What is Social Enablement? A Digital Download Special Edition

This week on The Digital Download, we’re celebrating the inaugural World Enablement Day with a special episode featuring the team from DLA Ignite. Social Enablement is both a strategic and tactical approach for individuals and organizations to leverage social media to drive more conversations and ultimately drive more opportunity. This episode will explain why it’s not just about social selling but about a broader concept of enablement.

We'll explore questions like:

* What is social enablement?

* What are some common mistakes to avoid in social selling?

* How can you train and motivate a sales team to adopt social enablement?

* What are some real-world outcomes of companies leveraging social enablement?

Discover the innovative strategies and practical insights that have driven remarkable successes for businesses around the globe. Learn how to effectively leverage social media to enhance personal brand, build meaningful customer relationships, and drive business growth. With a blend of cutting-edge research and hands-on experience, this session promises to provide actionable takeaways that can elevate your sales and marketing efforts.

We strive to make The Digital Download an interactive experience. Bring your questions and insights. Audience participation is highly encouraged!

This week's Host was -

• Rob Durant, Founder of Flywheel Results, a proud DLA Ignite partner

Panelists included -

• Tim Hughes, CEO & Co-founder of a DLA Ignite,

• Adam Gray, Co-founder of a DLA Ignite,

• Alex Abbott, Founder of Supero, a DLA Ignite partner,

• Tracy Borreson, Founder and CEO of TLB Coaching & Events, a proud DLA Ignite partner, and

• Bertrand Godillot, Managing Partner, Odysseus & Co, a proud DLA Ignite partner

Transcript of The Digital Download 2024-06-10

Rob Durant [00:00:03]:

Good morning. Good afternoon, and good day wherever you may be joining us from. Welcome to a special edition of the digital download, which is the live

Tracy Borreson [00:00:16]:

history. Weekly business talk show. Show. On LinkedIn Live. Now we're also syndicated.

Rob Durant [00:00:26]:

On TuneIn Radio. Alright. We'll work on that. In celebration

Tracy Borreson [00:00:32]:

Everybody knows. As we continue to work on that, it's gonna sound precisely the same. Yeah. Yeah. It is. So we will continue to work on it, but it's just gonna sound the same.

Rob Durant [00:00:42]:

Pretty much. In celebration of the inaugural World Enablement Day, today, we're asking, what is social enablement? But before we jump in, let's go around the set and introduce everyone. While we're doing that, why don't you in the audience reach out to a friend, ping them, and have them join us? We strive to make the digital download an interactive experience. Audience participation is highly encouraged.

Tracy Borreson [00:01:15]:

Alright.

Rob Durant [00:01:16]:

Tracy, would you kick us off, please?

Tracy Borreson [00:01:19]:

I would love to. Thank you, Rob. I am Tracy Borreson, founder of TLB Coaching and Events where we care about how marketers are using social selling. So I'm super excited to talk about social enablement today from a marketing perspective. And I'm also a very proud partner of DLA Ignite.

Rob Durant [00:01:38]:

Excellent. Thank you very much. Bearded Sales Guy, Alex.

Alex Abbott [00:01:44]:

Hello, all. Yes. The bearded sales Gray.

Tim Hughes [00:01:47]:

Calling from Portugal.

Alex Abbott [00:01:49]:

Selling from Portugal, otherwise known as Alex Abbott, founder of Supero and the creator of the the conversation operating system. I too am a proud partner of DLA Ignite, and I'm ecstatic about this top topic today. Sales sorry. Social enablement.

Rob Durant [00:02:12]:

Fantastic. Thanks for being here.

Alex Abbott [00:02:15]:

Thank you, Rob. I I was looking for a reference to the professor in your

Tracy Borreson [00:02:21]:

book, and I

Alex Abbott [00:02:22]:

couldn't find one.

Rob Durant [00:02:24]:

I think I allude to it, but not the professor. No. Haven't really adopted that moniker yet. Bertrand.

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:33]:

Yes. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Bertrand Gaudiot. I am the founder and managing partner of Adesis and Co, a very proud DLA partner.

Rob Durant [00:02:46]:

Excellent. Durant

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:47]:

thank you very much. Today on my favorite topic.

Rob Durant [00:02:51]:

Excellent. We're glad to have you here. Adam.

Adam Gray [00:02:56]:

Hi, everybody. I'm Adam Gray, cofounder of DLA Ignite. Now I'm I'm gonna steal some of Tim's words here, and we'll see why as we work our way along the top here. I'm famous for writing the book Brilliant Social Media.

Rob Durant [00:03:11]:

Excellent. Tim, welcome.

Tim Hughes [00:03:16]:

Welcome. Thank you. My name's Tim Hughes. It's a bit strange doing this on a Monday rather than a Friday.

Adam Gray [00:03:22]:

It is, isn't it? Yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:03:24]:

It is really it is really strange. Welcome to everybody. I'm the CEO and cofounder of DLA Ignite, and I'm famous for writing the book, Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers.

Rob Durant [00:03:37]:

Excellent. Welcome. Thank you very much. And myself, I'm Rob Durant, founder of Flywheel Results, a proud DLA Ignite partner. And I'm not famous for writing anything.

Adam Gray [00:03:49]:

Look. No. Yet. No. You are. You are famous now.

Tracy Borreson [00:03:56]:

Famous now for writing.

Rob Durant [00:04:00]:

The Social Enablement Blueprint: Stop Pitching! START SELLING

Alex Abbott [00:04:09]:

So I don't know about you guys, but but Rob, Tim, and Adam are all along the top.

Tracy Borreson [00:04:14]:

I know. What was that? Is that a plan?

Alex Abbott [00:04:16]:

Can you have the all along the Shorten and the the

Tracy Borreson [00:04:18]:

next The hustlers are just a little of love. Yeah. The llamas.

Rob Durant [00:04:25]:

Gives you something to aspire to, right?

Tracy Borreson [00:04:27]:

I'm coming for you.

