Recently, I spoke with a friend of mine who is an insurance salesman. He predominately sells life insurance and property and casualty insurance. When we talked at a local bar, he confided in me that for the first time since the financial crisis in 2008, he is not going to hit his sales goal.

He talked about how he has a solid client base. However, every year he loses life clients to lapses and old age, or property and casualty customers that change policies based on $5/month difference.

In the past, he has always been able to replace this yearly runoff. However, this year, he’s had trouble replacing these customers. He complained about his inability to get prospects to talk with him.

“No one picks up the phone when I call, and no one ever calls me back.” He said. “When I email people, they rarely write me back – even if I’ve been referred to them by someone we both know!” He lamented.

After a couple of beers, he said “I don’t understand – I’m doing what I’ve always done.”

“That’s the problem,” I interjected “you’re doing things the way you’ve always done them.”

I’m writing this piece because my friend isn’t the only one having troubles making his sales numbers this year. I’ve been hearing this same story a lot in the past few months.

So what’s the solution? You have to modernize your sales toolbox.

Here’s how to do it:

1)     Have a strategy. Many individuals (and even some companies) don’t have a strategic plan for sales. They just target people in their territory that they get from a list they bought, a tool their company uses, or folks they get as referrals. Are these the RIGHT people to target? Maybe … maybe not. The product you’re selling may not be a fit depending on what life stage the person is in currently.

Here’s a quick way to create a strategy and go to market plan:

• First, define who your ideal customer is – who typically buys your products? Who is your product designed for?
• Next, segment your customers into different groups based on different behaviors like what type of products they typically purchase or where they are in the purchase journey.
• Then, find where they live and breathe and go there with messages that are tailored to their needs via channels where they spend their time. For example, if your target audience is recent college grads, are you going to more successful with direct mail or Snapchat? (Hint: You better start learning how to use Snapchat!)

2)     Remove cold calling and blast email from your toolbox. Notice I didn’t say remove calling and email. It’s the “cold” and “blast” adjectives that are the problem. You need to do research on your prospects before reaching out to them.

These two acquisition methods have declining in value for years, and a recent study by Baylor University showed that cold calling results in a meeting about 1% of the time. I read an article last week that touted the “success” a cold caller had by calling 1,250 people to get 18 meetings. That’s a 0.01% meeting rate!

3)     Add social media to your toolbox.  I get over a 50% meeting rate for some my clients using social media and social selling. Thus, at that rate, they have to reach out to 30 people on LinkedIn to get those same 18 meetings that the cold caller generated (and without annoying and alienating 1,232 other people to do it)!

Social media is also great for getting signals such as buying a home, birth of a child, getting married and switching jobs. These are big pivot points from a needs perspective, and you can get notified when your current and prospective customers hit one of these milestones.

4)     Personalize your outreach. In today’s world, it’s all about the customer experience. Everyone has bought from Amazon or Zappos or has used an American Express credit card or flown on Southwest Airlines. They know what great, personalized customer service looks like.

When you reach out to a customer via phone, email, social media or even by sky writing, if it’s the same generic message, you’ve lost most of them before you’ve started. Go to LinkedIn. Go to Twitter. Go to Facebook. You can find out an enormous amount information on a potential client, and it’s all free.

Use this information to tailor your message to that person. If you can’t think of a problem your prospect has that your product solves, then maybe you shouldn’t reach out to them.

5)     Tailor your message to the medium. Not only personalize the message to the individual, but to where it will be read as well. You wouldn’t use the same words in an email as you would in a face-to-face conversation. However, many business just cut and paste their direct mail pieces email into social media. Don’t be surprised when those messages don’t work! Direct mail and social media readers are different audiences, so the voice, tone and content need to be adjusted accordingly.

In addition, most emails and social media posts are now read on a mobile device, so when you are crafting your message, make sure it is in a short, easily-readable format. Tip: send emails and phone messages (and blog posts too if you are daring!) to your phone before you send them. Do you have to scroll and scroll and scroll to read it? Would a prospect actually scroll that much in an email from a stranger?

Conclusion

Add these tips to your toolbox, and you’ll be well on your way to hitting your sales goal for next year. Remember, you are not reinventing the wheel, you’re just moving the race track.

(Note: I’m happy to say that my friend has enrolled in some training that his company offers to help learn modern selling tools. He’s a great salesman so I’m confident he’ll hit his numbers next year.)

