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Would you let anybody into your house, any stranger that knocked on the door?
Say somebody knocked on the door on your house, you open the door and they start pitching to you?
Would you let them in? Probably not as you know, they will keep pitching to you until you purchased something.
When you open the door of your house, you are connecting to people on a human level.
(You're not after all let people into your house because they have downloaded a brochure, which is connecting to somebody on a business level.)
That's why when you come to LinkedIn and keep pitching to people, you get such an infinitesimally small response.
Now, if somebody turned up at your door, they were dressed in a way that looked smart and they said “I'm knocking on your door as you look interesting. I love the fact you go mountain biking at the weekends. We go often go to a trail in Revelstoke in British Columbia”.
At that point you would say, “wow, sounds like we have a lot in common, come in”.
Now once you get into my house, if you turned around and pitched, I would throw you out.
If we carried on that conversation about mountain biking, we would form a relationship, build trust and that mountain biking conversation would turn into me asking “so tell me what you do?”
At that point, I've asked you to pitch.
This is the difference between using LInkedin as a social platform and not a media platform.
We recently explained this to a CRO and at the end of the call he said.
“I understand why we have now wasted the last three years on social media”.
But it doesn't have to be for you or your company.
Let's look at some context about social media today
Linkedin is the world's biggest network site.
So let's take a step back for a moment. How about if I could pick you up tomorrow and I drive you to a place which is full of your prospects? All you have to do is grab a coffee or a tea and go up and talk to them. You can stay as long as you like.
Now, you wouldn't walk up to these prospects of yours and pitch to them. You would have a conversation. Maybe ask then how far they drove to get there? Had they been caught up in the traffic? You would have a conversation. You wouldn't pitch to them, in fact they will probably ask you at some point, “what do you do?" but more on that in a bit.
Let's look at the data, cold calling vs our social selling benchmark
Here at DLA Ignite, we are always wanting to push forward the boundaries of sales, so we decided to put cold calling head to head with the DLA Ignite methodology for social selling and create a benchmark on 1st January 2023 (and business case) for our version of social selling.
So we took a team of "cold callers" cross trained them in our methodology for social selling and here are the results.
It's worth shouting out the team, Alex, Jordan and Jensen and they work for a company called Supero.
Don't believe me? Please check the team out on social and ask them about the results!
The results with cold calling
When the team were cold calling, that is, before we trained them on social selling. I'm not sure what results you get with cold calling but they did whatever they could in terms of warming up the calls with emails or webinars, etc. And the results, they got about 2 calls a week.
As with any cold call, your job is to take the call to a next action, which might be a demo, discovery call and they averaged 0.3 of these calls.
Anyway, you will have your own figures for cold calling in your business and you will know what they are.