Kingsman: The Golden Circle recently crash-landed in theaters with a flurry of CGI and over-the-top stylized action. Following up on the 2014 original, The Secret Service, this frenetic flick has been described as the “cinematic equivalent of a cotton candy sugar rush.”
Whether or not that sounds like something that’s up your alley, this new-age take on the classic spy thriller genre undoubtedly offers some key takeaways about selling in the digital era. As buyer preferences evolve, sales pros must adapt in kind, with team leaders taking the reins and setting a tone for scalable personalization.
Find Your Audience
The Kingsman movies are often described as a caffeinated reimagining of James Bond. Whereas the legendary Bond series has generally been more subtle, with its smooth-talking protagonist frequently escaping sticky situations through savvy and guile, secret agent Eggsy Unwin is more likely to find himself in a high-octane car chase or acrobatic martial arts melee.
And while 007 always had his assortment of gadgets -- an explosive wristwatch here, a credit-card lockpick there -- the tech deployed in The Golden Circle is decidedly more ultra-modern, helping the movie attract and connect with millennial audiences. At one point, Eggsy hatches a plan to track down a cyborg’s girlfriend by using Instagram.
It’s reflective of the changing environment we live in. Bond’s charm may have been enough to foil his nemeses when the film franchise rose to prominence in the 1960s and ‘70s, but today’s secret agent needs a fresh set of tools -- and the same is true for sales pros.
We don’t have fancy 3D holographic maps pointing us to our prospects, nor Q to equip us with his latest R&D creations, so social selling is our best bet for compiling dossiers and taking the spy work out of lead generation, with buyers increasingly active on these platforms.
Scaling Social Selling to Stay on the Cutting Edge
As Justin Shriber recently wrote at Harvard Business Journal, “Marrying social selling with the right technologies can deliver a measurable impact on a sales pro’s performance.” He calls out some critical techniques that today’s reps can take advantage of for a scalable personalized outreach. These include identifying intent signals via social shares, tracking content engagement through PointDrive, and gaining better grasps of buying committees through LinkedIn intelligence.
Just as the Kingsman organization equips Unwin and its other agents with the latest tools and data needed to complete their top-secret missions, sales leaders should outfit their teams with the knowledge and enablement support to succeed in the field.
By adopting the right strategies, and evangelizing a social selling culture, you can get your salesforce operating like an elite international spy network (ideally, without all the villainous conflict and spectacular chaos).
Finding qualified buyers, learning about them, making warm intros, engaging in a meaningful way, closing deals, gaining referrals, and then starting the cycle over again: Now that’s what I call a golden circle.
And the best part? You don’t need a blockbuster budget to pull it off.
Learn more about scaling social selling and utilizing the best sales tools by downloading the Sales Manager’s Guide to Driving Social Adoption and Revenue.
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