Today is our 4th Birthday - How Times Have Changed - Or Have They?

Today is the day that Adam Gray and I, and then Alex Low formed DLA Ignite.

All of us left corporate roles and decided on the start-up life.

I’ve loved every minute of the last 4 years, we have grown from the 3 of us with a clear purpose to a global organisation, helping clients across the world transform and come out of this pandemic, fitter and stronger.

I bet you are now expecting a product pitch, sorry to disappoint ....

DLA Ignite - Is about our People 

Before I talk about our last 4 years, our vision, our purpose and the future, we wouldn’t be anywhere without our people. 

While we can come up with the best methodology in the world, we are nothing without the teams that execute, everyday, for our clients. It may seem like a cliche, but it's the personalities that make up DLA Ignite and Adam, Alex and I, love the fact they have the ability to speak up and speak out. Better still, (maybe for me), but I love the fact there is always a "laugh out loud" on our calls. I just got off a call and there was a great "belly laugh" to lift spirits. But here is also a serious task about supporting our clients.

Our Winning With Social Enables Our Clients to Win With Social

All of our Associates and Partners, have to be the high watermark of social selling. Our customers expect us to social sell to win them business, so we social sell to win us business. You wouldn’t buy social selling from somebody that used email marketing or cold calling to sell social selling? We love talking to the Leadership team of a business and pointing out we are there talking to them because of social and wouldn’t it be great if their sales teams could do this too.

The team take a pride in experimenting with social, so they can bring the latest hint and tips to our clients. One member of the team has connected to 600 people in a business, just to demonstrate how quickly you can build relationships in an Account Based Selling environment. He is now connected to the whole leadership team and CEO in that account. Of course so can your sales team.

DLA Ignite is About Training

We also run three and half hours of internal training per week for our people. This provides us with a platform to up-skill new starters. It also provides us with the ability to share best practice across the world, fast. If something that is working in Germany, can be relayed and shared with our teams in the US. This means that our clients are getting the most up-to-date structured methodology, and they are also getting the latest hints and tips. It means they have the fastest competitive advantage in business.

So how did we get to 4 years old?

What Was our Vision - Why Did We Set Up DLA Ignite?

Like a lot of people, we spotted a gap in the market. Nobody was taking social media seriously. 

We could see that social media was changing the world, it was changing society and it was changing how we executed business. There were two issues as we saw them:-

1. Companies treated social media as a tactic, it was all about cat photos and photos of your lunch, there was no strategy and no methodology. How, as a salesperson, can I post something on social media and sell something off the back of it?
2. Even the “serious players” didn’t understand social and the strategy changes that were required. One “strategy” company explained to us that they didn’t need to understand social media. In fact any problem in their clients could be solved by “throwing 25 year olds” at it. We were also told that we didn’t understand business. The Management Consultancy explained to us “We take the CEO for a round of golf, they sign” it’s as simple as that we were informed.

What Are We Famous For? - Social Selling

As ever business has to be famous for something, we started being famous for social selling.

My first book “Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers” (available on Amazon worldwide) was in the best seller list and still sells like “hotcakes”.

We set about transforming sales teams and we found that when ever we ran our social selling program we got a 30% increase in revenue and 40% reduction in the sales cycle. When we found that this was predictable and repeatable, we moved onto executing our vision.

Which is to transform the whole of the business using social media. That is when we broke out of sales in September 2019 we released Social Human Resources (HR), employee advocacy and internal communications and in then December 2019 we signed our first contract for Social Marketing. In 2020, we launched Digital Supply Chain this summer, we thought that Social Procurement didn’t resonate with the market.

What Are We Famous For? - Business Transformation

In 2019, we became famous for business transformation. That is, treating social as a strategy and transforming your business to use social media both internally and externally. Why? Because you can do more for less. The efficiency gains you can get through using social means you can strip out costs for them business, while increasing sales, or service, or marketing, or retaining talent, etc. Often people want social selling as a “quick win”, especially in current times as they are looking at ways to get efficiencies in the business and social selling will enable you to increase sales output but lowering the cost.

DLA Ignite a Global Business

One of the first requests we got from a client was to roll out a social selling programme across the world. They felt that other social selling companies spread a “US world view” that wouldn’t be appropriate in Europe, Asia and South America. They wanted something that was a standard robust methodology but took into account local sensitivities and could also be implemented in local language.  

It took us two years to become a global business and we now have 450 Associates worldwide and can implement in English (UK), English (American) as well as German, Spanish and French. With Associates covering, North and South America, Asia, UK and Europe. Has social grown up or is it still about "magic"?

Data Driven - Business Transformation

Often we have found with social that people say that social works “because the guru says so” or because “it says so in my book”. There is nothing to back this up. Where is the data? Social seems to be magic or witchcraft, which is why often people have had difficulty getting projects signed off.

As we have worked with clients over the last 4 years we have tested our “theories” so that we now have the data to say if you “do this” and “do this” you will get “this result”. No guesswork. If you don't "do this" you will get this result.

As somebody said to me recently, “you now have both the art and the science in sales”.

Covid19 - How Did That Impact Us?

Covid19 pandemic has been truly catastrophic in terms of the human cost and the business impact. The moment lock down hit, we moved all our training online. There was also a rush to us. Companies we had been talking to, where there had always been another priority, suddenly realised they needed to get digital and quick.

The latest research shows that we had 10 years of digital transformation in 3 months and companies realise they cannot sell the way they did did before Coronavirus. That, combined with the latest research that shows there are now more people on social worldwide than not on social, a major tipping point. 

We are now working with a number of companies who say to us that they have pipeline challenges as well as they know they came into lock down analogue and they need to come out digital. 

So What About the Future?

Having accelerated past out competition in the last few years, we know we cannot be complaisant and we have a number of announcements on the way.

Enough of The Interruptions Please

In the last few months we have seen conferences fall by the wayside, advertising spend drop, the output from email campaigns drop and the output from cold calling drop. While it seems like this activities are not going away (yet), what you can achieve from they reduces year on year. In fact it would seem buyer have had enough of all interrupt marketing. It is time therefore for businesses to switch budgets away from “interrupt” and “broadcast” to “permission” and “conversations” on social.

Social Media Has Changed The World

That said, social media, has changed society and it has changed business. Every company now must have a social selling project, or they won’t come out of this pandemic alive.

Where Do You Go From Here?

Some companies will try and do that themselves, they risk looking very foolish online. It will take them a long time; - time and cash flow they might not have.

Some people will turn to their marketing agency, they are “full service” agency after all. We would ask that you look at that Agencies social profiles, the companies and the people’s, their CEOs. Is this really a business that understands social?

Others will see the need to get people in from the outside, people who live and breath social and can accelerate them to be digital, faster. It is, after all ...... all we do.

Looking forward to the next four years, social and DLA Ignite are certainly here to stay.