Rob Durant [00:04:28]:

Yeah. There you go. Awesome. Alright. So we've talked a little bit about social enablement, but most people probably have not yet heard that term. So let's start by answering the foundational question. What is social enablement? Social enablement is not a connect and pitch sales program. And that's why I prefer to use the term social enablement in place of social selling.

Rob Durant [00:05:01]:

In many circles, social selling has been given a bad name. Social enablement, on the other hand, is the strategic and tactical process of leveraging social media to drive more conversations and ultimately drive more opportunity. And it applies to all departments at all levels within an organization. Social enablement is not just for sales. Social enablement is the process by which organizational leaders, enablement professionals, and marketing and HR teams can support sales teams as they apply the ignite social selling and influence sales methodology to their social selling efforts. Adam, I think I've been through your social selling and influence class with Ignite at least Live times now.

Adam Gray [00:05:59]:

I was gonna say it's a lot more than 5, I think, Rob.

Rob Durant [00:06:03]:

And yet, I still want to ask you, what is Ignite?

Adam Gray [00:06:10]:

Well, when Tim and I set the business up, we knew that social media was the future of comms and sales and visibility and all of those things that make the different functions within an organisation work effectively. And there were lots of LinkedIn trainers and top tricks type things out there, but we wanted to produce a a proven, repeatable, predictable methodology, which we hope changes the way people think about this and how they behave in the in the online space. And this is not just about creating a plan and knowing that you have to be more friendly or more approachable. But, yes, there is an element of that. You have to have a vision. You have to have a dream. You have to have an idea of where you're heading, but you also have to know the the steps and the processes that you need to undertake, not just in order to achieve success because a quick win is success, but it's also a degree of luck, But how you can do that in an ongoing Gray, because, you know, one of the things that we like to say is that being successful on social media is is hard work, but it's a hell of a lot easier than the other options. And the point is you wanna get the maximum possible result you can in the most predictable way with the least amount of effort.

Adam Gray [00:07:39]:

So that's what we've created with this.

Rob Durant [00:07:42]:

Awesome. Tim, I know you wrote about this recently. What tools and technologies are essential for effective social selling and social enablement. Do I need to buy an AI?

Tim Hughes [00:08:00]:

It's it's it's a great question, Rob, and one I get asked a lot. And I think it's, you know, I'm I'm seeing that, you know, the average salesperson in in the states is probably getting spent, you know, $8,000. I'm hearing of people that are spending a $100,000 per salesperson just to give them some sort of tech to enable them to do what they've been doing for the last 30 years, rather than actually saying, well, there's actually the world has changed. We all know the world's changed. COVID changed things, social media changed things, digital changed things, but we're still doing things, you know, we're still cold calling like I did 30 years ago. And why are we doing that? Partly because the leadership is saying, well, we need to be doing it because it worked for me 20, 30 years ago. So, what they need to be doing is actually raising their heads up and seeing that there's actually something else. And this isn't about sending people spam messages on on social media.

Rob Durant [00:08:58]:

So bottom line, how much am I investing?

Tim Hughes [00:09:01]:

Well, we we actually, recommend that people take the professional edition of LinkedIn, and that's it.

Rob Durant [00:09:07]:

That seems so simple.

Tracy Borreson [00:09:11]:

Some of the best things are so simple.

Tim Hughes [00:09:13]:

You could save a you can save an awful lot of money and get and get better results. Isn't that an amazing thing? Is that more for less?

Adam Gray [00:09:24]:

Yeah. I've probably ever heard that expression before.

Tracy Borreson [00:09:26]:

Yeah. I'm

Adam Gray [00:09:27]:

doing all with less.

Tracy Borreson [00:09:30]:

So, Alex about this oh, yeah. If I can just, like, share something from, like, a marketing perspective because one of the things that I love about the phrase social enablement instead of social selling is, as you mentioned, Rob, that's kind of been segmented for sales. Right? People said, like, social selling is for sales people or sales activities. And one of the things that has confused me for a very long time is that marketers are responsible 98% of the time, maybe more than that, I'm being conservative, for the social presence of a business. So we Tim marketers over here creating the social presence of the business, as in they are posting things on social media, generally multiple platforms of social media. And then we have the salespeople over here. Maybe they're doing social selling activities, or maybe they're doing the old school cold calling types of activities. But for digital businesses, businesses that operate Durant to build their funnels in the digital environment, these two efforts now are Live fighting against each other.

Tracy Borreson [00:10:38]:

Right? So I got sales over here doing this. I got marketing over here doing this. Nobody knows what each other is doing, and so we can't build something together. We're not actually moving anything forward by the activities that we're doing. And if you look at most marketing organizations and the social activities they're doing, aka posting posts or white papers or client testimonials on their company page, they don't do anything. They don't do anything. And so maybe now you're paying money for a marketing tool to do that. May you're most likely paying a marketing resource to do that.

Tracy Borreson [00:11:16]:

So there is a cost associated with these things even though there's not a cost of having a company page on LinkedIn. And we just keep doing it. We just keep spending this money, and it just keeps going into the toilet. And when we we look at this opportunity to enable people from a business perspective to be social on social media. This is I mean, we're gonna talk a lot about sales today. I'm sure. But from a marketing perspective, I just think, like, this is critical. Right? Like, if you are going to have your marketing people doing activities on social media, they need to be socially enabled.

Tracy Borreson [00:11:56]:

And they are not being socially enabled today, and they're very fired up about it.

Alex Abbott [00:12:02]:

Yeah. So, Tracy, can I tell?

Tim Hughes [00:12:04]:

Well, Tracy, can I also pick up on that? Yes. Because I think there's been there's also been a transition from companies. SAP is a big example of this, which is where what they've done is that they've moved from posting on their company page to broadcasting on their leadership pages. There's a standard format that they use, and it will be, here's us at the sales kickoff. Here's us at the, at Sapphire. Here's us doing something else, and it's still broadcast. Right. And what they do is that they're getting they're getting a 100 likes because what they're doing is that they're going to their employees and saying like this.

