Digital Selling DNA

Understand the context

Digital Selling DNA

Getting Started

Build your process

Sales OS - Connected Sales Workflows

Introduction

Build trust to build Relationships

For most professionals, their network of relationships is the main way they gain customers. Referrals from previous customers, as well as jobs and business opportunities, generate most customers. However, have you considered what you can do to improve your relationships this week? Have you develop new relationships or evolve or even simply maintain existing ones?

Some argue that they are too busy to make time for social networks. They say that time is money. However, missing important opportunities can be much more costly. Most of us attend networking events whenever we find the time. We feel guilty or bored and take that break or waiting time to socialize a bit. Platforms bring a constant flow of updates, and you will end up interacting with a random set of people, rather than the ones that your career needs. That makes people more interested in seeking help with tools. However, many tools are too basic and only provide auto-responders and programs that send the same bulk messages to all. They are too easy to detect and miss the point, which was to build trust.

Relationship building also requires time and consistency. Some things cannot be sped up, nor can steps be skipped.

Giving Power Back to the People

Traditional demand generation, based on attracting visitors to a website by ads or content, expecting them to convert into prospects by filling out a long self-qualifying form, is not well suited for B2B sales. Over 98% of web visitors do not leave their contact details, and GDPR makes it even harder to get them into your systems.

On the other hand, cold outreach is neither effective nor compliant. The modern buyer wants to initiate the buying process, researching and grabbing information themselves before involving anyone from the vendor. Does this mean that businesses and anyone trying to promote a product, a service, or themselves have to adopt a passive strategy? Do they have to pay hefty ad fees or invest heavily in content creation, only to wait for someone to discover it and then be happy with the minuscule fraction that converts into potential customers to talk to them?

Before getting into that, let's take a moment to examine how we have come to this situation.

Everything starts with someone trying to make people aware of how their problems can be solved. Somewhere along the way, a division was created between people who talk to people one by one (sales) and other employees who use technology to reach many people at once.

Salespeople are the best at tailoring the message to the exact needs of the customer, but if you want to scale, you have to make a compromise and make the message more accommodating to a broad audience, for broadcasting. That has been true for many years due to the state of the art of the technologies used, from print, radio, TV, and even in the internet era. The complexity to build web pages and the associated systems made them just suitable for specialized IT teams.

However, now, a single individual has access to easy-to-use tools, networks, and ways to reach thousands or millions of peers, customers, prospects, and stakeholders in general.

The marketing-led model has reached a peak of inefficiency. People do not want to follow brands but other people. For businesses, it means that technology and the means are best used in the hands of those who can build relationships with the customers. The answer has formed for a while with terms like Account-based Marketing or the inverted funnel. In a nutshell, it means starting by locating and identifying your exact target, then creating ways to reach them to attract them with a much-focused and thus more relevant and higher-converting value proposition, mostly tailored content.

The richness of social data, combined with the power to scale that smart automation tools and technologies provide, makes individual employees a much more valuable asset than an impersonal brand account. The resources have to be allocated to get the best returns, and employees, in general, and sales, in particular, are the ones that can get the best return on the assets (content) to reach their intended targets.

Just a quick note to clarify that I am not advocating the end of the marketing function. The messaging, the content, the production have to happen, but the units to deliver the whole experience have to be closer to the customer: a kind of micro-sales & marketing departments that control their universe of stakeholders. We will address that in more detail in the chapter "Content for Sales."

Digital Selling Principles

The Sales Journey is Defined by the Customer

A sale happens when a customer is ready to buy. Even as simplistic as it may sound, this is currently not the way most organizations' systems are set up. As a first step, the process is defined by their internal channels, marketing and sales, inbound and outbound, and within each, different flows that put the product first and then look for ways to feed in prospects into it, make them adapt, and consume whatever is defined in the script for each buyer persona in best case scenarios.

However, people are unique individuals with unique needs and interests, so businesses have to adapt and cater to each combination of need/pain, buyer stage, buyer persona, cluster, segment, or even better, an individual profile and the myriad of containers to transmit a value proposition from content types to media channels, forums, networking sites, and publishing platforms, both for mass audiences or one-to-one communications.

In reality, it is not as complex as it may sound but actually quite rewarding as each product or service's value can be better highlighted at each laser-focused case of use. Value propositions can be transmitted not only with content but also with other forms such as apps, extensions, integrations within the ecosystem. For example, the value proposition of a product can be better demonstrated by a Browser extension or an app that helps some users with a micro-pain, collateral to the value proposition.

Active Profiling of Each Prospect

Modern organizations cannot afford to wait for their customers to call them or fill out their website forms. Being passive limits the funnel and creates a split between sales & marketing that does not help the business. Sales cannot wait for their targets to happen to visit the website or request information. You need to actively find out groups that have shown any sign of potential interest and prove them with each of the value propositions.

Value Propositions Relevant for Each Individual- Long Tail Interest

Your product value can be as specific as each situation where there is a need. And people with that need will seek content, experiences, and solutions to solve it. Any form of help, typically a piece of content, is better adapted to each person as possible. There is an obvious trade-off to be able to replicate it to scale, but as technology evolves, so do the individualization possibilities. Start by segmenting by topics of interest, then go further by types of buyers, titles, stages, etc. Rich social data can help a long way with that. Then you can take it to the next level by using systems that react to the customer context and activity, using triggers to deliver the message at the right time, when the customer is actually actively interested in one of the micro-pains that you solve.

Build Bridges Wherever They Are Reachable

People talk to people, see what people do, and read what people share. And they do it in forums, social networking sites, and some other mediums of personal communications. Businesses have to be there, connected to influence them. But not as a business or as a brand, but as people. Employees, sales, ambassadors, influencers, or any other form of people, one of the best being your own users or customers.

Use Assistants to Monitor Each Target and Scale Up Your Reach

Yes, social networks are people networks, but that does not mean that your people cannot use some help. We are talking about tools and automation, but that does not mean to stop being personal. The critical point is where or who should use the systems. If you centralize in a kind of central community management center, you miss the point. We are talking about decentralization, being closer to the customer, individual to individual, but at scale. Give back the power to the individual, but give them the tools to survive, artificial intelligence assistants. Social networks are noisy, and without systems to filter, it is a waste of time, a waste of sales valuable time. And sales need to monitor lots of contacts and prospects, actually, each potential customer should be monitored for each potential opportunity. So there is no way to do that without tools. The good news is there are plenty of options. The not-so-good news is that you need a plan to carefully choose the one that fits in your strategy.

Build a System that Flows in a Natural Way

Everything has to adapt to the ways the customers want to consume our value proposition. Generate natural flows where inbound, outbound, the personas, and the content work together in the same direction to complement each other. Salespeople leverage content adjusted to their segmented list, automatically sent when a topic is discussed in a forum, with tracking systems that alert sales or initiate a chat when a specific prospect visits the website. To manage all the possibilities under one single omni-channel platform that aggregates everything is simply not possible. Besides the mighty technical challenge and the complexity to manage a monster that controls each channel to interact with customers, webs, mails, contents, video, forums, many of the most popular ones are outside the scope of the enterprise. The social networks and attempts to "move customer data" have to take into account data privacy regulations (GDPR, etc.). You have to play in each field with the best tools available at each. The only single point of nexus across platforms is the people. All systems have to have the person as the centrality point. That's why, for a business, the strategy to leverage its employees is the best.