Michelle Laterman is head of marketing at MBJ London. In this article, she explores whether a strong social media presence or old fashioned hustling is more successful in sealing a sales deal.
Social selling was a 2015 buzzword that appealed to startups and entrepreneurs. It felt comfortable, familiar and more relaxed than its stressful older brother, sales.
Sales is a numbers game. Picking up the phone – a device rarely used for voice calls – sending emails, creating proposals/pitches and taking meetings. Sales is about getting a volume of deals into the pipeline, then getting a decision.
Social media, on the other hand, is about building brand awareness, increasing web traffic, generating leads and creating touch-points between your brand and customers. Somewhere along the way these two channels merged and blurred, creating ‘social selling’.
Returns
Social selling advocates argue it creates value through the buyer’s journey. Sales professionals dismiss anything that doesn’t get deals on the board. A Tweet isn’t a substitute for a phone call or email.
A sales consultant I know met with a SaaS startup, to mentor them on how to create a sales campaign. He asked them what they’d done so far.
“Well, we scheduled two weeks of social updates and pushed our landing pages live,” the co-founder replied.
No sales data. No phone calls. No meetings scheduled, for a product with a two-to-three-month decision-making process.
Even social selling “consultants” and advocates are vague about quantifying results, or only suggest it contributes between 2% to 5% of your total sales in your first year. And the other 98-95%? For startups with a nine-to-12-month runway, banking on social as a sales channel is an awfully big gamble.
Consumer brands are different. Social drives sales. No one would deny the value (despite Facebook, and soon Twitter and Instagram becoming pay-to-play environment), but when it comes to B2B startups; is this the best use of their time?
Embrace the hustle
For most entrepreneurs, particularly those who sell to businesses, the hustle involves a combination of old-school sales tactics and modern digital marketing. Digital should always have a key role. Buyers search for new products and services through Google and social networks.
A well-designed website, with social, content and email marketing playing a supporting role, helps get prospects into the top of the sales funnel. How do you get prospects all the way through to the close?
Sales for startups can feel like being in The Hunger Games. You don’t get many second chances. Businesses that take the hustlers approach to sales live longer than those who hope sales will come to them.
Sometimes all it takes a few key meetings with brands that will open doors. Everyone will take notice if you shoot an arrow at a roast pig in a crowded room (in other words: do the unexpected). Impress enough prospects to ensure a few sign up as clients. Some will, most won’t, but you’ll get enough revenue to keep moving forward.
Once a few do, you will have enough ‘social proof’ to convince others – ideally in a market that is self-referencing – to sign up. Keep repeating this process until you have sufficient recurring revenue to stay alive; then you can start thinking long term. In essence, that’s sales and for startups.
Moment of truth
It sounds easy. It isn’t, which is why social selling seems comfortable and easy. Sales involves a moment of truth. A moment when you hold your breath and wait, not unlike the feeling you get just before a rollercoaster drops.
The more experienced you are, the better supported, the more a prospect understands the value your business creates (again, well-designed websites, with great copy, images, eBooks and other useful pieces of information all help) the easier this moment becomes.
But, still, this is the most important part of this process. You win or lose a prospect in the space of a conversation. J C Carelson, a CIA officer, turned author, found her previous career had a lot more in common with getting ahead in the business world than she expected.
Human intelligence depends on sources (those inside terrorist cells, rogue governments, drugs cartels) giving spy agencies information, usually for money. This is contingent on officers, like Carelson, winning pitches.
After the moment of truth, true hustlers know they need to follow up, to close the deal. None of this can be done on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other social network. It involves human interactions. Listening and asking questions.
Entrepreneurs can hide behind profiles and scheduling tools; or they can get this week’s digital marketing sorted, which supports a sales campaign, then get back to the business of making money.