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A lot of time, effort and budget is now invested in social media.
When we started DLA Ignite, people used to say “but my clients are not on social media”, now we can confidently say that everybody we want to reach is on social media.
Your buyers, your salespeople, existing employees, your future employees, your investors, your future investors, analysts, alumni, are all on social.
When we started DLA ignite there was 450 million people on LinkedIn, now there is a Billion.
We have seen similar growth for all the other social platforms.
Social media has become the channel for sales and marketing, it's the richest source for your target audience.
It's not only where your audience is, it's where they want to be engaged.
Afterall you are reading this on social media!
So what are these two secrets of social media?
- People want to engage with people (not brands) that is what social media is about
- The platforms prioritise people (not brands)
The most important thing to a social network are the users (not brands) that are contributing content.
When we post as humans to that network, we are the most valuable thing to that network.
It is these posts that bring people back to the the platform.
Don't forget, the network does not discriminate, it sees everybody as equitable and if you are helping the network by sharing content, it will support you.
CEO, manager, individual contributor, salesperson, you are all the same when you post content.
The social network algorithmically makes sure the content shared reaches the broadest possible people and audience.
Most business today have recognised that the buyer is on social media, but they have created the digital version of the analog flyer.
That post about your company, your products, that you have won an award, that you are at a sales kick off (SKO) are all self serving and are just brochures and brochureware. The analog flyer, but on digital.
Let's not forget that buyers connect with humans and not businesses.
Recent research from LinkedIn shows that employees get 561% more engagement than brands.
Understand these secrets and you will be a success on social.
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: Connecting on LinkedIn Is Like Inviting Someone Into Your Home