Aaron
Wallis has recently undertaken the largest sales survey of its type which
explores changing trends within the industry as well as a powerful insight into
the minds of sales professionals.
With
62 questions answered by 726 completely anonymous sales professionals we have
captured some impressive results helping us promote professional sales, raise
awareness and gain a firmer understanding on how to succeed in sales teams.
While Jeremy Kyle and others are constantly
referring to Facebook causing problems and being the route to all evil, it does
have some slight benefits in terms of helping the company you’re working for as
it can help with advertising and expanding PR and publicity.
It also seems that the other well-known social
media sites in business, Google+, Twitter and of course, LinkedIn, are
beginning to help sales professionals develop leads and sales.
Promote your business correctly across the
different forums and sites and it can quickly, and cost effectively, help you
to gain a new audience .
It’s lucky for the 421 people who use these
social media sites but for the remaining 305 there’s some catching up to do:
·
Quite astonishingly, 58% don’t or rarely use social media sites for lead
generation
·
42% do regularly and proactively use social media sites for lead
generation
Social
networks aren’t just for posting egotistical ‘selfies’ or challenging your
mates to drink crème de menthe with Dettol! In fact, these networking websites were
found to be extremely effective for securing sales.
It is glaringly obvious that LinkedIn is the ‘winner’
for securing sales in the social website sector with 47% of workers using it;
it’s hardly surprising either as this media site has all the best qualities; it
is professional, prestige, popular and it’s specifically designed for business
in the least annoying way.
Additionally, 17% of people own a Google+
account. Google+ is free and an excellent way to promote your company; it gives
you the opportunity to really show off your business by adding specific detail
and links to content that makes your business more approachable and noticeable.
Facebook has been running before the dinosaurs
became extinct (well almost!); while 14% have secured sales from this site, it seems
more of a casual, relaxed and personal bubble that individuals prefer to use
for their ‘me’ time rather than promoting or using it for a business. However,
at least you can visually monitor how well your work is doing by reading the
comments and seeing how many likes it gains.
It also offers surprisingly strong analytical tools so you can see how
your campaigns are working.
Twitter is the dark horse of the social
networking family; it seems that Twitter is increasingly becoming popular,
particularly for some reason in the UK with 9% using it. There is talk that it could possibly overtake
Facebook’s addictive nature which for a social media site originally created to
take advantage of posting via text message (hence the 140 character limit) that
will be quite a feat. Twitter is a great way to promote your business and those
famous hash tags allow certain words to get you name anywhere that castor oil
can’t. Twitter also gives you the freedom to add anyone and everyone without
having to wait for friend acceptances or having to state how you actually know
the person. It does sound invasive but if you want to get your company’s name
out there, you’re going to want to approach certain organisations that you
won’t personally know to learn what’s going on in their business to help hone
your targets.
We appreciate that YouTube is primarily for
watching cats pull funny faces and hilarious videos of people’s epic falls but
we were quite surprised that YouTube hadn’t created more sales for the
respondents (only 3% of respondents) bearing in mind the amount of great
content that organisations are uploading to help promote their products and
expertise.
Realistically, Pinterest is only great, at the
moment, for visual products, I personally know photographers and Fashion
Designers that have developed rich contacts from the site but only 1% of the
respondents in this survey can attribute a specific sale to this site.
We were also quite surprised that no one had
generated a sale from SlideShare bearing in mind it’s prevalence on LinkedIn
(0% could attribute a sale to the site!)
In conclusion, it seems that to grow sales it
makes more sense to invest time and energy into the most popular accounts to
broaden your audience.
Not only are these websites available on the PC at
work, but nowadays you can easily access them on your smartphone, tablet and
soon to be watches, glasses and more; which is great for the sales workaholics mentioned
earlier who do not switch off!
Technology is a great and inventive method to
promote your work and develop leads with the fast ability to communicate. Unsurprisingly,
the majority of the sales professionals questioned felt the benefit of technology.
- 49% think
technology has been a complete benefit
- 9% feel it
has made absolutely no difference in getting sales
- 21%
believe accept that change happens and they just do things differently
- 11% feel
that technology has made them spend more time doing admin work
- 4% feel
that technology has robbed them of their freedom
- Another 4%
strongly believe they used to work less hours without technology
- 2% wish
they could have the power to turn back the clock
There are mixed reviews about technology; some
people think that it hasn’t helped and it’s just created more work for them. However, the majority have embraced it and it
has helped them make sales more than before.
Written
by Liam Oakes
Liam is the Office Manager at Aaron Wallis and has
been with the company for 3 years after having a career with the RAF; Liam has
helped hundreds of Sales Professionals secure a new Sales role and ensures that
Aaron Wallis runs smoothly.