About the author

Robert Knop is Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping organizations accelerate new customer acquisition and increase client retention using digital strategy and social media. He’s a proud member of the Wave3 network of consultants, and always happy to talk strategy, digital and social selling. To learn more about how to evolve your marketing and sales approaches for the digital age, please fill out the form below:

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Photo: Tara Hunt

I recently attended the Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit (#DMFSToronto). Digital leaders from Citi, Facebook, Wells Fargo, MetLife, Allstate, Salesforce and more were there talking about what is working, not working and what is coming next within digital marketing for financial services.

5 accelerating trends:

1) It’s all about the data.

It has ALWAYS been about the data in digital marketing, but now with so many advancements in programmatic advertising, real-time media buying, CRM, data lake technology and data visualization services, it’s easier than ever to track results, test, learn and optimize your marketing efforts.

Hari Pillai from Invesco spoke on a panel about a struggle many companies have – being data rich, but knowledge poor. His keys to success were to create a strong infrastructure for your data, and an API to simply and effectively leverage your data, so you know where the customer is in the journey. In his words, “Data is the secret weapon to move the customer down the journey.”

2) Customers matter more than ever.

As we all know, the dynamic has flipped to a customer being in charge more than ever in the buying process. 57% of the purchase journey is done before a customer ever contacts a supplier per the CEB, so you need to listen to the key needs of your customers and figure out how to solve those needs.

Ramy Nassar from Architech had a great presentation about focusing on customer needs instead of financial products. My favorite line from his presentation was “Think about the need, not the transaction. No one wants to buy a mortgage, they want a house.”

3) Social will soon rule the world.

The typical North American adult checks social media 17 times a day. SEVENTEEN! That seemed high when I first heard it, but now that I think about my own daily habits, that seems a little low.

Combine that with the fact that cold calling and emailing response rates are hovering around 3-4%, and millennials preference for social as the #1 method of contact, and social will soon be taking over as the primary communication vehicle for marketing and sales.

Any financial professional or salesperson that does not have a complete LinkedIn profile, which is optimized for search will slowly begin to lose their client base.

I spoke on the value of social selling to financial institutions in this new digital world, and how to use the power of social media to generate leads and sales.

4) Wearables are not going away.

If you are looking for the next big thing, wearables are it. How long is it until that Fitbit we use on a daily basis to track our steps starts feeding that information to doctors? Insurance companies? Retail stores? It’s a matter of time until everyone knows everything about everyone else. Enjoy your 15 remaining minutes of privacy! And be prepared to have everything measured and managed in real-time.

Rachid Molinary of Banco Popular de Puerto Rico presented an informative use case on how they quickly integrated mobile banking into wearable technology. Now you can check your BPPR account balance in a matter of seconds on your Apple Watch. What was even more impressive was the processes and systems they have put in place to bring this new tech to market in a short period of time.

5) The pace of change is fast (and will get faster).

Mitch Joel gave a fantastic keynote about how fast the world is changing, and how every company thinks they are being innovative. However, to truly create innovation is to “create something that the market did not know that it needed, that then becomes adopted (and paid for) in a way in which we could have never imagined our lives without it.” Not many companies are doing this today.

Erin Elofson from Facebook spoke about their roadmap, and how VR is playing a huge role in their future. To get a small glimpse of their VR capabilities, check out the first film shot with the new Facebook Surround 360 camera. This is just the snowflake on the tip of the iceberg.

So, how will you and your company react to this new digital world in financial services? These changes are coming sooner than anyone expected. Those that adapt quickly, will thrive, those that don’t will struggle to survive.

Related articles

• The value of social selling
• Invalid traffic becoming a bigger problem in programmatic advertising
• 4 steps to social media content success

Photo: Alberto Garcia

When I was younger, I loved my cassette tapes. I refused to move over to CDs for the longest time. For a while, I missed out on some good music because record companies eventually starting distributing only the biggest sellers via cassette, and I loved my alternative music. I finally broke down, bought a CD player, and caught up with the rest of the world.

This is how the world of sales is now. A lot of individuals and companies are holding on to their cold calling and blast emailing to reach potential clients because they have worked historically – even though success rates for these methods decline each year. They are missing out on a lot of opportunities as a result.

