Everyone loves a good underdog story.
It’s part of the reason why the NFL is so popular. A team and its passionate fan base can quickly go from bottom feeder to champion. Look no further than the Atlanta Falcons, which, after a few offseason tweaks, went from missing the playoffs last season – a season that also featured a six-game losing streak – to playing in the Super Bowl this Sunday.
The underdog nature of the Atlanta Falcons’ improvement is an inspirational story for salespeople who aim to rise from the ashes and achieve goals relatively quickly.
If you find yourself struggling to hit your goals, social selling may be the answer: 72.6% of salespeople who use social selling as a part of their sales process outperformed their sales peers who didn’t.
To inspire you to start your turnaround, we found two sales professionals and one sales leader who utilized social selling to, like the Atlanta Falcons, push through a stretch of stagnancy and achieve success.
The Social Selling Split Test
While managing his sales team, Scott Logan was experiencing a period of stunted growth. He identified that the primary reason his team was failing to deliver results from email outreach was their inability to reach and connect with the right decision makers.
He conducted some research and discovered social selling. After some extensive studying, he decided to test social selling using an AB split test. Half of his team members were trained on social selling and the other half remained unchanged.
The results?
The social selling portion of his team outsold the others by 160%. Nine months after he transitioned his entire team to social selling, his team boasted 215% more revenue.
A Relocated Sales Strategy
Darrel Griffin used a combination of cold calling and email prospecting, achieving moderate success. He recognized that inefficiency and time management were his primary problem areas, so when he and his family relocated to Australia, he knew he needed to shake things up and leave his old sales tactics behind.
Darrel reorganized his schedule to emphasize networking. He budgeted time to read and react to posts, identify professionals in target markets, and congratulate connections on their work anniversaries, promotions, etc. He took these actions with the hope that he would have a more engaged network and emerge as a premier voice within his field.
He did just that.
After a year of implementing the new practices, Darrel generated 42% of his leads directly from his social selling activity.
Darrel eventually went on to form a social selling consultancy called Social4Sales, where he helps sales reps and managers transition to social selling.
From Buying Lists to Building Relationships
Eric Mitchell was working as a sales rep for a cloud-based inventory management company and he was struggling with his sales approach. He was buying lists and then cold calling his way through the list, hoping to eventually call the right decision maker at the right company, which was rarely the case.
Desperate for a change in methodology, Eric wanted to find a sales process that allowed him to make use of technology. This led him to social selling.
He was immediately impressed by the impact social selling had on his ability to cultivate relationships with prospects. Gone were the awkward, one-sided cold calls. Instead he was conducting mutually-beneficial sales conversations.
Eric didn’t abolish the phone altogether. He did, however, mandate that before he got on the phone with a prospect he needed to be prepared to lead with insights. Which was made possible by using social media for research.
If you’re stuck in a rut and are looking to make an upward push like the Atlanta Falcons, follow the lead of Scott Logan, Darrel Griffin, and Eric Mitchell. Find a way to fit social selling practices into your schedule so that you can gradually do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. You don’t need to be perfect to make a run at President’s club. You just need to be devoted to improvement.
Ready to learn more? Download our Social Selling Index Kit. It has everything you need to better understand, measure, and improve your sales effectiveness.
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