The mightiness of being pro-active

Last week I blogged about my +30 meetings with CxO's and Sales VP's and their observations about the role of social selling in complex B2B sales. One key observation is that the more complex the sales case, the more important are consultative/solution selling skills - and the less is the use of social selling. It could be used more, but that's worth another blog. Continuing my observations on those meetings, and my own experience of selling to CxO's and VP's, I am concerned about the reactiveness of B2B sales force.

In complex B2B selling, you changes of winning are 15% if you hear of customer first time when they send you RFP. So, if you rely on inbound marketing only - the power of buying has completely transferred to customers some experts say - how do you ever get involved early enough? What ever happened to being very proactive with your customers? Human-to-human is still powerful.

If you are not proactive at all, relying only on inbound marketing and social selling, you end up being in competitive bidding in almost every case. The less proactivity other sales people have, the better position you have to get involved in very early relevant dialogue with customers - when they possibly haven’t even realized they have a problem or unrecognized potential (which means that at this point they have not searched for on-line content nor being recognized by inbound marketing processes). 

Don't get me wrong, I am very ‘pro' social selling, inbound marketing and especially better alignment with sales and marketing. What I am 'not pro' of, is the simplification that inbound marketing and social selling solves all your sales funnel challenges - just create interesting content and customers will come. Life rarely is 'either-or', in most cases it is 'both-and’ and same applies to sales. The concern is, do sales people have now a new reason for not contacting actively and meeting with customers? Now, those meetings can also be virtual - which is often case in international business particularly - and there are multiple techniques to make virtual meetings even more interactive that just talking over Skype. 

So, cold contacting is dead - but what is cold? And how well can you use LinkedIn for proactive contacting? Using people references and your own network to connect to new people is not cold. It does takes effort to use your LinkedIn network and connect first to 1st level contacts to find out how well they know the person you want to talk to - and to my observation sales people could use the power of personal references much more effectively. 

My own experience actively using LinkedIn for this purpose, particularly to connect to CxO/VP level people, is that it takes checking with 3-5 1st level contacts to find out a person who really knows my ‘target contact’. Over the last 3 months I have contacted +60 CxO’s and Sales VP’s, and out of them, and so far 3 have declined to discuss. For each contact I have done research, had a proper reason to contact, crafted a relevant message and individual call script and so on. Yes, I could have done a lot of social selling and blogging and LinkedIn comments with same time amount, so it’s choice. I have chosen to use the same platform in different way - successfully. Is this social selling or old-school, I don’t know. But it is effective. 

So, Sales Directors: while social selling is effective how do you keep your sales force also being pro-active?