Why outbound prospecting is a must - why social selling gets you 9% return on cold outreach and 33.6% conversion to next action is your best option

I was reading a Linkedin post the other day and it offered up this research, a Linkedin poll is not an exact science, but it gives a level of direction. 

"Pre-covid, the fish may have been jumping into your boat.

In 2023 you will have to go fishing if you want to eat."

In this case, people are saying that outbound will find you the most leads, and here is some more research. 

This research from the Bridge Group, shows that as the deal value goes up, the reliance on marketing goes down. Again, as the deal size goes up, the need for cold outbound becomes more and more a necessity. 

But what type of cold outbound should you be undertaking?

Let's look at the data, cold calling vs our social selling benchmark

Here at DLA Ignite, we are always wanting to push forward the boundaries of sales, so we decided to put cold calling and it's results, head to head with social selling and create a benchmark (and business case) for social selling.

So we took a team of "cold callers" cross trained them on social selling and here are the results.

It's worth shouting out the team, Alex, Jordan and Jensen and they work for a company called Supero.

If you want to hear the team talk about it then watch our digital download here. Don't believe me? Please check the team out on social and ask them about the results!

The results with cold calling

When the team were cold calling, this is, before we trained them on social selling, they did whatever they could in terms of warming up the calls with emails or webinars and got about 2 calls a week. As with any cold call, your job is to take the call to a next action, which might be a demo, discovery call and they averaged 0.3 of these calls.

Anyway, you will have your own figures for cold calling in your business and you will know what they are. 

The results for social selling

What is social selling?

Our definition is

"Using your presence and behaviour on social media, to build influence make connections, grow relationships and trust. Which leads to conversation and commercial interaction".

The team are getting a 9% response (on average) to cold outreach, so for every 100 people they ask for a call, 9 say "yes". This figure is an average, so we think somebody with intermediate skills or an expert should be getting a higher figure should be getting a larger response. In fact, our benchmark for an expert is 13%, but I want to keep figures realistic and conservative. 

Now with every "call" based on cold outreach there has to be some sort of next action. For your own company, ywill know what your next action is, it will be a demo, a discovery call or something. 

We have found that 9% of the people (on average) that have agreed to a call based on cold outreach, 33.6% are converting to a next action.  

Which is exponential growth when compared to cold calling. 

The team is averaging 11 calls / meetings per week, this week, they have got 24 meetings. But the average is 11, again, let's keep the figures realistic and conservative. 

Just think about that being rolled out across your sales team(s). 

It's time to work smarter not harder. 

I need to say, before I get any comments. 

There is no spam and no automation!

This is NOT connect and pitch!

It does NOT use inmails, which are spam. 

In fact the program is now back and certified by the Institute of sales professionals (ISP). 

Let's look at this with a business case

Let's take a sales team of 10.

We know that the average person can grow their network by 3,000 people a year. Let's assume of these 50% are going to buy, this gives you a network growth of 1,500 per person per year.

If you have 10 salespeople that gives you a total addressable market (TAM) of 15,000 new people to have conversations with.

With our, Institute of sales professionals (ISP) backed, social selling methodology, (note: we cannot vouch for anybody else) based on our measured benchmark, you should be able to get, on average, meetings with 9% of this TAM of 15,000. This means your sales team can have 1350 new conversations every year. 

(As we know, conversations create sales.)

As we discussed above, with any cold outreach the objective is to get a next action and using our social selling methodology and using our measured benchmark we can get 33.6% of 9% of our TAM to a next action, which is 454.

Let assume you win 1 in 3, that's 151 new sales a year using social selling, average order value (AOV) $100,000, that's 

$15,120,000 = $15 million

That's an additional $15 million that you are missing by cold calling rather than social selling.

or $1,26 million you miss every month you delay moving from cold calling to social selling.

Of course, if you have more than 10 sales people, you can scale the figures up. 

Want to know more about social selling, check out my new book

"social selling techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition".

In this brand new edition, I have updated all the text, I have also got 15 practitioners, so people who are doing this already to explain how they are get (practical) business benefit. From the CEO that has been running a digital business for over 18 months to sales leaders who use social selling every day. 

Articles on how these business have and are implementing digital, from Mercer, Telstra Purple, Ring Central, Cyberhawk, Namos, Ericsson, Crux Consulting, DLA Ignite and more.

What does Mark Schaefer, Marketing guru think of the book "social selling - techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition"? watch the video here

It's available on Amazon worldwide. Link to Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here.