The Digital Selling Crash Course
Chapter 1: Digital Selling 101
What is it, and who needs it?
Learn what Digital Selling is, why it matters, and whether you are suffering from the adverse effects of outdated traditional selling practices.
What is Digital Selling?
Digital Selling is the practice of leveraging digital technology to improve sales engagement with prospective buyers and enabling your sales team to close more deals, faster.
Digital Selling is an evolution from traditional selling designed to embrace the expectations and behaviors of the modern buyer. Modern buyers expect a customized sales experience that includes informative and engaging sales content, opportunities to connect face-to-face with a salesperson when they want to learn more, and zero reliance on in-person meetings.
To achieve this, Digital Selling brings together the latest advancements in cloud computing, digital content creation, management, and distribution, analytics, and digital communication. Digital Selling is to traditional selling what Uber is to the New York Taxi Cab. It’s all about leveraging powerful digital technologies to remove any awkwardness or friction in the sales experience. It’s also about empowering salespeople to best utilize their time and energy.
In this course, you will first learn how to quickly get started with Digital Selling. Then, we will address the many ways in which you can use Digital Selling to remove friction from your current sales processes.
Who should read this?
Do you sell? Do you support or enable sales teams? Are you a manager responsible for growing revenue and profitability? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, then it is very likely you are familiar with the following observations.
Have you observed the following with your sales?
Sales cycles are getting longer and more complex
It is challenging for sales teams to engage and convince multiple stakeholders & decision makers to adopt a proposed solution. Every influencer will have a different perspective and sense of urgency on the problem an offering aims to solve.
It’s getting harder for your sales team to qualify an opportunity
Prospects prefer to do their own research rather than meet in-person or online with your sales team. Prospects are unenthusiastic or hesitant to meet in-person or online with your sales team. Without these initial meetings, your sales team struggles to qualify an opportunity or get a chance to engage the prospective buyer.
Your prospects are irritated by the repeated attempts for meetings by your sales team.
Since you are unable to qualify your prospects early in the sales cycle, the sense of urgency is not known. Your sales team is demanding relevant content to engage the prospect rather than setting up a meeting to share the same information.
You are unable to capture and retain your prospect’s attention during in-person meetings
Your audience is quickly getting distracted during in-person meetings. You may realize your sales team is competing against the other screens in the room for attention. Your content is unable to capture and retain your prospect’s attention when you share it with them.
If you have seen, observed, or previously tried to address one of these observations, then you are suffering from the adverse effects of outdated traditional selling practices. These observations are just the symptoms. To address them, we need to dig beneath the surface and understand the root causes that are causing these symptoms.
Root Causes of Poor Sales Performance
Your Sales team lacks easy access to relevant content
If your sales team does not have easy access to relevant content that can engage on their behalf they will be heavily dependent on in-person or online meetings as the only way to engage their prospects.
Your sales team lacks insights about each of their engagements
When your sales team shares content with the prospects via email, or any messaging app, they do not get any feedback on engagement. As a result, your sales team finds themselves unable to determine the next steps, and gauge how nurtured a prospect really is.
Your sales collateral and presentations are not capturing the attention of your prospects
Most content design tools, that are used to create presentations and sales collateral, limit you to text heavy content with static images. This limits your sales team’s ability to capture and retain their audience’s attention during meetings. Leave behinds created using these same design tools will fail to continuously engage and nurture prospects after the meeting.
Your sales team is overwhelmed by the number of digital tools they need to adopt and use
The multiplicity of digital tools – CRM or content spreadsheets, cloud storage drives, presentation softwares, design tools, online meeting solutions and more – overwhelms your sales team. As a result, they resist adoption of transformative technologies and continue with increasingly ineffective but familiar traditional selling practices.
Your sales team can’t go on like this. The long term consequences of traditional sales practices with modern buyers is dire.
Traditional Selling Will Result In...
Low Win Rates
Longer Sales Cycles
Constant Demand for Discounts
Loss of Market Share
Higher Sales Costs
If you and your organization are experiencing these sales challenges and exploring ways to avoid these dire consequences, you will greatly benefit from this crash course. It will explain an effective framework for Digital Selling that overcomes these sales challenges. It also shows you how to put these ideas into immediate practice with fullfeel, a Digital Selling solution, and start benefiting from Digital Selling.
Digital Selling 101
Are you ready to unleash the power of Digital Selling?
Explore the Chapters...
What is it, and who needs it?
Learn what Digital Selling is, why it matters, and whether you are suffering from the adverse effects of outdated traditional selling practices.
Let’s skip the theory and put Digital Selling techniques into practice.
Your time is valuable. We promise in 30 minutes you will know exactly what to do to start helping your business close more deals, faster.
Transition from traditional sales collateral to digital sales collateral
Increase your sales performance by learning how to create immersive, engaging, and jaw dropping digital brochures, catalogs, lookbooks, and more.
3 rules that will improve the relevance of your sales content when engaging a prospect
Maximize your sales engagements by developing relevant content that addresses your prospect’s problems and presents the right information at every stage of the sales cycle.
Automate and accelerate your sales teams ability to engage
Learn how autonomous customer engagements and customer journey maps will enable your sales team to best utilize their time and energy.
The three phased approach to get your business to adopt Digital Selling
Transform how your business sells using the phased approach described in this chapter.