Can I land and expand with social selling?
Timothy "Tim" Hughes 提姆·休斯 L.ISP
Should have Played Quidditch for England
In the world of?software as a service?(SaaS) and?Cloud computing, so I guess most of the world of?IT?there is this term called?"land and expand".?For those that don't know what this means.?Land is about selling into an account, in the SaaS world this can be a small deal.?The assumption being that you sell a small deal (land) and then you?upsell?and?cross sell?(expand).
Can you land and expand with social selling?
In the past you were limited to?cold calling?and sending?spam emails, the problem with this is you try and?start a relationship by pissing somebody off, isn't a good plan.
People's ability to cold call and send spam emails has got less and less over time, which is why so many companies have now switched to social selling.
And while you can often get an internal referral, the area where you "expand" the internal people you are selling to will be cynical?you are just another salesperson.
This is where social selling comes in.
Worth saying that social selling, is not spamming people on social, that's called spamming people on social.
How can social selling help me?
In our?social selling?and influence course we teach and coach your sales teams how to have
1.?Buyer centric profile?- We all know that the people we contact in accounts, in both land and expand mode will look us up on social.?A buyer centric profile will show buyers are we are not after a quick sale, but we are after a long term relationship.?After all, that is what a expand is all about.
2.?A network?- Most salespeople have a bunch of contacts on?social media.?X colleagues and?recruitment?consultants, which are not the people you are trying to influence and sell to.
In our social selling and influence course, we coach you on how to build a wide and varied network in the accounts you want to influence and sell to.?We teach you how to do this in a non-spammy way. In fact, we teach you how to do it so that each connection request starts a conversation.?After all?conversations create sales.
A network will enable you to create the initial sell, so land and a network will also enable you to expand.
This technique can also be used in an?Account Based Marketing?(ABM) program.
3.?The third thing you need is content.?The days of you taking brochures from marketing and posting them on social media are well over.?After all, nobody reads them.
For you to land and expand in an account you need content that provides insight and educates.?After all, why are buyers on social media in the first place??They are looking for insight, looking for answers.
You need to create to content yourself and share through your network.?This isn't about hope, this is a strategy on why you are using that content and then harvesting the engagement.
Social selling is not showing as many brochures under people's noses on social!
I've written before about an example where somebody got?6 c-level meetings, 2 proposals and 1 purchase order from one post that took ten minutes to post.?There is not one single demand generation methods that can get those sort of results in 10 minutes.
So who's social selling?
In case you missed it, the?Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch?have?banned cold calling?and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.
But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling??Not according to Merrill Lynch.
"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"
The?CRO?(chief revenue officer),?Richard Eltham?of?Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about?social selling. See?here.
“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”?
Kevin Murray?who is the Head of Sales at?MacArtney?Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling?here?and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales?here.
Here at?DLA Ignite?we don't do?"hints and tips sessions"?we don't want you to waste your money. Our social selling and influence methodology will provide your sales team with the stable platform for growth. It is also the only social selling program based on 70:20:10 change management principles which gives your business the mindset change and habit change they need in this digital world.?
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Revenue Through Reputation. Founder, The LinkedIn Prospecting Playbook. I help leaders become more connected, more relevant and more influential for revenue growth. Podcast Host x2 | Founder, Fist Bump.
3 年Thanks as always Timothy (Tim) Hughes 提姆·休斯 for your wisdom and insights. I’m always grateful for what I learn from you! ????
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3 年Timothy (Tim) Hughes 提姆·休斯 "Worth saying that social selling, is not spamming people on social, that's called spamming people on social." Best and most true sentence for marketing ins 2021.