Trending
This deck is well worth checking out, here, sorry it's over 100 slides.
Every marketing team and leader I've met with over the last year is trying to figure out how to generate awareness and reach target buyers more effectively and efficiently.
Every sales leader I've met is trying to create more pipeline.
The deck takes you on a journey, from the old world of demand generation, through to today. Including a number of changes that have taken place over the last few years.
Who put this together? The venture capital company, Social Capital_ if you don't know them, they were founded in 2011 by Chamath Palihapitiya. Chamath,was the head of growth at Facebook (now Meta), he was a first investor in Slack and other tech startups that have a social media technology underpinning them.
His view is that we are moving from a world of traditional media of ads and brands to a world based around social media. It's a view that Adam Gray and I have had for the last 10 years. So, yes we are biased when this sort of research is shared.
What does this mean to you?
Chamath talks in the research about “influencers”. This is not influencers with a capital “I”, like Kim Kardashian, but people like your sales people, your HR team, your marketing team, your employees, etc. Influencers with a small “i”.
The deck explains that the way you are going to generate awareness, reach target buyers more effectively and efficiently and generate more pipeline is to have your salespeople and employees empowered on social media.
So what has changed?
Most companies thing that the brand is the most important thing in the world and what we do is promote the brand. You can see this with companies that still buy ads on LinkedIn or go to trade shows or post brochures on social media. Afterall the brand is an abstract concept that nobody understands or believes in.
That why the deck introduces Demand Generation 2.0
To quote the deck .. “We are entering a new phase of media and consumption, where (employees and salespeople) are responsible for aggregating an audience to generate demand”
Social Capital_ describe this happening by …
- Making differentiated content
- Acquiring an audience
- Building trust
- Sell to new customers
- Reinvest profits
- Rinse and repeat
NB: They don't actually say how people will sell to people over social, but that the piece that we have figured out.
The deck points out that nobody listens to brands, LinkedIn own research shows that employees get 561% more enenagement than a brand and research from DSMN8 shows that a CEO post on Linkedin will get more engagement than a brand page. Even Nike use it's employees to sell it's products.
We know that without trust as a business we are just a commodity and we only have one thing to differentiate us. Price. Without trust it's zero sum game.
How do sales people and employees build and maintain trust? They do this with their audiences by leveraging personal connection, transparency and community engagement.
The report points out that, most GenZs and Millennials now learn about new products to purchase from social media. Research from Simon Kemp, shows that people under the age of 35 turn to social media for brand research first before search. Where as people over the age of 35 turn to social media, after search.
Why should we be activating sales people and employees? - You're already paying them, in fact employees WANT to share about your company and what it's doing. - Your employees are connected with everyone you want to reach: customers, partners, prospects, hiring candidates, etc. - Critically, your employees are TRUSTED by their networks and as the saying goes, “we buy from those we know, we like and we trust.” - Collectively your employees networks are not only bigger than any brand profiles you have, they can be bigger than the followings of mega influencers like Kim Kardashian and Mr. Beast It's an extremely exciting time for marketers. We're somewhere in the process of a major shift from traditional to next generation demand generation and those who jump on the trend are going to be rewarded.
Thanks to Cameron Brain of Everyone Social for bringing this to my attention, I've also nicked a few of his words.
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.
Related: Why Your “Brochure” Posts on LinkedIn Won’t Make Any Impact