Bill Stinnett: The Digital Selling Handbook

The Digital Selling

Futurists are now predicting that many more corporations will be moving toward a model where their sales teams will be composed primarily of self-employed subcontractors as opposed to direct (common law) employees.

We actually have two different but similar models for this already. One is the “manufacturers rep” where manufacturers engage a third-party representative to promote their products to regional distributors and local retailers, for example. The other model, which is incredibly pervasive in the technology space, is one where solution providers offer their products and services through value-added resellers (VARs), dealers, agents, distributors, or the more generic term, channel partners.

Selling the Way Customers Buy Today

According to the latest research from Gartner, only 17 percent of the time a B2B buyer invests in a buying process is spent engaging with potential suppliers.

If we’re not willing to leverage digital media to continue selling in between the few meetings we are able to get with our customers, we lose the ability to influence perception and help them draw favorable conclusions during 94 percent of their buying process.

The vast majority of buyers — as many as 92 percent in one study — express a preference for virtual interactions with sellers.

Your prospective clients need and want real answers to real problems provided by a real person, but they want it on their terms and on their timetable.

Serving is the new selling! Today’s buyers are looking for more than just a source to buy from. They want a resource to learn from!

Your customers have not only changed where they buy; they have changed how they buy. Don’t approach today’s communication channels with yesterday’s sales and marketing strategy.

Changing the medium or delivery mechanism of your outreach can measurably improve results.

The big opportunity today lies in radically changing what is written or said within your sales and marketing message, not just how you deliver it.

A big part of digital selling is empowering your customers to learn about you and how you can help them even before you have any personal interaction with them.

There are at least eight truths that help distinguish digital selling from whatever we want to call the kind of selling we did before everything went digital.

• Digital Selling Is for Anybody Who Is Promoting Anything. If your prospective customers can’t find you or get to know more about you from their smartphone, you basically don’t exist.
• Digital Selling Exists to Facilitate Digital Buying. In today’s world, we have to leverage technology to empower prospective clients to make digital buying decisions on their choice of media 24/7/365. One of the key objectives of digital selling is to develop e-relationships with prospective customers as we empower them to come to know, like, and trust us before they ever have a chance to meet us.
• Digital Selling Often Combines Inbound and Outbound Strategies. If you restrict your digital selling efforts to a single medium of communication — regardless of which it is — you could be missing 90 percent of your potential to connect with prospective buyers. For many companies that can attract, transact, and deliver entirely digitally with little to no human contact, an inbound-only strategy can be extremely successful and cost-effective. Good examples would include traditional and online retailers, inexpensive SaaS (software as a service) providers, online education, and other self-service offerings. The majority of B2B settings, as well as most medium-to-big-ticket B2C sales environments, call for a creative combination of the two.
• Digital Selling Is Predominantly Asynchronous. The majority of digital selling is done asynchronously! Whether we like it or not, this is the future of selling because it’s the future of buying. “I’m just a synchronous guy. That’s who I am. I sell by talking to people!” Well, I suppose that’s fine for anyone who’s willing to render themselves irrelevant for the majority of buyers in today’s market. In the early stages of their exploration process, today’s buyers strongly favor a more self-directed, asynchronous approach to buying for several reasons: They truly don’t have time. They want to maintain control. They demand convenience. Your customers have too many other choices of people to work with and sources of information who are willing to engage digitally. If the only objective of our asynchronous sales efforts is to try to book a synchronous conversation, we are totally missing the true potential of digital selling. The true art of digital selling is proactively influencing perception and helping customers draw favorable conclusions about us before and after any real-time conversations!
• Digital Selling Is More Than Just “Social Selling”. People don’t go to LinkedIn to be sold to, either. They go there to find a job, network with like-minded people, and most importantly, to find prospects to whom they can sell their own products or services.
• Digital selling is Not Just Online Advertising. Digital selling is much more than just building awareness; it’s about literally changing what your readers or viewers believe about you and, more importantly, what they believe about themselves. A powerful brand is one that tells a story in which the prospective customer is the protagonist!
• Digital Selling is Done Primarily in Writing, Audio, or Video. I believe the aptitude to sell verbally will always be in demand and is still one of the most valuable skill sets in the world. But getting a scheduled appointment so you can sell verbally often requires great writing skills. Writing “sales copy” is basically using words to create digital assets, such as: Social media profiles and posts. Subject lines and the body text of emails. Scripts or talking points for telephone calls or voicemails. Scripts or talking points for prospecting or educational videos. Websites, landing pages, or any other mechanism to convert visitors into leads or customers. A wide variety of sales assets we can use to do the selling for us when the customer isn’t willing or able to talk to us in real time.
• Digital Selling Is Not Just a Job for the Marketing Department. You can build a team of sales development representatives (SDRs) or create an inside sales department to do a lot of the day-to-day outreach to prospects. But some aspects of prospecting, business development, networking, and referrals will always be the responsibility of the salesperson who “owns” the territory or the entrepreneur running the small business.