Tim Hughes [00:12:42]:

Now actually a 100 likes from SAP, because considering they've got what, 20,000 whatever, people. This isn't a Ross, But they think that's being social. Podcast through the leaders' social media channels, and it's not.

Tracy Borreson [00:12:57]:

Well, I I just wanna share this quick example because it's actually one of the examples given in the Ignite training system is there's, like, 2 people who post that it's their birthday on social media. 1 of them gets, like, 6 likes. The other one, which I'm actually going to say was me this year, I did a birthday post on my 40th birthday. It got, like

Adam Gray [00:13:22]:

You're never 40, Tracy. No way.

Tracy Borreson [00:13:27]:

I'm on the 4th floor. But I got, like, I don't even know, thousands upon thousands of impressions. There was like 200 comments, and like a whole bunch more, There was, like, 200 comments and, like, a whole bunch more likes and things like that, and I was Live, oh, one, so that didn't happen because I posted that. Didn't happen because I posted. It happened because I did all of this social relationship building before I posted that. So then when I posted that, it went big and got lots of traction and then lots of of new people saw it, which is weird because it's my birthday and when strangers wish you happy birthday, I think it's weird. But, like, that's the difference. But it's not, especially from a marketing perspective, I think so much of this has come down to you just have to Ross.

Tracy Borreson [00:14:12]:

You just have to post. You just have to post. And if you post, you'll get all of this engagement and all of these impressions. No. There's something that happens before the Ross, and it's the social enablement. So now I'll stop talking a little.

Alex Abbott [00:14:26]:

It's all during and after. It's That's true. All of the time.

Tracy Borreson [00:14:29]:

Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm.

Tim Hughes [00:14:31]:

Abbott let Tim just pull up Julia's comp comment, Rob.

Rob Durant [00:14:35]:

Absolutely.

Tim Hughes [00:14:36]:

Julia says, congrats, Tracy. You look you look amazing.

Tracy Borreson [00:14:40]:

Thank you. I feel like I have more energy in my forties than I did in my thirties. So I think one of the

Adam Gray [00:14:47]:

things that companies fail to understand in many instances is that the message that's being delivered is not the determinant of success. It's who's delivering the message that is the determinant of success. So, you know, Rob tells me something, and I don't care because I don't like Rob. Tim tells me something. I don't care because I don't like Tim. Alex tells me something. Bertrand tells me something. Tracy tells me something.

Adam Gray [00:15:11]:

Oh, that's really interesting, Tracy, because I know you and I like you. And the the fact is that when you've got an organisation, whether or not that's a team of 10 people or 10,000 people, it is it is the love and the individual networks that those those people have created where the value lies for the organization. You know, I don't want to hear Tim speak in Rob's words. Durant to hear Tim speak in Tim's words. Does that mean that everyone's gonna like Tim? No. But then they don't have to. What what you know is that when you look at a team of the 6 of us on the call when you look at the team of the 6 of us on the call, as long as one of us is liked by the person that's consuming the content, that's the bit that matters. And most organizations have this view that that if it's a well crafted, well produced, well photographed, well copy Shorten post, it's the thing that's gonna unlock the opportunity.

Adam Gray [00:16:04]:

And we know for a fact, we have a a a client where this individual posted something, and, it got 6 and a half 1000000 views and 38,000 likes. And he didn't generate any inbound from it. Because, actually, that is not where the value lies. Going viral as a business or as an individual is not where the value lies. The value lies from you stimulating conversations, And that's the bit that is missed by so many organizations. If if only there was a methodology that taught you how to do it.

Tracy Borreson [00:16:36]:

But it's all about pickup.

Rob Durant [00:16:38]:

Oh, go ahead, Bert.

Tracy Borreson [00:16:40]:

Alex. Everybody's talking.

Alex Abbott [00:16:42]:

Sorry. But it's all about the messaging, Adam. If the messaging isn't right, then, you know.

Adam Gray [00:16:47]:

Yeah. Of course. How foolish.

Tracy Borreson [00:16:50]:

But this is something that I always really I think it was confusing for me at the time and why it stuck in my brain. I remember working in corporate and I worked, like, the VP of sales had his office right behind me, and I remember, like, all of the sales people going into his office and brainstorming the script that they were going to use. And so they created this script that which at the end of the day is an average of all of the people, but not anything any of them would actually say. And so when you're talking about, Live, yeah, there is messaging that goes into it, but there's also this, like, level of authenticity in the message that allows you to be perceived as a human. K? If we are all out there, you got, you got 3 salespeople or you have 20,000 salespeople and they're all out in the market saying exactly the same thing, you know none of them are actually being fully authentic with you because nobody would no. We're not robots.

Adam Gray [00:17:51]:

Yeah.

Alex Abbott [00:17:52]:

Yeah. I would

Rob Durant [00:17:53]:

Tracy, I I wanna pick up on something that you said initially, when it came to sales and marketing. And the reason the sales enablement society no longer exists, It is now known as the revenue enablement society. The reason today is world enablement day, not world sales enablement Gray, is exactly the misperception that you had picked up on. When it was called sales enablement, people thought it was for sales. By simply calling it enablement, well, now we can talk about it for all of the departments. And that's why we call it social enablement. Yes. It's sales first because we can point to the results that social enablement drives for salespeople.

Rob Durant [00:18:52]:

But we can also point to the results that it drives for marketing, for HR, for purchasing. I can point to results for the engineering department if they undergo a formal program of social enablement.

Tracy Borreson [00:19:09]:

I can pinpoint results for career searchers. Like, if you're a job seeker and you are trying to use social media anyway, specifically LinkedIn to find a job, Social enablement, friends.

Rob Durant [00:19:22]:

Exactly. Yeah. So, Alex, you've done the research. How can sales teams measure the effectiveness of social, and what are some real world outcomes companies are leveraging it for?

