The big change: From cold calling to social selling

Since the first time I learned about the concept of social selling, I knew this was going to change the way B2B selling works forever. For us at the Euromoney group, we started with a couple of sales teams in some of the LinkedIn Sales tools about 9 months ago, and we have been working hard since to reshape the way we do sales ever since. But the path is slow and rocky...

The shift to social selling is a lot harder than I thought. Traditional B2B sales has always been very focused on cold calling. People will do 50-100 calls a day and they will have an effectiveness rate in terms of successful contacts. Some of these calls will lead to opportunities, and some will get to become clients. It was a simple math formula people used for decades. The more calls, the more opportunities, the more clients.

The world of B2B is a little bit more complicated now than it was before. First of all, it has been demonstrated that people do their own research before getting any kind of contact with a sales person. Second, people don't really use work phones so much anymore (some companies have even removed them), and others don't ever answer their landlines. Even worse, some people get very annoyed when they get an unrequested call, which has the completely opposite effect. Identifying the right person to speak to is not easy, and even less when there's a lot of concern about people's security, data privacy, etc. So how are the sales teams supposed to sell in 2016?

The answer is social selling. It's a new way to engage with your potential buyers through social networks, building relationships and getting their trust. It is then that they will agree to have a conversation with you.

But it's far from being straightforward. When you try giving a social selling tool to a traditional sales person, they use it as a large database to identify and try to contact users. But the approach to social selling takes more time and effort than the traditional cold calling. With social selling tools, you can look for the right lead, what they have done in the past, what they are interested in, what they admire, where they studied, and who they are connected to. It then becomes a much more strategic role, where the social seller needs to analyse all the data and create a strategy of how it's the best way to engage with this person, and create an action plan.

This requires a different set of skills and it can be quite frustrating for experienced sales people. As a rule of thumb, most millenials will have a natural talent to doing this job. After all, they group up with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but anyone else can learn how to use social selling to their advantage.

Some tips for successful social selling

As part of our experience, I decided to capture some of the key points that I have gathered in these 8 months. It all starts with doing the right searches and identifying the right people. For this, you need to apply some knowledge of targeting which is much more of a marketing concept than a sales one, so I suggest you ask for help. This includes job titles, industries, keywords, etc.

The next step is to build your online presence and personal brand. It is very important to complete your profile, have an appropriate picture, make sure you have all your connections. Furthermore, decide what you want to share, how this is relevant to what you do, and engage with the content other people are sharing by leaving comments.  And finally, it's interacting with the potential leads through the social channel using relevant content that will help you have a first approach to them.

The hardest part of the job is trying to analyse their behaviour and provide relevant content through the social channels, because sales people never had this before, so it's a major change in the role. Social networks and Google give you access to incredible amount of information about everyone. You can identify someone's political views, interests, places they have been, points of view on specific topics, where they have worked, where they studied, what kind of events they attend, etc. As much as this seems creepy, the better you understand them, the more effective you can be in approaching them.

This is probably too much information for many, but for the social seller it's a treasure if they know where and how to look at it. Identifying the right channel of engagement, the right message, at the right moment, is the key to developing relationships in the era of social selling. Providing value to the potential customer through sharing a relevant insight, content or point of view about a specific topic they are interested in, will help create the relationship overtime.

The other big change is in understanding the sales cycle, and that building this relationship will take time and patience. Most sales people that contact me over LinkedIn are so pushy about trying to get me on a phone call without any understanding of who I am, what I need or what I am interested in.

Social selling is a slow process that will help you build long term relationships with the clients at the time when they are ready to buy. You can provide them with useful content to help guide them through the buying process, but the traditional phone harassing will not get you the kind of relationship you need.

In summary, social selling will bring amazing results to those organizations who know how to leverage it and how to do it right, but trying to do your traditional sales strategies into this new channel is not going to work. This new approach requires people to develop other skills, processes and a deeper understanding of the client. It also needs to build relationships through content and ensure you build trust over time without pressuring the client being too pushy.

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