by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
Here at Digital Leadership Associates (DLA) www.social-experts.net we have written before about the importance of Prospecting. All companies must have a Prospecting culture that the management lead from the front.
At the last company I worked at, there was no Prospecting culture so it was enforced on sales through the use of cold calling days. Something that added to “feast and famine” nature of the demand generation process.
What do I mean? If you had no leads you got on the phone until your diary was full of meetings. So people started calling then stopped, the started again a few months later. That is one of the reasons why cold calling isn’t appropriate as a Prospecting method.
Social is the only “always on” method that is baked into what you do everyday. The same methods also help nurture current prospects as well as accelerating your pipeline through the funnel. We call it the treble advantage. People thankfully call social selling as the easy option. It is. It takes 3 legacy sales processes and pops it into one.
Should you block time out in your diary?
Of course, but social is open 24 hours a day, which enables you to spend prime selling time where sales people should be. In front of customers and not hiding behind a phone. I prospect on the train into London, I’m sitting here listening to Micheal Schenker Prospecting. As a social business, this blog is of course a Prospecting tool.
You may have read that we published a unique piece of content everyday and it gives us 3 pieces of inbound everyday. Not a bad ROI … of course it also nurtured of existing prospects and accelerates our pipeline. That triple advantage again.
So what other ways are there to prospect?
Of course that’s where social is 10 times more efficient than cold calling.
If you call 100 people, the problem with this is that it’s very inefficient. You have to call 100 to get through to 10. Where as with sales navigator you can find those 10. So how do we get social selling as 10 times more efficient than cold calling. Well let’s assume you can find the 10 right people to talk to with social, there is no reason why you don’t keep repeating that? So in the time it takes to call 100 people, 90 of them wrong, you could have contacted 100 of the right people, surely?
That makes Social Selling 10 times more efficient than cold calling. Even if you don’t agree, it could be 5 times more efficient or even double as efficient. Either way, you are putting achieving your number at risk by cold calling or put it another way, you are more likely to crush your number with social.
Worth saying at this point that cold calling has 4 outcomes:-
- Go away
- OK
- I purchased 3 months ago
- Call me back in 6 months
Social can help you with 3. and 4. If people purchased some time ago, you should be able to snatch them up as inbound. Same with the call me back in 6 months, you can nurture these people on social. Just by switching to social, you have already there switched lost deals in 3. straight from under your competition’s noses. In 4. You are increasing your chances even if it’s not being like the same old, same old sales people out there. Using the same old legacy methods.
Let’s not forget, Prospecting with Social is NOT sending in-mails. You don’t need in-mails to social sell, in fact they are just a “cold call” on social.
The final point with regard to Prospecting is the use of intent data. Before as a sales guy you switch off, hear me out. This enables you to prospect while you are in those customer meetings or even on the beach. How come?
It comes back to social being an “always on” prospering method. We use Microsoft Dynamics 365, their MSE (Microsoft Social Engagement) model. As a sales guy it takes an hour to set up and it listens to the typical things people might ask on social as a pre-cursor to buying. It just sits there and listens. Once step up, it chugs away in the background.
When it finds something it will tell you in Dynamics, you can either reject or accept it. The system learns as you accept and reject. Accepted leads then drop into the Dynamics CRM.
For Sales Leaders and Marketers this means you can measure activity on social, right through to Revenue.
People who read this article also read these:
https://www.social-experts.net/how-social-selling-is-all-about-being-human/
https://www.social-experts.net/reunions-can-lead-to-interesting-conversations/
https://www.social-experts.net/how-can-an-ice-cream-van-be-a-metaphor-for-social-selling-easy/