Engaging Customers Early in Their Digital Buying Process

If you want to better attract, serve, and retain customers, you have to learn to think about what customers think about. Commit to studying and internalizing the psychology of how and why customers buy.

A buying process begins when a customer recognizes some dissatisfaction with their current state. This is when they realize they have some sort of need, pain, problem, or challenge that is significant enough to do something about.

Most of what is sold in this world is not an end unto itself; more often it’s a means to an end.

While we might sell a solution, what our customer actually buys is a result!

Once the client has acknowledged their problem or dissatisfaction, you can then lead the conversation to explore their desired future state.

This exact same model, which is incredibly effective for real-time selling, is the perfect tool to guide our efforts for creating the content and assets we can use for asynchronous digital selling as well.

So much of what is published in social media and blog posts or made into videos for company websites is all about B. It’s all about our company and what we offer. But it doesn’t have to be that way! We can use social posts, published articles, YouTube videos, or really any medium to pose questions and engage readers and viewers in e-conversations about their current state (A) and desired future state (C).

The quantum leap happens when we embrace the fact that today we often need to empower customers to work through buying decisions entirely asynchronously.

We don’t want to give up the perceived control we have in real-time, synchronous selling. But that control we think we have is a false perception. We lost that control the instant one of our competitors put up a series of YouTube videos to answer customer questions that used to require a face-to-face meeting.

The best time to engage your target clients is before a project even exists! You want to be the one who helps your client recognize their dissatisfaction and paints the picture of the ideal Point C you can help them achieve.

Those of us who are hunters can’t afford to wait around for our target prospects to contact us! In that kind of sales environment, a proactive outbound approach is imperative!

In his book The Ultimate Sales Machine, author Chet Holmes offered a diagram that is quite eye-opening for just about everyone involved in sales and marketing. Only about 3 percent of the people or companies in a typical market are actually ready to buy something at any given time. These “Top 3 percent” are in buying mode. Beyond those who are currently in buying mode, there is another 7 percent or so who are “open to explore.” The “Next 30 percent” have some awareness of their own need for help at some point. The “Middle 30 percent” that have no awareness of their own need for help yet. And last, we have the “Bottom 30 percent” who are not only unaware they might ever need what we have to provide, but are opposed to even thinking about it.

Focusing on finding and selling only to the Top 3 percent is a flawed strategy today because by the time they arrive there, customers already have a strong preference for the company that helped them get there digitally.

Digital selling using insight, on the other hand, helps people get ready to buy by providing knowledge, guidance, and information that changes their perception of: Their dissatisfaction of the current state (A). The consequences of remaining at A. The possibilities available at their desired future state (C). The payback or return when they reach C. Why they should take action now. Why we are the ideal partner to help them.

When delivered well, insight provides context for interpreting new data, real-world examples, suggestions for practical application, and proven best practices.

When it comes to digital selling in an asynchronous fashion, insight can be shared in a wide variety of formats: Website or landing page copy. Videos on websites, social platforms, or YouTube. Downloadable assets like white papers, studies, or a “free guide” of some sort. Social media posts, either organic or paid. Comments you leave on other people’s posts. Articles, books, and ebooks. Blog posts, either on your own blog or as a guest on someone else’s. Podcasts, either your own or as a guest on someone else’s. Online text-based, live-audio, and live-video discussion forums. Digital advertorials and other paid or bartered digital content placement.

Whenever possible, focus on creating separate marketing and outreach campaigns for those people and companies you believe are currently in the upper 10 percent versus the lower 90 percent.

The most effective marketers today, the voices that others want to follow, the “influencers” in this world that shape market perception, are influential because they freely share their thoughts and opinions with everyone.

