How to generate a healthier looking sales pipeline.

This seems to be a burning question for many organisations at the moment. The past 12 months has bled their pipeline dry and they often don’t have an effective mechanism for generating new leads. For many of these organisations time is running out. They have pinned their hopes on “things picking-up in Q2”…but as the quote goes - you should hope for the best but plan for the worst. What if things don’t pick-up?

you should hope for the best but plan for the worst.

For some years now there has been a shift in customer behaviour - fewer emails get opened, events cost more end deliver less, advertising generates little interest (except for those funky things Instagram timeline seems to be full of)…

The reality is that the cure for this problem is simultaneously easier and more difficult than you think it’s going to be.

First. Generating leads, meetings, pipeline and revenue is a bi-product of being social (not the task). The social world works in a different way to old-school selling.

Ruthlessly put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and ask yourself “If I had a cold outreach from someone I didn’t know (even if they were from a brand I did know) saying they could solve my business problem would I believe them?” I suspect, if you’re being honest, the answer is “no”. The reason for this is because everyone says that they’re good and that they can help so therefore being told that has no meaning. The main ways you select whether you will listen to and believe this message is i) do I know the person, and ii) do I trust the person. If you can’t answer yes to both of those the message will probably fall on deaf ears.

Therefore the first task salespeople need to do is build an audience that knows them and trusts them. This takes lots of effort, commitment and practice.

Second. We need to realise that the corporate narrative is not attractive to customers and prospects no matter how much we wish it to be true. IBM, one of the world’s largest and most respected consultancies has over 10 million followers on their LinkedIn page yet, when they post content hardly anyone engages with them…sometimes a couple of hundred people drop a “like or comment” on their content…sometimes far fewer (and of those many are IBM employees or partners). By contrast, I have 11k followers and I typically get 30, 50…even 100 pieces of interaction. The reason isn’t that my content is better it’s because I am a person who helps and shares and IBM is a company that does what all companies do…talk about themselves.

Third. As organisations we have worked very hard to create a brand and we are rightly proud of the images and feeling that brand engenders. But I can’t forge a relationship with a brand and brands contain both positive and negative connotations. The strength in creating a social organisation is that the diversity of the team and their differing ways of articulating the brand proposition is an incredible strength and NOT the weakness that so many organisations think they are.

Fourth. These changes are tough. Because these are changes to people’s behaviours, NOT campaigns or short-term activities. People need to grow their networks, engage people, create and publish content and these need to be daily activities as part of their responsibilities (to both he organisation and to themselves). This is the biggest barrier to success we see. “I don’t want to appear spammy so I will only publish once per week”…is an opinion based on no data whatsoever. Publishing three time per day is too much, but publishing three times per week is too little. The less you publish the more invisible you become and NOBODY will wait to read your content when they go online, they will read the posts from whomever shows up…and that could be your competitors.

Fifth. You must do all of this strategically. There needs to be a plan - a corporate plan about who will help manage, coach, mentor and measure KPIs, and a personal plan about tone of voice, target accounts and content diary. If you don’t have a plan you are unlikely to end up where you want to get.

The output from achieving this though is remarkable.

If there are 100 people in your company/division/team and half of them adopt this behaviour and every day each person posts one piece of content and each piece of content gets just 500 views and it stimulates 10 likes/comments and each of the people who left those likes and comments receives a message saying “thank you…would you like a chat” (and just 10% of those people say yes) and each day they send 10 connection requests (that have a 50% acceptance rate) after one year this is what will have happened:

• The team will have grown their combined networks by 62,500 people - that’s the number of new people who might see one or more piece of your team’s content 
• The team will have posted 12,500 pieces of content - that’s 12,500 keyword optimised, micro-niched opportunities for a prospect to think “wow. these are the people I should be talking to.”
• The team will have had 12,500 additional calls
• The team has generated 6,250,000 views of their content

This is what YOUR organisation has been waiting for.

This is what YOUR organisation has been waiting for. 12,500 calls per year. If perhaps 1 in 10 of those goes in to pipeline that’s 1250 new opportunities. If 1 in 5 closes at an average deal size of ￡50k that’s over ￡12,000,000 in additional revenue.

We have a huge amount of data of what works (and what doesn’t) around type of post, style of post, tone of post and length of post. We also have a very clear methodology for how to maximise engagement, how to amplify visibility and how “process” conversations and turn these in to revenue. More importantly though we have been responsible for enough transformations that we know where organisations are most likely to fail when they try and implement this sort of change and how to overcome these roadblocks because there is a very distinct difference between “what should work” and “what actually works” in most cases.

The reality is that the processes and methodologies are obvious and pretty straightforward, but this certainly doesn’t mean that they are easy of you as an individual to implement and they are extremely difficult for you as an organisation to implement.

If you have ever sent team members on a social selling training course (or attended one yourself) you all have seen time and again that the principles are easy to grasp and you never doubt that they work…but somehow they just haven’t been sticky. After a few weeks the behaviour you had started to adopt gradually wanes and before long you’re back to normal.

Of course, our training is better (well, I’m bound to say that aren’t it) but whether the training you have received is good or bad isn’t the issue, the issue is maintaining the techniques you’ve learned and making them part of your daily routine.

This is not a campaign, this is not a short-term fix (although there may be lots of quick wins when you start to do it) this is a strategic shift in how your organisation can operate and how it can be sustainable now and in the future.

This is simple…but in this instance simple and easy are not the same thing. If this was easy everyone would be doing it and they’re not, very few are. And therein lies the opportunity for you and your organisation.