Meeting after meeting we attend now, Marketers say to us “nothing works anymore”. In fact, somebody today, went so far as to say, “nothing in Marketing works today, it’s like a switch has been flicked. All Marketing has been switched off”. Apart from one method. The Marketer went on to say.
“We run webinars and nobody turns up, we change the titles and nobody turns up. We are doing paid advertising but don’t expect to get anything. Cold calling died in the enterprise space 2 years ago and GDPR killed email marketing.”
Now the cynical reader might be saying the marketer is rubbish, but I can assure you they are all at the top of the game.
It is at this point I ask them “where are your customers?” After a short discussion they always agree they are on social. (I can assure you they are not on your website).
So What Do You Need to Do?
The tipping point has been reached and the digital marketing perfect storm is such that now is time for radical change.
What Do You Need to Do Now?
First off you need to get your salesteam on social. Please don’t nickel and dime this with a Hubspot article but get a third party in. This is about survival after all.
Two things to ask from your social selling trainer is “what ROI will people commit to?” and that social selling should be a process, and not tied to a platform. LinkedIn-only training will leave money on the table and put you under competitive pressure. Don’t forget to check out any social selling “expert” out on social before you hire them. One client said, after firing their “expert”. We thought he knew about social media as he had a beard. Don’t be that guy.
The other solution that also fails is buying a tool and hoping that will change something. It doesn’t. Social Selling is a change of mindset, it was Grady Booch who said “A fool with a tool, is still a fool”.
Why the question on ROI? Social selling should be self financing. The level of inbound (a good measure (with revenue of closed business) if you are doing it right) and the deals you close should provide the funding to role out across the whole of sales.
Once you have run a pilot and proved social is the transformation and it’s creating you incremental revenue you need to take your success to the C-Suite and get them to share and understand the way forward. We would recommend an exercise based day session should get the whole team onboard. At the end of that day the C-Suite should clearly see social as the priority. Then you can start on the rest of the business.
The “issue” with social selling is that it’s just a random act of social. Now you need to link up all of the social across the business; marketing, customer service , Human Resources (HR), Procurement, Supply Chain, Finance and use the same techniques to make them more effective and efficient by using social.
At a previous company we got employee efficiencies of 20%. Who wouldn’t want an additional 20% of people at no cost? At this previous company, our social roll out meant we had an additional 27,000 staff at zero additional cost.
Related: The Future Of Everything That Matters In Digital Marketing
There are also other spin off benefits like more accurate sales forecasts, Diversity and inclusion (D&I) benefits such as maternity returns, HR benefits like making the employee experience better through better onboarding and the sales, the finance benefit of having salespeople contribute to the business quicker, and increase the win rate ratio. All of these are business benefits with a return on investment in their own right. Only you know what these metrics are for your business, but you have to admit they are pretty compelling making you “better” and more profitable.
If you are finding that marketing isn’t working, maybe it’s time to change?