• Create a Problems and Results Inventory. Literally, make a list of problems you and your company can help customers solve at Point A and the results you can help your customers achieve at Point C.
• Title at Least Three Articles or Videos.
• Write or Record Something for at Least One of Those Titles.
• Post or Share Your New Digital Asset.

Perfectionism is a form of procrastination usually driven by fear of what other people are going to think. Get past that! Do something imperfect with these ideas today.

Mastering Digital Selling and Content Development

• Who do you hope will see or consume this content?
• Where should you publish it? (What is the best platform to use to deliver it?)
• When, or on what cadence, would you want to release it?
• Why would you be posting this to begin with? (What is the intended objective?)
• What should you say or try to communicate with this piece of content?
• If you capture their interest, what should you ask customers to do next?
• How could you persuade the reader or viewer to take the next logical step?

Any and all of our efforts should be directed to accomplish a specific purpose.

We’ll look closely at how customers make buying decisions. We will uncover how to influence customer perceptions as we help them draw conclusions about us, about what we offer, but also about themselves.

The quantity and frequency of publishing digital selling assets definitely matters — as does how you choose to deliver them. But what matters more is the way you make people think and feel after they read or watch them.

Any significant buying process boils down to two big decisions that are based on the buyer answering two major questions:

• The Action Decision: Do we really need to buy something now?
• The Choice Decision: Who should we buy from?

Three words are really, buy, and now.

Corporate investments now require more documentation, justification, and “hoop jumping” than ever. Your customers will probably never do all of that if they don’t have to.

• We really need this. It’s not just a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have.
• We need to buy this as opposed to trying to make it or do it ourselves.
• We need this now. We can’t afford to wait or put this off any longer.

Exploring the various factors that go into supporting those two big buying decisions that customers have to make. I call these factors action drivers and choice drivers.

There are eight action drivers:

• Motive: We have a compelling vision of our desired future state (Point C).
• Consequences: We cannot afford to stay where we are today (Point A).
• Urgency: We recognize the urgency to take action on this now.
• Priority: This endeavor is of the upmost priority to us at this time.
• Consensus: We all agree on the action and the direction we need to take.
• Resources: We are willing and able to invest the money, time, and manpower required to get this done.
• Payback/Return: We are convinced the payback or return on the completed project is worth the investment.
• Risks: We are willing to accept the risks of taking action now.

Choice Drivers – To make their selection, your buyer would have to believe all or most of these statements to be true:

• The Trust Factor: We know, like, and trust these people and this company.
• Knowledge and Insight: These people have the knowledge and insight we need.
• Customer Experience: These people honor their commitments and are easy to do business with.
• Stability and Reliability: These people and their solutions have a strong track record.
• Product/Services Solution: This solution is the appropriate quality and is a good fit for us.
• Availability and Delivery: These people have the appropriate product selection and can deliver what we need, when we need it, and in the way that we need it delivered.
• Price to Value/Risk Ratio: This solution is the best value and lowest risk option for the price.
• Terms and Payments: The terms, conditions, and payment schedule are the best fit for us.

“Social proof” is a key element people use to determine whom they will trust.

Creating content to use for either inbound demand generation or outbound prospecting isn’t something you do in addition to your job. This is your job!

If you have time to consume content, you have time to create content.

If you’re only willing to share your guidance and advice with the people who are ready to take your phone call, that’s going to be a small percentage of your market these days. Digitize everything you know!

Knowledge is the new currency! If you want people you’ve never met to know what insight and expertise you have, you’ll have to show them and tell them in some kind of digital format.

• What do I want to publish about?
• Where do I want to publish and in what format?

Try to restrict your content creation to non-selling hours.

The best way to develop a lot of content quickly is to create what I call nested content. You can take larger assets and break them down into a variety of smaller pieces.

Pick a topic that you think has the potential to really influence your customer’s thinking about one or more of the action drivers or choice drivers.

Create or curate a long-form piece of content, such as a 20-to 30-minute video or a 600- to 800-word article. Slice that one video asset into a half-dozen 3- to 4-minute videos to post on LinkedIn or Facebook. Break the article down into several smaller pieces of 80 to 120 words for short posts on your choice of platform. Take the best one-liners from both and post them on Twitter.

