In the near future, savvy salespeople are going to greatly enhance their sales by leveraging AI. One of the mechanisms for this improvement will be leveraging the “social graph” more effectively.
It’s always been true that a referral beats any other lead, with referrals converting to customers 50% of the time, according to Joanne Black. AI will help us use our “social graph” to find referrals without spending too much time on research. Up to this point, this kind of research has generally been too time-consuming for the average salesperson.
The best tool today for this research is LinkedIn. LinkedIn can show us who knows who. Unfortunately, this connection data is not reliable, with the system showing people knowing many more people than they actually do in “real life”. In my research, I find that less than half the connections someone has on Linkedin are people they really know.
Other tools do exist to mine our social connections. Such tools usually look through our email to see who we contact the most and use this as a proxy for a relationship. One of the benefits of this approach is that we can give each relationship a strength rating.
What does not exist yet (to my knowledge) is an all-encompassing tool that combines LinkedIn’s data (or some of it, there are legal issues with using too much of LinkedIn’s data) and the data from other sources like our own email. Something along those lines, with an advanced cleaning algorithm, could potentially guide us through the “social graph” much like a GPS guides us through busy roads and show us the optimal way for us to approach any given account.
While we wait for these more advanced AI tools, it’s possible to build something similar using humans instead of software. There could be significant ROI to using a team of admins to find the best “social path” to a target account vs. direct cold approaches.
Which connections really help us find a job?
Talking of the social graph…this article in the Harvard Business Review describes research conducted with 20 million people that confirms Mark Granovetter’s 1973 hypothesis that weak ties are the ones that help us get a new job (or sell something.)
Book notes: Success is in Your Sphere
This book is a “how to” guide on building your social graph (connections). Since most of us are short on time, I distilled the book down into a blog post. The book lays out the CAPITAL approach to network building: Consistent Execution , Aggregate, Prioritize, Investigate, Timely engagement, Add value and Leverage.
10 Key Ways to Leverage Your Business Ecosystem to Close More Deals
There are several creative ideas in this article about using an “ecosystem” of partners that can help you get into accounts and close business. Another interesting view on how to leverage the social graph.
How can sales professionals gain leverage with a VA?
While we wait for the perfect “artificial assistant”, we can use a virtual (real) one to help us research and leverage our social connections. Prialto provides VA services to sales teams and lays out here some of the ways these assistants are used today. It seems super-sensible to use a VA for sales support. Every salesperson I know is short of time.