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In the recent Boston Consulting Group (BCG): CEO Outlook April 2023 report, which you can get a copy of here.
It's clear that CEOs are batting down the hatches and cutting spend, but at the same time they are still looking for growth. A classic, "they want their cake and eat it". If you are like me, where you've seen many a recession, you will know that those that invest, are the ones that come out of any down turn faster and with greater velocity.
In the report, 30% are planning "bold moves to build competitive advantage" and actively asking "where would I like to invest strategically to fuel growth?"
And "50% plan to invest in tech & innovation for top-line expansion".
Now is the time to "redesign processes and operational models" for profitable growth now and rebound readiness post-recession.
Let me show the data about a digital first sales unit.
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 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. 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, 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 for cold calling in your business and you will know what they are.
The results for social selling
What is social selling?
Our definition is
"Using your presence and behaviour on social media, to build influence make connections, grow relationships and trust. Which leads to conversation and commercial interaction".
The team are getting a 9% response (on average) to cold outreach, so for every 100 people they ask for a call, 9 say "yes". This figure is an average, so we think somebody with intermediate skills or an expert should be getting a higher figure should be getting a larger response. In fact, our benchmark for an expert is 13%, but I want to keep figures realistic and conservative.
Now with every "call" based on cold outreach there has to be some sort of next action. For your own company, ywill know what your next action is, it will be a demo, a discovery call or something.
We have found that 9% of the people (on average) 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 / meetings per week, this week, they have got 24 meetings. But the average is 11, again, let's keep the figures realistic and conservative.
Just think about that being rolled out across your sales team(s).
It's time to work smarter not harder.
I need to say, before I get any comments.
There is no spam and no automation!
This is NOT connect and pitch!
Let's look at this with a business case
Let's take a sales team of 10.
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.
If you have 10 salespeople that gives you a total addressable market (TAM) of 15,000 new people to have conversations with.
With our, Institute of sales professionals (ISP) backed, social selling methodology, (note: we cannot vouch for anybody else) based on our measured benchmark, you should be able to get, on average, meetings with 9% of this TAM of 15,000. This means your sales team can have 1350 new conversations every year.
(As we know, conversations create sales.)
As we discussed above, with any cold outreach the objective is to get a next action and using our social selling methodology and using our measured benchmark we can get 33.6% of 9% of our TAM to a next action, which is 454.
Let assume you win 1 in 3, that's 151 new sales a year using social selling, average order value (AOV) $100,000, that's
$15,120,000 = $15 million
That's an additional $15 million that you are missing by cold calling rather than social selling.
or $1,26 million you miss every month you delay moving from cold calling to social selling.
Of course, if you have more than 10 sales people, you can scale the figures up.
Related: Social Selling Already? Great Stuff, but How Does That Compare To Best Practice?