Whether you create your digital assets yourself or hand that job to someone else, you have to make sure the finished product is designed to actually sell by shaping perception and influencing your customer’s thinking and behavior.

Get involved in the creation of your content and build in the kinds of questions, stories, case studies, and insights that you would share if you were literally talking to your customer in real time.

Selling via digital content should be the asynchronous equivalent of whatever you would normally say to your customer on a telephone conversation or in a face-to-face meeting.

Designing Your Digital Selling Engine

Whether you are running a business or selling for one, remember this: a marketing department, a business development team, or an outsourced lead generation function are simply resources to you. The person who owns the revenue number needs to intimately understand all the digital selling touchpoints — all the pieces your prospects see throughout the customer relationship journey.

Early on in my corporate sales career I adopted a Business-Within-a-Business (BWB) mentality. I paid for my own computer and whatever software applications I needed. I bought my own prospect lists and covered the cost of sending prospecting letters via FedEx to target executives (best approach ever, by the way). I even hired a part-time assistant to take as many administrative tasks off my plate as possible — on my own nickel.

If you see yourself and manage your territory as “just one of the reps” at your company, then your customer will only ever see you as “just another rep” and therefore someone they’ll probably try to avoid.

An effective digital selling strategy is composed of a combination of inbound and outbound selling mechanisms that fit your business model and sales environment. I call this your digital selling engine.

The engine is designed to empower customers at every stage of their buying cycle and lead them through a customer relationship journey.

I break the digital selling engine down into four layers as follows:

• Connection Layer: This is where we make connections with people we don’t yet know or who don’t yet know us.
• Conversion Layer: This is the layer where connections, followers, or visitors can be converted to some deeper relationship.
• Selling Layer: This is where selections are made, commitments are made, contracts are signed, etc.
• Retention and Repeat Layer: This is where the next sale is made.

Every sales pro or business owner needs to know the keyword phrases that their prospective clients are typing into search engines as they relate to the kinds of solutions they provide.

Take the responsibility to know the keywords your prospective clients are typing in.

The key to being found in a cost-effective way via paid search is the use of “long-tail keywords.”

You have to look beyond cost-per-click and focus on how many of those clicks become paying customers. CPA (cost per acquisition) of a new customer is what you want to look at.

Outbound engagement can be synchronous, in the case of a live telephone conversation, or asynchronous, in the form of written, audio, or video assets sent to prospects via some delivery mechanism.

Best practices such as research and preparation, genuine empathy, conversational discovery, and a desire to actually help people are being abandoned for the sake of expedience and playing the numbers game “at scale.”

It’s the substance of what is in the email that determines its effectiveness. But just because they look at your email does not necessarily mean they are going to respond to it or do anything with it.

Basically, a funnel is a streamlined website (landing page) designed for the express purpose of converting visitors into leads. Many companies use lead funnels in lieu of or in conjunction with a traditional website.

The true heart of your digital selling engine is your company website — or at least it should be! Your website should be your primary conversion tool. A great website converts visitors from one stage of the customer journey to the next. Your website needs to be more than just an online brochure. It should be designed with the intent of propelling visitors through their digital buying process.

Put simply, the selling layer is where you connect the dots between what your client needs and wants and what you have to offer. It’s where you: Earn trust and rapport. Position yourself and your value promise. Present the buyer with options. Overcome any obstacles standing in their way. Mitigate risk in the buyer’s mind- Ask for a commitment.

Of course, the ideal situation for many of us would be to figure out how to sell more of what we offer in an online, self-service model where people can buy without having to talk to anyone.

In the world of digital selling, a list of opt-in subscribers including email addresses and/or mobile (text) numbers is solid gold. It’s literally like money in the bank. Social followers are great!

Perhaps the hottest tool for adding value to a subscriber list, attracting new prospective clients, and turning existing clients into repeat customers is a podcast.

One newer platform for organic social that has tremendous potential is social audio.

Please don’t try to create a digital selling engine that is so complex that it’s unsustainable over time. The complexion of your engine needs to be proportional to the amount of time, money, and human resources you can allocate to running it.

Building e-Relationships Throughout the Digital Buying Journey

How to lead people through what I call the customer relationship journey.

To align with how your customers live and buy today, invest in building e-relationships with people wherever they are in their overall process. Then, be willing to continue to invest as you lead them through the customer relationship journey one step at a time, if needed.

