can sell the product, but they have a problem with renewals.
It would seem that this provider didn’t have a problem with selling, they would have a great launch and then over a six month period usage of the product would dwindle.
They had tried everything, commercial deals, so locking the client into three years, rather than one. It didn’t solve the problem, just cut the number of people cancelling in 12 months and “kicked the can down the road” to people cancelling in 3 years.
They also looked at social selling. They had a team of CSMs (customer service managers) whose job it was to make sure clients renewed. They used social selling techniques, such as having great personal brands, building networks with their clients and sharing relevant content. The problem for the client I’m talking about is that the CSMs hadn’t been trained in social techniques so they didn’t understand that the corporate content they were sharing wasn’t interesting. In fact it was plain boring. That is a blog for another day.
We pointed out, that their SaaS product required a change of mindset and a change of habit with the client and until they implemented this within the client they would never be able to sort their cancellation issue.
So that is now what they are doing as part of the implementation process. Which is teaching people, what it is like to be social. While this does have an impact on sales cycle and SaaS ARR (annual recurring revenue) the business understands that they need to change they way they sell to make sure they retain clients.
It’s worth noting that their profitability and valuation is based on how many clients, how much ARR they are banking and the churn figures. Or lack of churn.
By changing the way they sell and implant, they were able to make sure the product was used, not just in the first six months, but it became baked into the way their clients worked. Which meant the number of renewals went up, in fact people started to say “we cannot do without your product” which is true stickiness.
People who read this article also read these:
https://dlaignite.com/side-by-side-social-vs-spam/
https://dlaignite.com/are-you-one-of-the-57-of-salespeople-that-anticipate-that-they-wont-make-quota-in-2019/
https://dlaignite.com/your-linkedin-profile-is-your-front-door-is-it-looking-tired-tatty-and-unloved/
