Change is long overdue and it's coming...

On 26 September 2013 my first book “Brilliant Social Media” was published by Pearson. It was later translated, then later still reprinted in a different format for developing countries. It was the first globally published book on using social media for business.

When I met Tim , he had just published his book “Social Selling Techniques to Influence Buyers and Chanegemakers” which focused on social selling in the B2B space and had become the acknowledged guide for organisations wanting to social-sell.

After working together for a few years we co-wrote “Smarketing” a book about how sales and marketing functions within organisations need to move closer together and be less siloed in order to be more effective.

All three books were written with the vision of helping organisations capitalise on the opportunity to transform to be more relevant by using the available platforms and tools to more effectively engage their prospects

In the (nearly) decade since my first book, little has changed in business. Still, ineffective legacy methods are the norm amongst organisations for marketing, prospecting and developing conversations with buyers.

This is, frankly, a sad state of affairs. Martech has developed, for sure. The sales stack has developed, naturally. The quality of data and analysis has developed, obviously. But the thinking hasn’t. Much of this technological development has happened as a result of a failure to acknowledge that many of the corporate outreach activities simply don’t work any more.

Using mailing lists may be an effective way of selling $100 training shoes where a “oh I like that style” is enough to create a purchase desire but that simply isn’t true for large B2B purchases. The fact that you have emailed the “Head of Operations” at your prospect will do little to pique their interest because you’re not the only people trying to get their attention and the process of them buying is far more complex, protracted and full of pitfalls.

But still the “hit the (phones/inbox)” mentality prevails.

"Let's hit the phones. Let's do this..."

When we begin working with organisations they often put a brave face on the situation. They see changing how they prospect and develop conversations with social media as a nice add-on to their current activities. But as we get to know them better it becomes clear that they have a major problem. Not only do the salespeople tell us that the MQLs are not really leads (because the person doesn’t want to speak to them), but that they have no reliable mechanism/process for starting conversations with prospects.

One salesperson said "I keep hearing this noise but the truth is that nobody in this company that I know of has any pipeline and very few will hit their target..."

The key challenge is this:

If you need to do 100 dials to speak to someone and you need to have 100 conversations to produce a proposal, that’s a 1:10,000 success rate (or a 99.99% failure rate).

It doesn’t matter how you cut it, that’s broken. It doesn’t matter if your market-leading sales scheduling software gives a 4x improvement…that’s still a 99.96% failure rate.

Moving from a 99.99% failure rate to a 99.96% failure rate has drastically improved things...but it doesn't address the elephant in the room.

IT'S BROKEN

The change that Tim and I laid-out in Smarketing/Social Selling/Brilliant Social Media is still relevant today and would give any organisation a massive competitive advantage.

But this isn't a point of debate. This is beyond dispute.

The success data for social selling activities from Salesforce, Hubspot, Gartner and countless others supports that social is a more effective way of developing conversations and pipeline than other methods. But to grasp this opportunity organisations need to give this the same level of importance as other transformational projects. A 1/2 day seminar on social selling or a "tips and tricks sheet" is not the answer because salespeople already know what they are going to hear. They've heard it before…they simply aren’t doing it. Telling them again will not change it.

Telling salespeople again what they need to do will not change the outcome.

This needs to be a change to how people are measured, managed and supported. This requires a change to the operational parameters of the sales function. This is a strategic initiative not a tactical one. This requires a visionary leader to embrace this and they need to have a desire to dominate in their space.

This is a strategic initiative not a tactical one.

Someone is going to do this. And when they do there will be a lot of casualties and those casualties will be saying “who could have predicted this would happen?”… well the answer is us at DLA Ignite .