Implisit, an Information Technology and Services company acquired this year by Salesforce, analyzed the pipeline of hundreds of companies across the globe to determine which channels deliver the highest conversion rates, and the results may surprise you.
At Sales for Life, we field thousands of discovery calls every year about social selling. And you might be surprised to learn that the most common question we get asked is NOT, “Can we measure social selling?”
It’s often said that what you can’t measure, you can’t manage and govern. It couldn’t be more true for social selling programs.
As a sales operations or sales enablement leader, are you constantly struggling with these two problems in your business?
The incorporation of social selling into any organization’s culture can be challenging. While enablement, marketing and sales leaders inherently realize this, sometimes what we don’t truly know can hurt us in the long run.
While social selling may feel similar to launching other corporate initiatives, beyond this launch phase you will find unique challenges that you may not have prepared for.
One of the toughest parts of in sales is qualifying interest of buyers. Most of us become excited at even the littlest sign of interest from a prospect. Go on, you can admit it. It happens to me, too.
If someone makes a nice comment about what I do, tweets, sends a LinkedIn message, leaves a voicemail, sends an e-mail, etc. it gets me excited. I know I’m not alone in this. Let’s face it – we confuse conversation with red-hot interest.
However, qualifying buyers is something we’re not doing enough.
Every time I write anything about cold calling, I seem to upset a lot of people. But I hope you see the reality of these numbers. I can’t verify that cold calling works only 3% of the time, but what I can tell you is that it’s effectiveness in reaching people is shrinking. I’m not the one reporting this; the data is from ALL of us who grind daily in an effort to talk to more potential buyers to serve them better.
I believe wholeheartedly that sales professionals have the best of intentions when wanting to speak with, and ultimately do business with, their prospects.
So why is it that we are largely brushed off and ignored by prospects?
Let’s call it the way it is, prospects ignore us and when they do speak with us, they’re initially guarded. It seems there is an air of mistrust in conversations. This doesn’t happen all of the time, but by and large, I’m sure you’d agree.
How many times has this happened to you? I’m guessing this is the norm more often than we care to admit.
As Social Selling grows and enters the sales process of organizations, the most natural questions that emerge pertain to metrics. Sales is used to measuring everything and social is no different.
With some prospects, you can give them all the most logical, most emotional, most persuasive arguments in the world about what you sell and they’re still not going to budge an inch. These are the people who want to see the numbers. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, nothing can really match one really well-supported number.
Sales for Life was founded with one goal – to become the most trusted sales resource for its customers. During our journey, we’ve had the privilege of serving thousands of sales professionals and leaders around the world, from start-ups to Fortune 50 corporations.