Three categories: A prospective customer right now. Someone who may become a prospective customer in the future. Someone who could recommend you to a prospective customer at some point.

The heart of digital selling is learning to leverage a variety of digital assets throughout the complete customer relationship journey, which I break down into three major phases:

• Pre-Conversation Phase: This is the time when we attract and build e-relationships with prospective customers who are in the early stages of their buying process.
• Conversation Phase: This is when we have made contact and begin having person-to-person interactions with our prospective client.
• Post-Conversation Phase: This is the period when we continue to foster relationships after our customer makes a purchase.

“You don’t have to close a big deal all in one conversation. Just help your customer take the baby steps toward the close.”

When you build e-relationships and engage in e-conversations, you allow your prospects to self-select and choose to move to the next step in the relationship journey on their timetable.

We’ll start by looking at a progression of steps of:

• The pre-conversation phase.
  • Stranger: No Relationship. A good example of a stranger would be users of a social platform whom we have not yet connected with. Learn to use comments on other people’s posts as a way to start a dialog the same way you’d mingle at a live networking event. Simply join the conversation your prospect is already having with other people online.
  • Follower: Connection Made. Followers could be a connection on a social platform or a subscriber to a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel. Make it a habit of requesting to connect on LinkedIn with every person you meet in a business setting!
  • Consumer: Reading, Watching, or Listening to Content. As a consumer, a person would partake of the insights and ideas you are making available to them through social media posts, blogs, articles, YouTube videos, or whatever other platforms you are leveraging. Converting followers into consumers of what you publish is all about the quality and presentation of the content you post. Much like the subject line of an email, the first sentence of your post needs to be interesting enough to get people to click on “See more.” Video will typically get significantly less social “reach” than straight text. Which simply means fewer people will see it. But video does produce higher engagement rates and, I find, much higher conversion rates in terms of profile views and inquiries.
  • Engager: Liking or Commenting on Your Content. Most people who post on social media cannot resist tracking the number of likes or comments their posts produce. The goal of using social media for digital selling is not engagement in your posts. The goal is conversion from one stage to the next in the customer relationship journey! Great social content that speaks to people should be designed with one of these four objectives in mind: Instruct: Teach people how to do something, how to avoid something, how to fix something, or how to accomplish something. Enlighten: Inform people and make them aware of some new trend, some new bit of knowledge, a new threat coming their way, or a new opportunity available to them. Inspire: Provide encouragement to help people believe in themselves and what’s possible as well as the motivation to do something about it. Entertain: Make people laugh, bring a smile to their face, or just give them a temporary escape from the tedious, the stressful, or the mundane.
  • Promoter: Sharing Your Content. When people so identify with your content that they are willing to repost it on their own timeline, it represents the ultimate endorsement.
  • Subscriber: Email or Text Opt-in. The email or text opt-in subscriber stage is one of the most important steps your customers can take in the relationship journey. They are basically signing up to hear from you whenever you have something new to share. The idea of gated content is creating some kind of gate that a person has to pass through to gain access to it.
• The Conversation Phase. The purpose of all your efforts in the pre-conversation phase is to earn enough trust and rapport with your followers that those who need your help will either contact you or provide their contact information to you.
  • Contact: They Provide Full Contact Info For this discussion, we’ll define a contact as someone for whom we have complete contact information.
  • Conversation: Personally Interacting with You. For any of us who grew up in the world of synchronous selling, a “conversation” is synonymous with a meeting, videoconference, or telephone call.
  • Trial Customer: Testing or Trying Your Product or Service. In situations where it’s possible, offering your customers a free trial of your product or service is one of the very best ways to advance the relationship beyond the conversation stage with little or no risk to them.
  • Starter Customer: Bought Insight or Something Small. One outstanding strategy that is gaining momentum for advancing relationships is giving people the opportunity to become what I call a “starter customer,” thus moving them one step closer to being a full customer.
  • Customer: Bought Full Product or Service. If my hunch is right, I don’t need to explain what a paying customer is. Don’t forget that there is an entire third phase of the customer relationship journey after someone becomes a paying customer.
• The Post-Conversation Phase. Once your customer completes a purchase or an investment — meaning they buy something and you deliver what you’ve promised — we enter what I refer to as the post-conversation phase. One of the best ways to literally multiply your time is to use digital assets to keep moving your client relationships forward even when you can’t be there.
  • Repeat Customer: Bought Multiple Things.
  • Steady Client: Ongoing Investment. For some of us, there is a stage beyond repeat customer that we’ll call the “steady client” stage.
  • Advocate: Testimonials and Endorsements. Advocates are clients who are willing to testify on your behalf and tell the world how you’ve helped them. In a world where anyone located anywhere can put up a website and call themselves the global leader in _______________ (fill in the blank), nothing speaks louder than a real client talking about how you added measurable value to their world.
  • Champion: Actively Recruiting and Referring Clients to You. The ultimate destination of the customer relationship journey is creating champions who will not only say a few nice things about you when asked, but will promote you and tell other people every chance they get.