Alex Abbott [00:19:36]:

Well, we, I think, you know, the reason I started the research so we we've done, I mean, we've done a study now for 3 years. We've got 16 months worth of data where we've been tracking, you know, individual rep behavior, not just rep, actually, a range of experiences from SDR, you know, AE, sales director, leader, you know, on the on the kind of the presale, so new business as well as post sale. So, you you know, looking at developing conversations with existing customers. And the reason we started the research was for the exact kind of reason, Tracy, you were kinda talking about this dichotomy between marketing and sales where, you know, sales want marketing to generate leads, and marketing is still trying to generate leads, you know, by creating messaging and content and nurturing, and it's doing the exact opposite. It's actually pushing buyers further away. And then salespeople, you know, want leads, but they feel like they're they're past it. Right? You know, we don't do prospecting anymore because we've, you know, we've now graduated as a as an enterprise salesperson. And, you know, I needed data really to prove that the ignite sales social selling methodology worked.

Alex Abbott [00:21:11]:

So when I was going into conversations with sales leaders, challenging them to get their sales teams to do more prospecting, you know, build relationships with their territories at scale, I had the data to back that up. But on the other side, also with marketers to tell, you know, to to educate marketers, you you know, about the importance of adapting their approach. Certainly, I'm talking b to b sales and marketing. Right? So, you know, no longer can marketers just expect to do what they're doing and and and have different results. They need to think about how they support the sales team differently so that the sales team can actually do the things that sort of, you know, help them, empower them to build relationships at scale. And that might be repurposing content, corporate content, but repurposing it in their own words, not just sharing corporate content that you, you know, you've touched on Tim, in in this call. And so, you know, within the Q1 of measuring things like network growth, follower growth, the number of posts on LinkedIn, how human the content was, you know, not not personalized, but actually human, genuine, and authentic. By by tracking how many new conversations each person was inserting themselves into on social media.

Alex Abbott [00:22:41]:

You know, that's looking for topics that are relevant to them and their target audience and actually, you know, kinda getting involved in the conversation and commenting, looking for people that are posting. And if those you know, if their target audience isn't posting, look at what their target audience is commenting on or Live. Because when you, you know, comment or react to those posts, your target audience sees you. And you and and it's a great way of putting yourself in front of your target audience. So we were measuring all of that stuff. And in by the end of the Q1, we found that we were able to create meetings, calls with 6.7% of those that we asked. And as we continue to track that and as we continue to practice the methodology, we got better at crept up to 9% by the end of q 2. You know, we're now sort of averaging we can see an average benchmark across the range of people that we're tracking, and that's, you know, Sapiro Associates as well as clients, you know, we we can see the average is 10.5%.

Alex Abbott [00:23:56]:

So for everyone

Adam Gray [00:23:57]:

So so hold on a second. So you're saying that you ask 10 people for a call and one of them says yes on average? Yeah. So during the course of a week, I ask a 100 people for a call. That means 10 people will take a call with me.

Alex Abbott [00:24:12]:

Yeah. And and you and that's the point. They actually take the call with you. They don't just say yes.

Adam Gray [00:24:18]:

I I mean, this this this is remarkable, isn't it? Because most organizations, they they don't get anywhere close to that. If you said to the sales Tim within most organizations, if if all of your sales reps were able to have 2 calls per day with ideal customer profile people, where the people attended those calls, how would that affect your business? I mean, I I think most of them wouldn't be able to answer because they're currently getting one call every 2 weeks. Yeah. So Yeah. You know, it's it's Jordan of magnitude different, isn't it?

Alex Abbott [00:24:50]:

It really is. It it isn't. You know, when we first kinda started this, we were seeing about 33% of those calls progressed to a meaningful next step. And that's an important measure as well because to your point, Tracy, when you're putting the effort in to make yourself look as attractive as possible on social media, and it's clear that, you know, not only what you do, and that you're an expert at what you do, but you're also a genuine authentic person worth having a chat with. When those people have a chat with you, they're more likely to want to have another chat with you. Because there's it's no surprise, you know, who you are and what you do and what your intention is, which is what most people wanna understand when they meet you for the first time. So we now see that's reached 39.5% on average, that core progression rate across everyone that we're tracking. And then we started to look closer at, you know, those customers that that had focused account territories.

Alex Abbott [00:25:57]:

So for everyone, it's not, you know, it's not about volume. It's about quality and actually penetrating those large accounts as deep and as wide as possible. And then we found things like the you know, by following this methodology, clients were increasing their territory penetration by 10 to 15 times. So, you know, making 15 times. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Gray [00:26:24]:

I mean, the the the Rob with this is that these numbers are are, outside of most people's scope of understanding. Aren't they? You know, a 1500% increase in your territory penetration. And the the the the thing is that it's, it's through simple the repetition of simple, easy to understand tasks. Yeah. That's that's the point, isn't it? You know, like going to the Tim. If you wanna get fit, you need to not lift heavy weight once. You need to lift it a 100 times. And, you know, that's that's the point.

Adam Gray [00:26:58]:

It's about teaching people how to do these things. Because we know Tim and again that it addresses the fundamental issues that every sales function in an organization has these days.

Alex Abbott [00:27:08]:

Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:27:10]:

So so true.

Rob Durant [00:27:13]:

And You you delivered those numbers so casually, Alex.

Tracy Borreson [00:27:17]:

Yes.

Rob Durant [00:27:17]:

They are groundbreaking.

Tracy Borreson [00:27:21]:

Yeah.

Rob Durant [00:27:21]:

They are not casual at all.

Alex Abbott [00:27:24]:

I know. I know. I should perhaps, be singing and dancing whilst I'm yelling you.

Bertrand Godillot [00:27:30]:

The Gray you smile the way you smile when you when you Lenwood these numbers, actually, for for for for the ones who are just listening to us tells a lot.

