Social selling versus cold calling

Social Selling: the process of developing and building long term relationships as part of the sales process.

Cold Calling: making an unsolicited visit or telephone call to someone, in an attempt to sell goods or services.

I’m going to be bold here and say… I’ve fallen OUT of love with the cold-calling process and fallen IN love with the internet. Well, more precisely, social selling.

It’s not the phone I don’t like.

From 20 years of working with businesses, I know how relentless the lead generation process is. In that time, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to nudge prospects through the sales process.

Cold calling

Let me take you back… When I started out in the business, the internet didn’t exist. I was given a Yellow Pages, a telephone headset and told to ‘crack on’.

In 1997 I was “The Fastest Dialler In The West”.

I was making over 200 cold calls per day.

It was easy back then. I was able to book appointment after appointment. And I loved the buzz and excitement of getting the sale.

As the digital age dawned, the customer became much harder to reach. And more savvy.

The rejections became more and more frequent. In response, I committed to my craft and learned tactics for ‘getting past the gatekeeper’ and ‘overcoming objections’. Eventually, I became disillusioned with the process and started looking for a better way.

My career in sales was not wasted. Yes, the channels had changed but the principles remained the same.

• To be helpful
• To be useful
• To be solution focused

The buying decision

At any one time only 3% of your market are actually making a decision to buy.

Even if you CAN get past the ‘gatekeeper’ and have a conversation with a busy buyer, do you know how many calls you will have to make before you ‘stumble upon someone’ who is in the market right now?

When I am called from a cold caller, even if I am actually in the market for buying that product or service, I still tell them I’m NOT interested.

Here’s why.

I don’t want to be rushed or pushed into making the WRONG buying decision.

I want to take the time to do my research first.

I don’t know the person that is calling me out of the blue, trying to sell me something. And I don’t trust them any more than I would trust someone knocking on my door trying to sell me new windows.

I know so many companies who still have a sales force of salespeople. Bums on seats, call-time targets, conversion targets. Yes naturally, if you do enough of it, it will work. But it’s expensive and if you can convince a prospect to become a customer over the phone, how easy will it be for one of your competitors to do the same?

Social selling

The benefits of having a social sales lead generation process are really easy to measure.

Here are a few:

• You spend more time talking to qualified prospects that you know need your product or service, rather than the ‘hit and hope’ mentality of trying to get someone on the phone.
• You have a method for staying top-of-mind with your prospects.
• You educate and inform while they are in their consideration stage.
• When they are ready to buy, they know who you are, what you do and what you offer.
• You are able to plan your pipeline more effectively. Some of what we teach at Get Your Marketing is a numbers game. Highly targeted, yes! But the gold is in the Follow-Up.
• You are able to build an ENGAGED network of your ideal prospects.
• You can have a two-way conversation with them, tapping into their changing wants and needs.
• You are able to develop content that helps them to stay ahead. Why would they go anywhere else?

Let’s be clear. I’m not saying that social selling is a silver bullet and doesn’t require a lot of hard work.

But it IS more effective.

Social selling and the Cog™ System

At Get Your Marketing we blend over 20 years of sales and online marketing experience with exciting new technology and marketing automation.

We advocate that you develop a social selling process that profiles your ideal customers and uses attraction methods to attract them to your product or service. This can be through a combination of content marketing, paid social advertising, LinkedIn outreach tactics, and traditional offline marketing.  

I developed my own bespoke methodology AND the 3 Step COG™ System.

Using the COG™ System, we have significantly grown the client base of ALL the businesses we work with.

Here is an outline of the Cog™ System

Step 1:  We crack your Online Marketing Code, then create your lite Lead Generation System (LGS) bespoke for your business

Step 2: We optimise and scale up the lite LGS to your full power system

Step 3: We implement your Online Marketing Code to ramp up traffic through your LGS to grow your business

Our bespoke methodology takes an engineering approach to marketing and we fully test every single aspect of the Lead Generation System that we create for you.

As a result, you will know some key metrics:

• How many people you need to reach out to.
• How many prospects you need to have conversations with before you can convert to a sale.
• The cost of acquisition for a customer with our Customer Acquisition System.

If you want to find out more about our COG™ system, click here.

Remember, you’re not really selling.

You’re solving their problems.