Creating a Magnetic Personal Brand

A strong personal brand is more than just a way for people to identify you. It’s a way for people to identify with you!

In today’s digital marketplace, being real is more attractive than trying to be impressive.

Nine elements that make a personal brand magnetic. They are:

• Knowledge and Expertise.
• A Heart for Serving Others.
• A Compelling Promise.
• A Relatable Personal Story.
• The Courage to Step Out.
• Credibility and Authority.
• A Platform with Reach.
• Consistent Communication.
• Genuine Irresistibility.

Knowledge and Expertise. Many of the most effective sales professionals and business owners are those who possess deep knowledge in their field of expertise. If you want to become well known, you have to know something, or know how to do something, that other people want to know or do! You become much more valuable to your customer when you know their business, their industry, and their competition and show them how to improve in one way or another. It’s not the person who knows the most, but the person who most effectively shares what they know, that becomes the expert that others turn to when they need advice. You can’t be a leading expert on everything all at once. Focus on a niche.

A Heart for Serving Others. The second ingredient needed for a magnetic personal brand, which is surely as important as the first, is a heart for serving others. People can sense our heart by the language that we use, our interest in them, our responsiveness, our generosity to freely share what we know, and also by how we define success.

A Compelling Promise. “So, what are you selling?” Have you ever been asked that? I actually love that question because it gives me the chance to answer with my favorite little comeback line: “I’m selling revenue and profit margin. Are you interested in either of those?” A message is a statement about what we do and who we do it for. A promise, on the other hand, is a story that places your customer at the center of a journey.

A Relatable Personal Story. One of the most powerful aspects of your personal brand is your own personal story. Nothing engages a reader or a viewer quite like seeing how you found your way from where you once were to where you are today. A story with purpose! It has an origin, a destination, and a promise!

The Courage to Step Out. As simple as it sounds, the thing that keeps many people from building their own personal brand is that they are afraid to step out and say, “Here I am!” Get clarity on what you want to accomplish. Find some other people to learn from. Take baby steps!

Credibility and Authority. Comedian Eddie Cantor is often credited with the quip, “It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.” Establishing credibility, however, is something entirely different than just attracting a lot of social followers. Credibility and authority come in other ways: Become a Professionally Published Author Nothing builds credibility and authority like being professionally published in newspapers, in trade magazines, and by major book publishers. Become a Podcast, Video Show, or TV Host or Guest Getting our own show on NBC might be a stretch for most of us, but anybody can start a podcast. The best way to be invited to be a guest on podcasts, online shows, and even television is to become a professionally published author. Embrace the Art of Public Speaking.

A Platform with Reach. If you’re going to develop a brand that has gravity and influence, people have to hear about you. They have to know you exist. Before the era of social media, this was an incredibly expensive and time-consuming undertaking.

Consistent Communication. If you want people to know you, appreciate you, and remember you, they need to hear from you regularly! Maybe you could set a goal to share your story and your promise by. . . Posting on LinkedIn three times a week. Posting a video on YouTube once a week. Being a podcast guest once a month. Publishing an article once a quarter.

Genuine Irresistibility. The ninth and last element of a magnetic personal brand is probably the most powerful of all. Here are the nine qualities of irresistibility. Love: appreciation, endearment, admiration. Joy: enthusiasm, positivity, optimism. Peace: composure, serenity, contentment. Patience: tolerance, even temperament, being slow to anger. Generosity: kindness, compassion, helpfulness. Integrity: goodness, honesty, consistency. Dependability: faithfulness, loyalty, trustworthiness. Humanity: gentleness, humility, respect. Self-mastery: self-control, discipline, restraint.