Alex Abbott [00:27:39]:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tracy Borreson [00:27:40]:

Well, but I'm also thinking of this from a, like I would say that the majority of marketing qualified leads are not at all qualified or leads. They're neither of those things. We just call them that because that's what we're getting measured on from a marketing Live a Hughes. Right. But, like, can you imagine can you imagine if you had that kind of rate in generating marketing qualified leads and 39% of your marketing qualified leads were then became sales qualified leads. Like, that number is insane. Right? People don't people don't get that, but that's because people are not doing they're not I would say right now people are not being social enabled. So it's not even that they're sitting on the skill stack right now and not doing the things.

Tracy Borreson [00:28:31]:

They have not been enabled in this way. And so this is why this conversation is so important is, like, what does it actually look like to be socially enabled? And then once you are and you've gone through the effort, you've put in that 90 days, 100 days of effort into building things, then you get to see those numbers. Yeah. But you have to be enabled by the thing, Ross.

Adam Gray [00:28:55]:

You you do. You do. You have to do the thing is what you're saying, Tracy.

Tracy Borreson [00:28:58]:

To get the thing, you have to do the thing.

Adam Gray [00:29:01]:

Yeah.

Tracy Borreson [00:29:01]:

It's well known around here.

Alex Abbott [00:29:03]:

It is. Yeah. I mean, we had one client who had been working with their SDR in partnership. So he was a sales director working with his SDR. 5 months, they were cold calling and emailing into their territory. One meeting. 5 months after their journey with this program, 36 meetings, 2 point averaging 2.4 meetings per active account had engaged 6.4 times more stakeholders than before, which is huge when you think about enterprise sales and the number of stakeholders now influencing, you know, purchase decisions. And now we've got the luxury of kinda looking looking back.

Alex Abbott [00:29:53]:

So beyond the 5 months ends the 1st year. Alright. You know, he finished in the top half of the table. But the the the the thing that is just wonderful about it is looking into year 2 in the first half, 70% of his h one pipeline is committed revenue. And now he's thinking about just creating a predictable flow of pipeline and revenue, which is the holy grail for anyone in in enterprise sales. And the confidence that he has now is is just unreal. And he can trust to your point, Adam. He just trusts in this process.

Adam Gray [00:30:33]:

Abbott, I mean, let's let's be honest. If you've been thrashing away for 5 months and generated one selling, and then you try this, and in the same period of time you generate 38 meetings, did you say? 36. 36 meetings. So a 36 times increase in the number of meetings that you've got, and that that would give most people confidence, wouldn't it? Yeah.

Bertrand Godillot [00:30:57]:

And the other meetings. That's the point. They're actually potentially better meetings even than the work that was achieved in in 5 months. Yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:31:08]:

So one one of the Abbott one of the things that I I quite find funny, because I have a a dry sense of humor, is that one of Alex's clients is an email marketing company, and they can't get any business through email marketing. So they came to Alex and said, Alex, we our email marketing system doesn't work. Can you help us with social sign?

Tracy Borreson [00:31:37]:

I this is the thing. Right? Like, email has its place. Right? There's lots of things that email can do, but from a lead generation point of view, it's mostly useless for most businesses. And even if we're primarily talking about b2b Shorten, and there's a lot of differences between b2b and b2c. And so if you're trying to take this is something I really observe too with the, like, split of sales and marketing because I do think in some industries, it makes sense to do that in b to c. I used to work in retail furniture. The marketers sit in the corporate office. They make flyers.

Tracy Borreson [00:32:14]:

They send out the flyers. The salespeople are in the store waiting for people to come in. Marketing's job is to drive people into the store, which really, isn't working. I don't know. People come in when they need a fridge. Right? Your fridge Gray, you come in and buy a fridge. The salesperson sells you a fridge. Right? The the activities of sales and marketing don't have to be connected in order for it to work for a business.

Tracy Borreson [00:32:40]:

But from a b to b perspective, people are seeing your marketing efforts and interacting with their salespeople at the same time. So if those two things are not aligned and not working well together, we're actively breaking your brand experience instead of actively building your brand experience. And again, if marketers are here for anything, is it not to actively build your brand experience?

Adam Gray [00:33:04]:

I think I would take it take issue with what you said there, Tracy, because they're not seeing your marketing efforts. And the point is that the reason they're not is that, you know, we all are very good, whether or not we're looking we're scrolling in Facebook, or we're looking at our inbox, or we're driving down the street, or sitting on the subway looking at, you know, with the the adverts around us, What we do is we actively tune this stuff out.

Tracy Borreson [00:33:31]:

That's true.

Adam Gray [00:33:32]:

And and the reason we do is that how good, how well you can do your job is partly based on how well you can focus on that job. And when I'm getting loads of emails with people selling, just bouncing this to the or circling back round in order to have a conversation, or did you get a chance to have a look at Tim? No. And and I remember the words of Gary v. He said, content is king, but context is God. And the point is that that, you know, the reason that I'm gonna read your email is because it's your email. Got nothing to do with the content of it, because I only know that when I've consumed the email. And I'm not gonna consume it, because I've no idea who the hell you are. And and it's this point, isn't it? If you build a relationship first, you build a platform on which not only are you likely to listen to what I say, but you're likely to believe what I say.

Adam Gray [00:34:17]:

And that's a huge disconnect in, well, pretty much every marketing or marketing function. Because they they they believe that the solution is volume. And if you're selling training shoes, it is volume. You know, Nike, Adidas, Reebok, whatever, you know. Yeah. They will do pretty much the same thing. I'm gonna buy your brand because I like your brand or because I like think it's it's really great that LeBron James wears a pair of those or whatever it may be. That's a perfectly valid thing.

Adam Gray [00:34:42]:

If you're selling an enterprise wide ERP system, it ain't gonna work in the same way. You know, the fact that that that Richard Branson is saying there, well, I use the Oracle ERP. So it's like people don't care. They have no interest in that. And the only way you can get them to care is if they form a bond with you, and you demonstrate through your actions that you know what you're talking about. And and that that's something that has seems to have blindsided most people. Doesn't it?

