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A number of people come to me and say they are social selling already, which is great. Maybe you've had marketing teach you or social enablement.
But what sort of results should you be expecting to get?
Well here's a benchmark, something you can compare yourself with.
Clearly if you are are not meeting this benchmark, maybe we should have a conversation. If you are exceeding this benchmark, then again I would love to have a conversation to understand what you are doing.
Let's look at out cold calling vs 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 and it's results, head to head with social selling and create a benchmark (and business case) for social selling.
So we took a team of "cold callers" cross trained them on 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.
If you want to hear the team talk about it then watch our digital download here.
The results with cold calling
When the team were cold calling, this is before we trained them on social selling, they did whatever they could in terms of warming up the calls with emails or webinars and 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.
The results for social selling
The team are getting a 9% response to cold outreach, so that for every 100 people they ask for a call, 9 say yes.
Now with every call based on cold outreach there has to be some sort of next action. You will know what your next action is, it will be a demo, a discovery call or something.
We have found that 9% of the people that have agreed to a call based on cold outreach, 33.6% are converting to a next action. Which is exponential growth when compared to cold calling.
The team is averaging 11 calls per week, the week I am writing this blog, this week, they have got 24 meetings. Just think about that being rolled out across your sales team(s).
No spam and no automation!
This is NOT connect and pitch!
This is exponential growth!
Let's look at this with a business case
Let's take a small sales team as an example
Sales leader - 3,000 followers
Salesperson A - 357 followers
Salesperson B - 1146 followers
Salesperson C - 646 followers
Salesperson D - 310 followers
We know that the average person can grow their network by 3,000 people a year, let's assume of these 50% are going to buy, this gives you a network growth of 1,500 per person per year, with these 5 salespeople above gives you a total addressable market (TAM) of 7,500.
With our social selling methodology, based on the figures you should be able to get on average, meetings with 11% of this TAM of 7,500. This means your sales team can have 825 new conversations every year. Let's not forget that it's these conversations that will create sales.
And we know from the figures above that using our social selling methodology we can get 33.6% of these to a next action, which is 277.
Let assume you win 1 in 3, that's 92 new sales a year using social selling, average order value (AOV) $100,000, that's
$9,200,000 - $9.2 million.
That's an additional $9.2 million that you are missing by cold calling rather than social selling.
Just think about that scaled across the whole of your sales team!
Related: Why Your Win Rate Isn’t Your Problem, This Is Just a Symptom of a Bigger Issue