If you love your customers, you are constantly seeking to understand what they are trying to accomplish and the challenges they face.

If you want more joy in your life, get around people who embrace joy — even if you can only associate with them digitally. Joy goes hand-in-hand with gratitude and hope.

You can never meet expectations if they are not properly set to begin with. Part of developing your integrity is carefully making promises that you know you can keep and then keeping them.

Sales Prospecting in a Digital World

The real impact came from proactively reaching back into the early stages of the buying process to engage customers who demonstrated some early stage buying intent.

The best time to reach out to prospective customers is whenever they are willing to respond to the outreach!

Inbound paves the way for more effective outbound. And outbound multiplies the results of your inbound! Do both!

The main reason most salespeople don’t see the prospecting results they really want is not because they don’t know what to do. More often they just don’t do what they know.

Ask yourself if one or more of these could be sabotaging you right now. We are not really convinced that what we have to offer actually helps the customer. We let fear and lack of confidence paralyze us. We vacillate between tools, platforms, and approaches too frequently. Often we experiment with several methods but don’t commit ourselves to one long enough to get into a rhythm that starts producing consistent results. We haven’t done enough prospecting to really get good at it. We don’t manage and prioritize our time well. We put forth inconsistent effort. We don’t have a master prospecting plan or a weekly plan of action.

Two different methods of outbound prospecting, which we will refer to as tactical prospecting versus targeted prospecting.

Tactical prospecting is the method that is more traditional and where many of us have the most experience. The more targeted method represents the big opportunity for many salespeople and business owners.

The term account-based marketing (ABM) has become quite popular in the last few years. The premise of ABM is that we would market ourselves differently to each target account based on knowledge that we have about them or buying behavior we can observe.

Another vital part of putting together an effective prospecting strategy is defining your approach angle.

“What direction are you coming from?”

I identify at least five different positions that you can take when it comes to approaching an executive-level prospect.

• Educator.
  • Explain how the latest technology can impact the customer’s business.
  • Share the latest industry trends and the impact they might have on the client’s business.
  • Spot opportunities and threats to the customer’s business and offer a plan for how to capitalize on them or avoid them.
• Problem Solver.
  • Proactively identify current-state issues or obstacles to achieving specific goals.
  • Find root causes to problematic situations and craft solutions to address or eliminate them.
• Connector.
  • Introduce your prospective client to other executives in their industry.
  • Provide contact and access to industry thought leaders and experts.
  • Bring in needed business partners to solve problems and provide capabilities beyond what you currently offer.
• Collaborator.
  • Help your customer assess their current state and current levels of performance.
  • Help them put together a plan to improve their performance in some way.
  • Help them execute that plan and maybe even provide resources as needed.
  • Help them measure the results they achieved at each stage of the process.
• Innovator.
  • Bring new ideas from outside their business or totally new to the market.
  • Challenge the status quo of the way they do things today.
  • Help them rethink how they currently operate and then recommend process improvement and best practices.

The following are the seven good reasons for reaching out to customers. Maybe even write out a sentence or two that comes to mind regarding how a request for a conversation might sound coming out of your mouth.

• Learn about their plans, goals, and initiatives going forward.
• Teach them something relevant and useful.
• Inform them of something they need to know.
• Provide insight they may not already have.
• Bring them a new “profit opportunity” (i.e., a way to help them improve their profitability).
• Introduce them to others on your team.
• Invite them to something special.

After a brief conversation . . . You’ll know more about _______________. You’ll be able to _______________. You’ll have all the information you need to _______________. You’ll know exactly what to do about _______________. You’ll be able to decide _______________.

If you want to sell past the gatekeeper, sell to the gatekeeper!

Four Key Elements of a One-to-One Approach.

• A good point of reference.
• Something you’ve learned about them.
• How you’ve helped someone else like them.
• What you want them to do next.

If your approach sounds so generic that it could apply to anyone, most people automatically assume that it doesn’t apply to them.

Once we’ve established the method we’ll use, the people we’ll approach, our approach angle, and the substance of our approach itself, the next question becomes, “How are we going to reach out to try to get these people’s attention?”

Response rates to emails that include video are documented to be at least three times greater than response rates to emails that don’t include video.