When was the last time you answered a phone call from a number you didn’t know? I know when my phone starts ringing, the first thing I do is look at the number. If I don’t recognize it, then it goes straight to voice mail. For emails, 90% of the time, it gets deleted.

So, how you get in front of those potential clients nowadays? What is the CD that you need to start using? The answer is social selling – using social media to get closer to your clients, strengthen relationships, build trust and drive sales.

First Steps

Although social selling is a relatively new concept, some brands are already successfully leveraging it to drive business. Personally, I mostly use and recommend LinkedIn because it’s the most used social network for business purposes.

On LinkedIn, it’s important to have a profile that is complete (picture, summary, experience, more). It’s also important to connect with the right people and engage with content.

If you do nothing else, those steps are a good start because as a result, you can be found on search engines (LinkedIn has great SEO), you can stay top-of-mind, and you can establish yourself as a thought leader. How do these things help you? If your current and potential clients see enough content – which originates from you – that is important and relevant to them, then you are no longer a sales rep. At that point, you are a trusted partner with your connections, which is the ideal relationship – both of you helping each other. I have seen this approach generate leads and sales.

The Next Level

To get even more out of LinkedIn, you need to go a step further down the customer journey. This step involves the Sales Navigator product and more customized content.

With Sales Navigator, you can send InMails (sending messages to people you don’t know), do advanced searches, save accounts and leads, and get a steady stream of news and information about your connections and potential clients sent to you.

The content at this level, is as 1:1 as you can make it, and is through LinkedIn messaging. At this point, you’ve got a good idea of your key clients’ needs because you’ve been reading what they post, you know which content they engage with of yours, and you have a ton of information on their profile. So, hopefully, you have your clients segmented into groups, so now can you write messages for each of these segments, and then customize for the individual. Is this hard to do at scale? It’s not easy, but the success rate is so much higher vs. cold calling and blast emailing, that it’s absolutely worth it. (And don’t forget, it’s much higher value to your client!)

Why Does Social Selling Work?

In addition to not knowing who is calling or emailing, think about just the sheer VOLUME of phone calls and emails you get at work during a day. In my last corporate role, for example, I received about 30 calls and 300 emails per day.

How can you cut through all that noise with an introductory call or email? Your product and messaging don’t matter because they have little chance of ever being seen/heard!

Now, think about how many LinkedIn messages you receive in a day – is it one? Maybe one per week? I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, and I don’t think I’ve ever received more than 10 in a day. My average is one. So, 30 phone calls or 300 emails vs. one LinkedIn message – which one do you think will actually get read by your intended audience? Personally, I read 100% of the LinkedIn messages and InMails I receive. Compare that to your current email open rates.

Now, I’m not suggesting you spam the heck out of all your potential and current clients on LinkedIn. Quite the contrary. As I mentioned above, content on LinkedIn needs to be targeted and relevant to your audience. Do your research first.

Stop! I don’t have time for this!

The push back I always get about social selling is that is takes too much time. My response is: would you rather spend 8 hours calling 100 people with a non-targeted, generic message, or 4 hours doing research and sending out customized, relevant LinkedIn messages that are targeted to your audience? With which group will you be able to have more informed, personalized conversations? Which one do you think will generate leads with a higher propensity to transact?

Finally, think about the opportunity lost if you are not social selling. Let’s use the financial services vertical as an example. According to multiple surveys, a strong majority of financial advisors are using LinkedIn for business purposes. So, if you are a financial advisor, and you are NOT using LinkedIn as part of your sales process, you are in the minority now. You are still listening to cassettes while your competitors are listening to CDs.

Key takeaways

• Cold calling and blast emailing are becoming less and less effective
• Social selling is a win-win for both the client and the sales representative
• There are multiple levels of social selling, but the key is to start now – every little bit helps

Today, I’m undertaking one of the most exciting (and scariest) endeavors of my life – I’m opening my own company.

I’ve been helping companies get closer to their customers, build trust and drive sales using social media in the corporate world for many years now, and now I’m really excited to be doing the same from a consulting perspective.

I’ll be providing tips at both the company and individual levels to help you build your business, set up a corporate social selling program, determine what kind of content to use, work with compliance effectively, build advocacy both internally and externally for your program, and train your team.

Big thanks to everyone that encouraged me to take this plunge!

Best,
Robert Knop