Alex Abbott [00:35:09]:

It is. I the reason I I really love what you're doing with this book, Rob, because, to to your point, Adam, and to your point, Tracy, you know, marketers are spending most of their time, if not all of their time, trying to search and qualify the 5% of people that are in market to buy the thing that that you that that they sell. Yeah. And and they're missing out on this huge opportunity, which is to actually build relationships with people, which is why this program works so well because the success that we see is as a result of those people not selling actually to your to to your book the point of your book, Rob. And and and actually to take this one step further, I think the future for organizations is actually to think about creating a prospecting culture. And perhaps prospecting is the wrong word because the minute you say prospecting, people think selling. But actually creating a culture that that, you know, where where everyone in the organization are contributing to developing their network for the good of the organization.

Rob Durant [00:36:22]:

Absolutely.

Tracy Borreson [00:36:22]:

I like to call it a brand community.

Rob Durant [00:36:26]:

So picking up on that, Tracy, as our resident marketing and branding expert, what role does personal branding play when it comes to social enablement? All of it.

Tracy Borreson [00:36:43]:

I mean, so here's the thing. Right? First of all, if we're talking about being social, I think it's important for people to note that the way I am social is different than the way Alex is social or Rob is social or Tim is social or Adam or Bertrand or anybody who's watching this. Everybody has a unique brand of being social. This the things that fall into it are things Live whether you identify as an introvert or an extrovert that will contribute to how you feel comfortable being social. So this isn't about all people showing up the same because all people showing up the same doesn't have authenticity behind it. The the repetitiveness of the tasks, the things we do are where the consistency and the habit building lies, but your personal brand is how you build relationships with people. And even if you're listening today and you're haven't ever thought before that you have a personal brand, Every single human has a unique personal brand. You have conversations in specific ways.

Tracy Borreson [00:37:51]:

You build relationships in specific ways, you are comfortable talking about certain things and you're uncomfortable talking about other things. One of the things I love most about this program is that it allows you to harness those things and build the habits on top of it instead of trying to create, like, a bunch of cookie cutter salespeople who are all using the same script and the same pitch. It's about embracing your personal brand, discovering your personal brand, which a lot of people, and I would say specifically from a marketing perspective, this has been very interesting for me because as a marketer, I would say growing up as a marketer, you are behind the scenes. You are the voice of the brand. You are not the voice of yourself. You are the voice of your brand, and the brand says this, so you say that. Right? You repeat the pitches. You repeat the elevator statements.

Tracy Borreson [00:38:42]:

You repeat what's on the website. You just repeat it. And the problem with that, and I can't remember if it was Tim or someone alluded to this earlier, maybe it was Adam actually, that the way I say something resonates with a specific group of people. But Tim could say the same thing in his own words, and it would resonate with a different group of people. And so from a marketing perspective, there's a lot of power in that because now I've created the opportunity to resonate with a whole ton more people. You got 6 marketers on your team. You have the opportunity to take what is a cuss or a a lockdown narrative right now and open it up to 6 times the amount of people by enabling the personal brands behind the social interactions. Now again, a lot of marketers right now aren't even having social interactions.

Tracy Borreson [00:39:31]:

Their job is to post the thing on social media and then tell the sales people to share it. And the sales people sometimes do, sometimes they like it, most of the time they do nothing, and we just keep doing the same things. But at the end of the day, this is about igniting that uniqueness of the people behind the scenes within the umbrella of the Durant. Because I think a lot of times why people are afraid to do this from a marketing perspective too is that they're like, but this is our brand. Our brand has to be this. But if you've hired your people responsibly, then your people should match your brand. Gray? So if you let your people go out and be people, it should match your Durant. And this is why, Rob, you talked about why this has, like, a HR and a culture perspective attached to it too because if you historically haven't done a good job of hiring your marketers or your HR team or your engineers or your salespeople in alignment with your brand values, then, yeah, you William terrified to let those people go into the social environment and share what they're going to share.

Tracy Borreson [00:40:36]:

But then there's other problems. I'm gonna leave it at that for now.

Rob Durant [00:40:44]:

Bertrand, I wanted to ask you as one who has recently started practicing Ignite in the French market. How do language and culture play into social enablement strategies?

Bertrand Godillot [00:41:00]:

Well, of course, Rob. I mean, obviously, we'd love to think we're different. But, the reality is that we do have social animals. We do Live people who are more reluctant to being social. But, you know, my own experience, every single call I have with my new contacts on LinkedIn on LinkedIn are actually very high quality. We discuss our challenges. We, you know, we also Shorten thoughts about how to solve them. Now is is the French market different? Of course, the the the the the language is different.

Bertrand Godillot [00:41:46]:

I've Shorten, applying Knight, I think, a little bit more than 4 months ago. I have more than doubled my number of contacts in my target market. I am on the range of 5 to 10, conversations a week. And, you know, when when I talk about having having high quality conversations, there are some of these new contacts I'm already on the 3rd or 4th, call with them because we, we actually have created a relationship, and I'm glad we we talked about this, which is the exact opposite of of what, very unfortunately, is hiding behind the term social selling in practice. Because in practice and and to to to to go back to what you were saying, Tracy, you know, the the Tim social selling in our market is it's just all about automation and SDR, completely disconnected. And and then you end up with a sales team who's not social enabled. So there's it's it's completely counterproductive Tim you were very well very well stated. So that's also why, you know, there are people who are reluctant to getting on a conversation.

Bertrand Godillot [00:43:06]:

The reason why they are reluctant is because they believe they're they're gonna be pitched, which is obviously not the the goal of of, creating a a relationship and and and being on a social network. We we are here to, to, do the networking activity. And by the way, you know, one number I was contemplating again this morning is my level 2 connections are currently at 320 k, which means that we've even with a very small network, but very targeted, you actually have a Live, which is completely Tracy. Assuming the fact that you have truly connect you have truly created a relationship. And not just, you know, sending a flyer or, you know, a a digital version of the analog flyer. I I don't think that is working. So great experience here. We're no different than, than any other than any, other, country from Abbott Tim.