When you don’t reach out to people because you want to avoid hearing no, you also avoid hearing yes!

Most salespeople really flourish when they adopt a pattern, use it for a while, and tweak it into just the right sequence to use repeatedly over time.

30-Day Prospecting Plan

• Set some business development goals! Determine exactly what prospecting results you want to accomplish and why. Determine the number of opportunities you want to add to your pipeline this month. Think about how many client visits you’d like to hold each week, the numbers of approaches you want to make each day, or the number of new deals you want to add to your pipeline by the end of the month.
• Decide which companies, divisions, or business units you will target that would be ideal additions to your client list.
• Decide which people you will target within each company. Which ones would most likely play a role in a buying decision?
• Decide which mediums of communication (letter, phone, voicemail, email, text, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, etc.) will be part of your approach pattern.
• Decide which planning and tracking tools or templates you will employ to organize and track your efforts and results.
• Decide how much time you will invest in business development on a daily or weekly basis.
• Execute relentlessly for the next 30 days. Don’t let anything knock you off track!

Managing and Closing Deals Digitally

The potential for using digital assets to find and create sales opportunities is truly limitless whether we adhere to strictly inbound strategies, choose to leverage outbound, or use a combination of the two.

A lot of really great sales training courses. They covered topics like prospecting tactics, closing techniques, and negotiation skills, but what really fascinated me was managing the overall sales process.

I organized my own six-stage process for selling the kinds of complex technology solutions my company offered. Most salespeople today have seen something like this. Identify. Qualify. Validate. Propose. Close. Deliver.

The whole reason that we have a sales process is to help our customers work through the steps and stages of their buying process. We book revenue, retire quota, and get paid based on what our clients do. Our job as a sales professional is to help facilitate our customer’s buying process.

Here are the six stages of a typical complex buying process, as I have defined them: Recognize. Explore. Evaluate. Select & request. Approve & commit. Implement. To turn this six-stage buying process into a repetitious cycle, where the customer buys from us again and again, we have to add a seventh stage. I call this the missing stage “Assess & Measure”.

“Can you sit down and write out the steps and stages your typical customer has to work through in order to buy?”

The instant your customer arrives at Point C, it becomes the new Point A. What was once the desired future state is now the new current state, and the whole process starts all over again.

If you want to drive customer satisfaction and repeat business at the same time, learn how to help your customers assess and measure themselves against their own past performance and, even better, against similar companies in their space.

Map out a typical buying process for the types of customers you work with. Determine which buying roles might be involved at each stage. Think about the actual personas who will play a part in each of the major steps. Think about what guidance and information you and your company could provide at each step.

The average customer spends 45 percent of their time in a complex buying process doing online and offline research. Wow! They spend another 22 percent of their time meeting with other members of the buying group.

What sources are they going to for information? What kind of information is the most helpful to them as part of their research?

Decide what format or platform to use to share your guidance and information.

The one huge drawback to asynchronous selling is that you forfeit the opportunity to ask for a commitment and wait for them to agree in real time. You lose the ability to truly close!

For every critical step that requires us to obtain a commitment from the buyer, there are six or seven other steps the customer needs to take that can be supported quite beautifully using digital selling assets.

For more complex selling/buying processes, here are at least four major steps where a real-time conversation is absolutely crucial.

• Discovery and Needs Assessment. There’s just too much at stake to step into a product demonstration — or especially into a solution presentation or a proposal — without being able to ask some questions to make sure you are presenting or proposing the right thing.
• Custom Solution Demonstration. Some products lend themselves nicely to being demonstrated via prerecorded video. Many of the questions that are asked during product demonstrations provide great opportunities to draw differentiation between you and competitors or to really help solidify your customer’s choice decision.
• Presenting Proposals and Pricing.
• Negotiation and Closing It is possible to go back and forth with your customer to negotiate pricing or other terms and conditions via email, but it’s not ideal. I strongly believe there are digital assets we could create that would enable us to better facilitate the buying process at nearly every step through all seven stages.

Industry benchmarks: The idea of industry benchmarks is very appealing. Companies are always curious to know how they are performing compared to their competitors or to their peers. If you are able to collect data on various key performance indicators across organizations, and then enable your prospective clients to compare themselves to their contemporaries, that can be a fantastic way to start a relationship.