Is Social Selling just a buzz word, what does it actually mean?

Here's what it means to us!

In short, social selling is the ability to build deep and meaningful relationships at scale, using social media. There is 'no selling'. It's all about creating enough of a rapport so that someone, your target audience agrees to have a conversation with you. And the more you 'sell' the less likely a conversation is to happen.

To do social selling effectively, where you generate a consistent flow of new conversations with new and existing prospects and customers, you need four things:

1. A strategy - with clearly defined objectives. Think lead measures as opposed to lag measures. Behaviours that increase your probability of creating and progressing a conversation. A lot of which is done way before you have a conversation.
2. A methodology - a series of activities that lead you to many new conversations with your target audience. When your day gets busy it's important to trust your process and follow the simple steps.
3. Measurement - measure the behaviours that matter, the behaviours that when done each day will deliver the results you desire. Measuring these things will enable you to hold yourself accountable for following your process.
4. Change management - not everyone is comfortable or even able to talk about themselves or create a variety of content that makes them stand out, look different, like a genuine, authentic human being. It requires an approach that helps the individual work through the change, and grow in confidence, opening new doors to engage with your target audience at scale.

We tested outbound prospect techniques over 3 years

I've been running a test for almost three years. Between December 2020 and January 2022 we proved that traditional outbound prospecting techniques like cold calling, cold emailing, no matter how tailored our emails were and how sophisticated our multi-channel sales cadences were, no matter how well orchestrated our webinar series were for clients.... it produced some conversations and very little pipeline - as buyer trust fell in vendors so to did the level of engagement we could drive with ours and our clients target audience.

I have no doubt you have or are experiencing the same challenge.

In January 2022 I made a tough decision to transform our business model from a traditional prospecting approach to a social selling approach that focused on relationship building as opposed to searching and qualifying the 3-5% of ones territory that might be in market.

For 8 months we have been measuring social selling performance across ourselves and our clients, following our methodology, and we have enough data to prove that social selling, when done our way, outperforms any other form of marketing, prospecting or demand generation activities.

We have three clients contributing to the benchmark data and our team of associates, all following our methodology. The contributors have different levels of experience and are targeting existing clients as well as net new prospects.

The results

We found, we are able to engage with 41.5% of our combined networks in a none threatening or salesey way. And because we purposefully building our network with our target audience, the folks we want to see us, are doing, and they're regularly engaging with our content.

We have found that the conversation rate is 10.48%. Which means when we ask 100 people to have a call with us, 10.48 of them sit a call.

And of those calls we sit, 35.63% of the progress, with a meaningful next step agreed. When you or your team is in front of the right people, who clearly see what you do, and what you stand for, and often feel like they already know you, what percentage of those conversations do you think develop into pipeline, either now or in the future?

Whether you need to lower CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs), improve pipeline quality, or grow revenue faster, it all starts with a conversation, without that, their is no growth and customer acquisition costs do rise as you work harder using outdated techniques that put a strain on your sales team and your own buyers.

Client case studies also proving the theory

One of our clients had been following old fashioned prospecting techniques, for almost 5 months as a BDR and Sales Director team, working a focus set of accounts and in that time had managed to book one meeting. 5 months after starting his social selling journey with me, he has booked 36 meetings, across 25% of his territory, including clients and prospects. He's averaging 2.4 meetings per account and guess where he's sitting in the company for size and quality of pipeline?

This approach has delivered a 36x increase in meeting creation in 5 months. Revenue will come, as it's a complex B2B sale and sales cycles are in excess of 12 months from scratch.

But the outcome was 30x better than they currently experience today. Think about it. By doing the opposite of what our clients asked for we were able to improve performance by 30x!