by Philip Hesketh | @PhilipJHesketh | LinkedIn
The debate on the relative merits of old school sales techniques versus social selling is full of claims and counterclaims. I thought, why not look at the evidence myself and compare the two strategies for prospecting.
A friend of mine who works as a salesperson in a B2 Information Technology organisation decided to use a Linkedin lead generation agency. You know, the ones who take over your Linkedin profile and make cold outreach requests on your behalf. He was happy to share with me the results and the Linkedin conversation threads the agency used to make a pitch.
The first outbound mail is an innocuous message asking to make a connection. As soon as it is accepted by the new contact a “sales pitch” email is then sent asking for a meeting. Twenty-four hours later if there is no response, a second message is sent, followed by a final “you must be too busy or not interested” message. The messaging then stops.
AI is driving the conversation on these threads, and it is possible to spot the lack of humanisation in the dialogue between the agency and potential customer.
I have measured my activity on Linkedin over the same three week period. I have posted three times on Linkedin, interacted with other posts, and made new connections to people who have viewed my profile, liked my posts or made comments.
There is no way an agency will love your prospects and customers as you do. The agency can claim success with some introductions made, but there is no way a third party will find and build relationships top of the funnel that you can. The people who have interacted with my posts have done so voluntarily, they may not be interested today, but over time as I send out more informative posts, our relationship will become closer.
As a consequence of my activity I’ve had 14 sales conversations, compared to the 2 from the outreach organisation.
At the same time, through inbound connection requests, comments on my posts I have expanded my network by 252 connections.
My posts have been seen 3,983 times, compared to ZERO number of views of the non existent posts made by the outreach agency.
I have appeared in 198 searches over the 3 week period compared to 22 for my friend.
Although, I have used data to make a point Social Selling isn’t about numbers or contacts; it’s about relationships. These relationships you own, not the people you have pestered. Social Selling will be able to reduce your time to close and will increase your win rate, and you think outsourcing that is a good thing?
So based on this evidence, why wouldn’t you invest in the time to learn how to be more social, find time to grow and nurture your network?
People who read this article also read these:
https://www.social-experts.net/a-recent-harvard-study-shows-that/
https://www.social-experts.net/why-social-selling-is-prospecting-and-why-anyone-who-says-its-not-is-a-big-fat-liar/
https://www.social-experts.net/can-you-tick-the-social-media-box-and-say-thats-done/
