How We Reached Conversation Creation At Scale
When it Began
Almost four years ago I decided to leave the corporate world after a 23 year career in MarTech sales, where my last role’s were building a $22M ARR SaaS business within 4 years and leading a team of 40+ sales reps and leaders to transform their sales approach to one that was value based.
I experienced many different crises including the financial crisis, the oil crisis in the Middle East, and a military coup in one of my most successful regions. There is one fact above all else that ensured we won against the odds, and that’s pipeline development.
An activity that was becoming harder as each year flew by, despite our best efforts to maintain a relationship first strategy to pipeline development. And with a region spanning 103 countries ensuring focus locally and maintaining insightful dialog remotely was vital to our success.
I started Supero with one thing in mind, to bring my skills and experience to others. After more than 3 years of testing a variety of traditional outbound prospecting strategies, many of which don’t work anymore, I found one that not only works but can provide a consistent flow commercial conversations at scale, providing predictable pipeline development for organisations.
Traditional Prospecting Techniques Outdated
Our first year was the most challenging, as all of the techniques once trusted by me and my teams, no longer worked. Calling, emailing, events, sophisticated omni-channel experiences and webinar series that attracted large audiences about things they care about, but that engagement was not converting into commercial conversations.
We were lucky if we secured 1 or 2 meetings per month for our enterprise clients and 3 to 4 for our mid-market clients. Very few of which qualified as opportunities. We found the traditional concept of MQL and SQL to evaporate as conversion rates through each stage plummeted.
The Epiphany
Until, 2 years ago I bumped into an old friend of mine on LinkedIn, Adam Gray a Social Selling expert I worked with at Oracle back in 2014. We reminisced old times and I recalled how I still use some of the social selling tips he had given me back then, today.
A Light Bulb Moment
Traditional sales and marketing strategies for prospecting and developing demand no longer worked like they once did. What better way to scale commercial conversations than by replicating in-person networking, the most effective form of networking, but in a digital format, from the comfort of your home office and without expensive media, agency or event costs.
Taking Action
I put my team through the program, and we saw results within 4 weeks, signing our first new social selling client for 10 people. And the quote from the Head of Marketing was, “traditional B2B marketing efforts no longer work, we struggle to generate any new commercial conversations with our target audience, and therefore we’ve decided to cancel our email baed lead nurture program as we know it’s not generating leads.”
Through-out 2022 we became experts in social selling and before long we were measuring the behaviours that actually mattered when it came to generating conversations with our audience, things like network growth, the amount of humanised content shared and the number of social networking conversations entered each and every week.
We Had to Measure What Mattered
We soon realised that when you measure these things you can hold yourself accountable for continuously driving the behaviours that increase conversation rates the most, and after a few short months the call rate had reached 10%. I found that when each learner could see the impact of their effort in a dashboard it would motivate them to do more of the things that mattered. And as they produced tailored insight and content that demonstrates they are a genuine and authentic person worth having a chat with, when they had a call with a contact, that call was 34% likely to progress to a meaningful next step.
And this has been captured over a period of almost one year, and includes a range of different salespeople with various levels of experience, from junior SDR to experienced sales leader.
Creating Conversations at Scale
To scale the approach I have created the Conversation Operating System (Creating Commercial Conversations at Scale) that consists of four vital pillars for success;
Strategy
Skills
Measurement
Personal Change Leadership
Measurement and Personal Change Leadership were the missing link for creating conversations at scale. Once we had measurement, each learner were more motivated to do each behaviour on a daily basis. with personal change leadership we are able to help each learner understand the feelings they experience in relation to the change being asked of them and with the app, they take control of the plan to drive change forward for them. Together these pillars form a system that empowers any organisation to drive a successful transformation focused on Creating Conversations at Scale.
And I’d like to share this insight and my learnings with my network so that all can benefit in our constantly evolving world.
To learn more about Creating Conversations at Scale, check out our Walking Digital Corridors podcast and video's or consume on Spotify, Apple or YouTube, all of which can be found on www.walkingdigitalcorridors.com
Alex can also be found on SalesTV www.salestv.live or as the Bearded Sales Guy on YouTube, Twitter & TikTok. ell your story online can make all the difference.