by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
On a recent Facebook group a guy asked a question. His Prospecting method was as follows:
He spent a day (Friday afternoon and Monday morning) creating a list of 100 targets. From this he emailed them and got a 2% open rate, he then called the people up and said he could make 50 calls a day. One question was about how many times should he call a company before he should give up, so I guess he wasn’t getting through each time.
The problem with this is it’s very inefficient. You have to research and plough through 100 names to find the 10 you need.
Now to do this, the guy would have spent a one off day, (let’s say) finding out which apps to use and how to use them.
So how does that compare with Social Selling? Let’s assume we have two one off days to learn how to use Sales Navigator and to create your Personal Brand.
Now somebody recently said to me that social Selling was writing content and hoping that somebody would contact you. Wrong. I don’t know which joker said that but they are dead wrong. Maybe that’s Social Marketing it’s certainly not social selling.
Now the other difference with social selling is you don’t have to filter your way through 100 people to find the 10 targets. Using Sales Navigator you can find those 10 straight away.
The other difference you will find on Social compared to Cold Calling is that there are no gatekeepers. This means you don’t have the problems with the massive rejection you get with email and telephone.
The CEO of Aviya told this story in front of his sales team when he kicked off his social selling program. I contacted him on the Thursday and had a meeting with him his Marketing Director and head of PR on the following Tuesday. We presented to his board two weeks later.
Graham Hawkins of Sales Tribe tells a similar story of how over two weeks he was able to get to the CEO of an Insurance company.
Social Selling is not about writing content and waiting, it’s a pro-active Prospecting method that gets you higher, faster, than cold calling.
Back to the comparison.
With cold out reach you end up with massive inefficiently as to get 10 people to talk to you need 100 contacts. Then you have to wade through the rejection of spam filters, gatekeepers, junk email boxes, number blockage facilities on mobile etc.
Where as with social selling you can go straight to those 10 targets and there are no gatekeepers. This is massively more efficient use of time and means that sales teams, sales leaders and companies can be more successful.
If we then take the time the cold callers use to profile and contact 100, then we should be able to use that to me and scale out across social Selling. This would mean social selling beats cold calling by a factor of ten.
OK maybe not 10, but you can see social selling can be five times or twice as efficient.
Objections:
You need loads of followers. Rubbish, the article I wrote 3 years ago features a salesguy called Paul. He has 450 followers.
Issues for Cold Callers:
- Often I find that as social allows you to sell directly to C-Level, this is too scary. Coldcallers are more comfortable talking lower down in an organisation where they can get through.
- Excuses abound, you need loads of followers, load need to write content and sit back. All rubbish and all just excuses often because they are just to scared or not good enough to sell high.
There is also another issue with cold calling, the feast and famine Prospecting culture. What is this?
With cold calling you make enough calls to get enough business to close, then you stop calling. Then you close the business, ending up with no pipeline. The cold caller then starts again. Feast and Famine. As a Sales Leader this is heart attack territory.
With Social Selling the Prospecting is always on. As it’s a way of working, you use social to speed up the deals through the pipeline. This action also enables you to continually prospect.
As a sales leader it’s so important to me to have a continual, “always on” Prospecting method vs feast and famine you get with cold calling
Bonus Reason
As a salesperson you can use “intent data” to help you Prospect. In other words, while you are on the beach or sitting in front of customers you can continually prospect. Again part of this “always on” Prospecting culture.
I realise this sounds techie or difficult, it isn’t. Well we know Microsoft Dynamics 365 and for most (if not all Dynamics customers) you can do this within what you are paying already.
Each salesperson can listen to intent and it takes about an hour (trust me) to set up. This isn’t some centralised marketing initiative, it can be actioned at salesperson level.
People who read this article also read these:
http://www.social-experts.net/the-secret-of-creating-content/
http://www.social-experts.net/the-day-all-the-worlds-sales-pipelines-overflowed/
http://www.social-experts.net/its-time-for-your-enterprise-to-run-on-social/