Bertrand Godillot [00:44:19]:

I'm quite sure. Does that answer your question, Rob?

Rob Durant [00:44:23]:

Absolutely. Thank you for that. As we've got 15 minutes.

Tim Hughes [00:44:28]:

As we've got 15 minutes left, I I thought I'm gonna talk about this.

Adam Gray [00:44:33]:

Okay. So

Tracy Borreson [00:44:34]:

Bob Durant wanna talk about his book, but we're gonna talk.

Tim Hughes [00:44:39]:

So so it's not available on Amazon yet, is it, Rob?

Rob Durant [00:44:43]:

No. Because

Tim Hughes [00:44:44]:

I I checked and

Rob Durant [00:44:45]:

Yeah. No. The the great thing about writing a book is writing a book. Abbott challenging thing about writing a book is everything else that goes with it. And as others know and I have learned, you need at least 3 full business days before you post a book to Amazon before it's available for distribution. With delays in writing, delays in editing

Adam Gray [00:45:08]:

Have you posted it to Amazon? So it is it will be any moment now it will be available.

Rob Durant [00:45:13]:

It will be available by the end of this week. And if you would like to get notice of the wait Live, you can go to socialenablement. Enablement. On socialenablement. Pro or the QR code on screen, you can register to have an email notification when the book becomes available on Amazon and other book resellers. Yes. Sorry about that, Alex.

Alex Abbott [00:45:46]:

It's alright. It's a good resting spot.

Adam Gray [00:45:50]:

So, Rob, your book, in a nutshell, why should somebody buy your book?

Rob Durant [00:45:58]:

That's a great question. Honestly, they shouldn't. They should know these things already.

Tracy Borreson [00:46:06]:

I I know the answer. Oh, I know. Because you know Rob and you like Rob and you wanna support Rob, and that's why you buy your book. And this is what social enablement is all about, folks.

Rob Durant [00:46:16]:

There you go. Honestly, there's nothing groundbreaking in there.

Adam Gray [00:46:21]:

It's No. But no. But I would I would disagree. I would strongly disagree.

Tracy Borreson [00:46:25]:

Short selling this, my friends.

Adam Gray [00:46:27]:

Yeah. Because there is. There's not a lot

Tracy Borreson [00:46:30]:

of writing in there.

Tim Hughes [00:46:31]:

Live read it as well, though.

Tracy Borreson [00:46:32]:

Rob's brain didn't know. He knew it and he wrote it down.

Alex Abbott [00:46:35]:

Yeah.

Tracy Borreson [00:46:36]:

But there's a lot of

Alex Abbott [00:46:37]:

ground breaking

Tracy Borreson [00:46:38]:

in there that other people do not know.

Adam Gray [00:46:41]:

No. But but I think that that the point is that that yeah. From a fact perspective, you know, we've been doing this for nearly a decade now. So we've we've published all of our IP into the public domain if you chop it up and, you know, put it out there all the time. But these the the the thing that you've achieved, Rob, is you've brought it all together in a really coherent way, and you've wrapped it in a beautiful narrative that is easy to understand and easy to digest. And I've made loads of notes from having read it where I think thought to myself, I'm going to steal that. Steal that with pride because that's such a great way of describing that particular thing, or how you Gray that, or how you've positioned that. And I think that for anybody in a sales role, be that a sales leader, a sales enablement professional, a sales enablement leader, a salesperson, anybody that's in a revenue facing role, they should read this book because it helps frame the actions that they need to take to be successful moving forward.

Adam Gray [00:47:48]:

You know, it it every time you go on to LinkedIn, there's somebody saying they've got a a a a 2 hour master class that will tell you all of the secrets. Yeah. And and all of these things are Gray. And they do tell you Tracy secrets that you need to know. But they don't tell you how to implement the secrets. And they rarely tell you why you should implement the secrets. And the beauty of this is that it clearly lays out what the process is, and it says you need to learn more about this bit. You need to learn more about this bit, but it gives it great context.

Adam Gray [00:48:15]:

And I don't believe that anybody can read that book and then not at the end of it say, right. I understand what the road ahead looks like if I choose to go down this path. And I think that from that perspective, if nothing else, from that perspective, it's a must read for everybody in a revenue role.

Alex Abbott [00:48:34]:

And and what I'd like

Tim Hughes [00:48:35]:

to add to that, Rob, is that, it's clearly written in your voice. And as you say in the book, you know, your your father was a teacher and you feel that you're a teacher and it's not it's not patronizing. It's it's funny. It's, it's positive. It's, and the and and and you've got these great exercises at the end of the chapter. So it's not like here I am standing on the top of a hill with 10 commandments go away and do them. You've actually got the exercises to say this is how you do this. And and and you've come up with an an an, you know, this is this is a great example.

Tim Hughes [00:49:14]:

So it's it's it's Gray way of of if you've got the the theory and the practice as well. So that

Tracy Borreson [00:49:19]:

as well.

Rob Durant [00:49:20]:

So that brings me to why I say, nobody should buy it. You should all know this inherently, but you don't. And that's okay because I didn't either. We all have this FOMO. We know we're supposed to be on social media, but we don't know how, we don't know what, we don't even know why. And that's the approach I try and take with the book. Simon Sinek laid out that roadmap. Start with why, explain the how, and then tell me the what.

Rob Durant [00:49:57]:

And I've put together a very prescriptive process with examples of how to do each of the 3 basic Jensen. Be approachable, be sociable, and be generous. And speaking of generous, I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone here for their generosity. Tim and Adam for bringing me into the fold with the

Tracy Borreson [00:50:25]:

LA Ignite and showing me

Rob Durant [00:50:25]:

this path. Tracy, Al, showing me this path. Tracy, Alex, Bertrand, you've all been very generous with all of the ideas that you exchange both privately and publicly. And that's the opportunity that I hope everyone reading this book has as well to get to know the entire team here at DLA at night to get to know everyone in your network. We all have valuable things to Gray, but we just sometimes don't know how to go about saying it. Certainly not publicly, certainly not on social media. I'm not Gary Vee. I'm not, Kardashian.

