It’s happening, can you hear it, the sound of people waking up in the USA to the fact that legacy sales methods are over!While the USA have always thought of themselves as leaders in Digital and Social, while that may have been the case in the past, other places like Europe have over taken.
But why does it seem that USA have woken from their Cold calling nightmare?
Is it because?
If you look at the latest Gartner results ...This 60 min presentation by my friend Brent Adamson at Gartner he takes you through a whistle stop tour of the “state of the nation” for sales and marketing right now.There are some interesting findings:The number of people involved in a sale have gone up from from 2009 to 2012 it was 4.8 from 2013 to 2015 it was 6.8 and is now more like 9 and 10. Why is this?There are just more and more people needed to evaluate products and services. First of all it was the C-Suite, then the executives where involved, then the end users, then procurement, then third parties, etc etc. The change that has happened in the last few years has been around data, cyber, data security. That could because of GDPR or the move to cloud.The average number of data sources that each of those 10 decision makers are accessing is 4.5 – EVERYBODY is doing their own research.The data usually just re-enforces what they know already – So when they come to the table to make a consensus, they cannot.Related:
What Was Working in Sales, Isn’t Working AnymoreRelated:
CEOs: What You’re Not Being Told and Why It’s Costing You Big TimeThe average time that clients spend looking at data is 50% of the B2B buying process.The world is awash with good content, so how do you stand out?89% that the information they encountered was high quality, so pumping out quality isn’t the solution. How to buyers find the truth?Customers need an expert to help them work this all out.Customers are not looking for another white paper or more research or another infographic they are looking for data that helps them make …. progress. They want data that takes them a step further to sorting out their problem/challenge.
All of this points to social selling. Start in Sales
When we go into an organisation, we usually enter through the sales department as this is an “obvious” place to start. If we can increase the number of leads and meetings (and we do), if we can increase the number of wins (and we do) and if we can reduce the time to close (and we do) then this revenue created can be reinvested into rolling out across the rest of the business.Social selling requires both habit change and mindset change and this sets the people on both an enjoyable and self enhancing journey. One which mean people understand the company is investing in them as well as the revenue enhancements.So far in each company we have worked on, we have also left with a prospecting culture, something the cold calling gurus say isn’t possible. Bo-hoo to them!In Simon Eskom’s ‘Digital in 2019’ report he points out thatThere are
5.11 billion unique mobile users in the world today, up 100 million (2 percent) in the past year.There are
4.39 billion internet users in 2019, an increase of 366 million (9 percent) versus January 2018.There are
3.48 billion social media users in 2019, with the worldwide total growing by 288 million (9 percent) since this time last year.
3.26 billion people use social media on mobile devices in January 2019, with growth of 297 million new users representing a year-on-year increase of more than 10 percent.
Social as a Company Methodology
One of the mistakes people make with social is that they see it is tactical (as we mentioned before) and employee different people in different companies to do different parts of the project. Where as, if people are taking a strategic approach they will want the same methodology rolled out across the world. But obviously having a methodology that can take into account local changes, such as WeChat, Xing etc.Add to that that Social Selling provides the perfect prospecting platform regardless of the lies that Cold Calling vested interests put out. This is blowing up to be the perfect storm.It will be courageous that put their hands up first who will be the winners.
