Leveraging Social Proximity to Sell Smarter

Editor’s Note: The article below by Reachable’s CEO, Al Campa, was recently posted on Business 2 Community.

Every good sales professional knows that leveraging personal contacts is a fantastic way to generate leads and close deals. A recent study by Reachable places numeric values on this common knowledge: The Value of Connections infographic illustrates the findings of the study, which took a look at a random sample of 300 business professionals involved in the purchase process at their companies. It found that:

• Calling on an account where there is a personal connection makes it five times more likely to receive a return call than those without any connections.
• More returned calls means more deals in the pipeline and results in an increase in sales productivity of 240%
• Callers with direct connections were about 11 times more likely to get a call back.
• For every 1,000 sales calls made, 345 were returned if the caller didn’t have a connection; callers who did have personal connections received 849 calls back out of 1,000 made.

Common sense tells us that personal connections enhance sales effectiveness. But the study shows that it’s not only direct personal connections that make a difference: A 2^nd degree connection, or knowing someone who knows someone in an account significantly increases the likelihood that a sales call will be returned.

What does this mean in practical terms? It means companies are sitting on a goldmine that they haven’t yet fully begun to explore. Right now, most companies aren’t completely leveraging their connections. If they’re savvy sales people, individual employees use their connections to generate leads, but most businesses aren’t proactively taking advantage of all the connections – direct and indirect – within the organization and its partners, vendors and other stakeholders.

Given the incredible ROI companies can gain by leveraging their collective social graph, it makes sense to identify all the connections within an enterprise and capitalize on them. Fortunately, new technologies and new data sources have made this possible.  Social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are great sources of connections.  Email systems and other enterprise systems yield corporate connections to customers, partners and vendors.  And powerful new analytics can now collect and score the connections to find the strongest links to any person or any account and extend the company’s social reach.

In light of these new tools, it also makes sense for company leaders to rethink the way they divide sales opportunities and pursue leads. Geographic or vertical-based sales divisions are traditional ways to manage sales territories. But since connections can drive a five-fold increase in responses and more than double productivity, businesses looking to revitalize sales or expand into new territories should consider a new strategy: social proximity, in which sales teams are organized around the social graph. By harnessing the power of social media and designing a sales approach based on the key driver in closing deals – connections – companies can improve ROI and generate new revenue.

The Value of Personal Connections in Sales

Today, we are releasing the results of research we recently conducted to understand the value of personal connections in the sales process; in particular, when it comes to the returning of sales phone calls.  The detailed results can be seen in the infographic below but here are the two key takeways:

• Personal connections have a big impact on whether people return sales calls.  When a salesperson has a personal connection to the person they are calling, the person being called is 5.2 times more likely to return the call than if there is no personal connection.
• Personal connections trigger a large increase in productivity through the sales process.  The increase in likelihood that a sales call will be returned because of a personal connection leads to a 243% increase in sales productivity, which ultimately results in significantly more closed deals for the same number of prospecting calls.

Salespeople have always tried to leverage their personal connections to gain the upper hand.  Now, however, since a lot of a person’s connections are documented in a digital form – whether it is in social networks or email contact lists – there is an opportunity to take advantage of this and use a different approach to selling.  We call the approach Sales Proximity Selling and it involves using the strength of personal relationships, rather than geography, to assign leads and accounts.

The bottom line is that our research demonstrates the significant impact personal connections have in the sales process so every salesperson should do whatever they can to leverage their networks.

Here’s the infographic…