Trending
The brochure. It’s a relic from the analogue world.
I remember my first start-up, I got the sales team together and asked them what we needed to do to help them sell.
The number one thing they wanted was a brochure. We spent £1,000 ($1,300), money we didn’t have on a box of brochures. And they sat in the box in the corner of the office never used.
The idea of a brochure is that I will tell you everything about my product. And you will get really excited and will ring me up and buy two.
But with all the brochures that have been created, has that translated into calls for your products? Of course not.
We just need to change the messaging, I hear you saying.
A brochure can never tell you about something I don’t understand. And I won’t read the brochure as it will say “buy my product because we are great”.
What you sell and what I sell needs a conversation.
When anybody says to me, send me a brochure, why would I lose control of the sale by sending you one. I always ask for a call and I always get one. I stay in control of the sale.
By the way, as a business we don’t have brochures for this very reason.
Can a couple of pages of A4 change your mind and excite you, of course not. It is an unrealistic expectation.
But I have a better chance on a call.
This is the same when you post brochures, product descriptions, case studies, photos of sales kick offs, award ceremonies…. Nobody, apart from the people who work in your company and your life partner, cares.
And you know this as you are posting them and nobody is phoning you.
How about if you started sharing insight, something that can help me as a buyer?
How about if you started sharing content about you so I can start building a relationship and trust with you?
How about if you see content as a strategic way to prospect and start conversations?
After all conversations, not brochures create sales!
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.