Five challenges your business has and who you should fire for not solving them!

A couple of years ago we collated our findings from all of our customer conversations in order to find whether there was a pattern in what companies were telling us, and there was!

There were 5 challenges that were by far and away the most common challenges that were being faced.

• Pipeline & revenue - even companies which were very good at converting conversations in to business were having significant problems starting conversations with prospects and target companies.
• Visibility - most organisations seemed to struggle to be seen as they were vying with their competitors for share of people minds & hearts.
• Credibility - whilst they produced beautiful collateral they were rarely seen as experts or the “go to” company in their sector- they didn’t appear “better” then their competition.
• Employer of choice - often they thought they were a great company to work for but they still struggled to recruit talent and often lost great candidates to their competitors late int he recruitment process.
• Shared sense of purpose - people within the business often felt like they were alone, they didn’t see that they were part of something bigger and 2 years of working remotely meant people didn’t see themselves as part of a team.

Obviously, each of these challenges has knock-on effects on the other challenges but these were the key points that most businesses seems to be able to relate to.

Socialising your organisation solves all of these challenges, but it requires a major rethink of what social media is and how you should implement it. Social media is NOT a marketing-led broadcast channel. Marketing providing content for people to share and instructing them to “go and like the company posts” achieves NOTHING whatsoever. There are a number of reasons for this but you can take my word that this is not a successful for organisations.

Employee advocacy, is rather like marketing-led broadcast activities. It’s not quite the abject failure that broadcast marketing is but it absolutely fails to acknowledge the fundamental try which is this. You can’t be bothered to listen to your best friend telling you about how their new {insert whatever product or service you like} solves major challenges facing organisations…so if you can’t be bothered to listen to your best friend pitch their business why would you listen to me pitch mine? Employee advocacy is more effective than broadcast marketing but it still fails. We have never seen an employee advocacy tool/strategy/agency that has created something which provides any more than an uplift in vanity metrics.

If you really want to solve these 5 challenges you need to encourage the people within your organisation to be social. They need to build relationship with people they want to influence, but they can’t do this by talking about your product, that only serves to turn people off. They need to talk about things that matter on a human scale. Imagine you have gone to a bar to meet someone (perhaps on a date)…if you want the time to be entertaining fruitful, and lead someone where long-term you need to talk about who you are and discover who they are - talk about dogs, kids, holidays, music, food…whatever creates relationship. If you start that first date by saying “let me tell you why our email marketing tools is so innovative…” it is likely to also be the last date.

The reason for this is that people don’t care about your product and even if they really NEED your product they have no reason to listen to you speak (because everyone has a market leading, highly efficient, solution based blah blah blah) and no reason to believe you when they do (“trust me, I’m a doctor” doesn’t cut it int he modern world because we have all been lied to too many times). You MUST build human connections with people.

And you must be in it for the long haul. That doesn’t meant hat you won’t get results immediately but research shows that 95% of people are not ready to buy now. The harder you push that 95% the less likely they are to listen to you when they are ready.

95% of people are not ready to buy now

The skill is in staying visible, relevant and keeping the audience engaged until they are ready to buy - at which point you will be the “obvious” choice.

All of this seems pretty straightforward, and it is, but that doesn’t mean that you are actually doing is…because you’re not.

With every client of ours we hale put in place a way of tracking the results they get for their social programmes. Yes we measure like, comments, shares and views…but only as a leading (or early) indicator that people are doing the right things. We have to track the money

Likes and views don’t pay the bills, sales do. Connecting your posts and network growth to opportunities and revenue is doable, but requires thoughts diligence and commitment. It is however, worth it.

If your agency says “we create posts for you and they have generated x views which helps to boost brand awareness” sack them.

When your agency says “we create posts for you and they have generated x views which helps to boost brand awareness” sack them. When people tell you that views mean that prospects will be more responsive when they receive an email, sack them for that too.

Your CEO, CFO, RevOps director, sales director and bank manager have no interest in likes/comment/views they have an interest in conversations, proposals, forecast and revenue…that’s what you need to be connecting to your activities.

It is about time that businesses grew-up and realised that playing on social in the hope that it will generate some magic benefit is verging on delusional behaviour. "Hope" has never been an effective strategy and if you are hoping that a prospect will "ride in on a white steed" and hand you that life-saving purchase order because they saw a Tweet of yours is...well, you know what it is.

You can solve this and social probably is the answer, but you need to run the social strategy and development of your business with the same diligence you would run any other strategic and transformational initiative.