Rob Durant [00:51:09]:

I'm not, I'm not, I don't care what you're not. I only care what you are. So take this opportunity to to share that part with me. And if you don't know how, well, the book will map that out

Adam Gray [00:51:22]:

for you.

Alex Abbott [00:51:23]:

Yeah. I think for me that, you know, it it's not know you may have said this before, Tracy, I'm sure, but it's not it's not oh, it's wrong. It's not what it's not it's not what you know. It's not the fact that people now know. It's the fact in your Rob, you actually talk about, you know, you kinda give them the guidance of what to do, how to do it.

Rob Durant [00:51:45]:

It's not what you know. It's not who you know. It's who knows you for what you know.

Alex Abbott [00:51:51]:

There we go.

Tracy Borreson [00:51:52]:

I say that all the time.

Bertrand Godillot [00:51:53]:

That's true.

Adam Gray [00:51:54]:

Stolen with pride. Stolen with pride.

Rob Durant [00:51:58]:

Steal liberally. The the more people that hear that message, the Ross sociable these platforms become. Because right now, they're too much media networks. Stop shouting at me. Stop pitching and start selling.

Adam Gray [00:52:18]:

Yeah. So so one of the the lines that I absolutely loved in this was, for each of the experiences that you have, you have 2,000 words available, so why give me just 10? And I just Live that. I absolutely love that. Because that's the essence of it, isn't it? You know, the essence of it is to tell people everything about yourself, where you've been, what you all of this stuff. They're they're under no obligation to read it all. But the better the story that you tell, the more of it they'll read. And the more of it they read, the better they know you. And the better they know you, the more comfortable they are with you and the more likely they are to believe you when you speak.

Adam Gray [00:52:55]:

And, you know, the these concepts are concepts that we all inherently do understand. You know, when we go to a party, we don't say, hi. I'm Rob. I'm in sales enablement, and I'm I understand Abbott how to enable sales team to put, you know, that's not what you Gray. I'm a dad. I'm a teacher. I love the following things, you know. That's that's the thing that we all get.

Adam Gray [00:53:19]:

Every single person gets that. And yet, we come onto these digital networks and we go so I'm gonna talk about podcast week, I got a 15% increase from this Live. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about any of this stuff. And yet, we still keep keep, recycling it because it's almost as if we believe that there's this secret rule book written of how we need to behave in the business context. But there isn't. I mean, it's it it Live, everyone thinks, oh, William LinkedIn, it's a it's a business network, and you're not supposed to share personal stuff. So where does it say that? Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, he never said that.

Adam Gray [00:53:54]:

It's not written in any of the terms and conditions. So why would you be assumptive and think that that's what he wanted you to think?

Alex Abbott [00:54:01]:

Good point.

Rob Durant [00:54:02]:

Because that's what makes me comfortable. And I would much rather tell you how you should not use LinkedIn, how it's not Facebook than it is to put myself out there.

Tracy Borreson [00:54:17]:

This is one thing I will say because even for Live, I'm a personal brand advocate. I'm known for my authenticity and going through this program it tested tested my ability to be vulnerable on LinkedIn, and that is a practice. Right? So then once once you do it a few Tim, then it gets easier and easier and easier. And I'm not saying and I don't think any of us are saying that this is about revealing all things about you to the internet. This is about me saying, I had a moment with my son and this is what happened, and this is what it taught me about personal branding. And this is part of the reasons why I am a branding expert is because I see branding in the entire world. I see it in this episode. I see it in my son.

Tracy Borreson [00:55:06]:

I see it in the neighbors across Ross street. I see it. And so when you can take those things that you uniquely see and show them to people, then what they get to see is you're seeing things that other people don't see. And those things that you think are so basic, there's nothing new in this book, are things that other people have never been able to put together until you used your words to tell them it. And so that's why I think there's so much power in this concept of social enablement because we're just really selling we're socially enabling people to share their story. And authenticity, in my definition, is about you saying or doing what you would do or say, when you would do or say it. I don't get to dictate what story you tell. You dictate what story you tell.

Tracy Borreson [00:55:57]:

But you tell the stories that you wanna tell. And you stop letting fake boundaries on LinkedIn selling you you can't tell them because you can't.

Rob Durant [00:56:08]:

Yeah. But, Tracy, that's scary.

Tracy Borreson [00:56:10]:

Yeah. It is scary. It's scary. And this is the thing I tell my son. My son is 6. It will always be scary until you try it. Well, it doesn't get less scary until you try it and you start to work your way through how you would do it. And then once you find your way to do it, it's not scary.

Tracy Borreson [00:56:31]:

But as long as you sit there and wait, it will continue to be that same amount of scary. It won't get any less scary. You gotta just do it.

Adam Gray [00:56:40]:

Yeah. Right.

Bertrand Godillot [00:56:42]:

I think you're right. Perfect.

Rob Durant [00:56:46]:

I think that is a perfect way to wrap this up. If you want the thing, you have to do the thing.

Tracy Borreson [00:56:54]:

Is that what we're saying? I heard that. I heard that before.

Alex Abbott [00:56:59]:

You want the thing? You have to buy the thing.

Rob Durant [00:57:01]:

There we go.

Tracy Borreson [00:57:02]:

In the book.

Rob Durant [00:57:04]:

You can join the wait Live for the social enablement blueprint at SocialEnablement.Pro or scan the QR code on screen.

We now have a newsletter. You can sign up for show highlights, beyond the show insights, and reminders of upcoming episodes. You can visit us at DigitalDownload.Live and click on newsletter or follow the QR code on screen.

On behalf of the panelists, thank you all for being part of this inaugural World Enablement Day social edition. And we'll see you next time on The Digital Download.

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