Digital Selling defines the future of the sales industry

Interesting guest post by Kevin Neary CEO @ CONNECTORS | #DigitalSalesTransformation | #DataScience | Blogger | Speaker | #SocialSelling Analytics | Innovations in #LeadGen |

Digital Selling has arrived and is fast becoming the future of sales. As the lines between sales and marketing blur and the roles merge we’ll be hearing a lot more about digital selling in the next few years. Social selling is an explosive topic right-now but it’s just one component that makes up digital selling.

WHAT IS DIGITAL SELLING

Digital Selling is the use of digital assets to identify, engage and drive revenues from buyers. Digital selling takes a holistic view and brings together many elements across the organization to guide buyers through a journey that ultimately leads to better engagement and ultimately more closed deals.

It certainly does include social selling but also many other assets like advanced analytics, sales automation, digital documents, customer relationship management, online presentations and more.

The term digital selling emerges as part of the current wave of digital transformation which is impacting every single industry. For the sales industry, which has been slow to change; it means the eminent fusion of marketing, sales and customer service to eventually form just one revenue generating unit.

This transformation has started and will ultimately take many years to become mainstream as forward thinking multinational organizations lead the way whilst the more cautious small and medium sized businesses watch and learn.

HOW DOES IT WORK

Digital Selling starts with evolving an organizational structure to firstly create content and then distribute and measure how customers engage with the content.

Sales teams distribute content through social selling, webinars, podcasts, video etc., and the rate at which the target audience consumes the content is the ultimate barometer of how engaged buyers are as well as their propensity to buy.

One of the reasons that Digital Selling is the future of sales is that everyone is involved in the creation and distribution of content – this holistic view is more efficient and also results in better quality and more consistent messaging.

Sales leaders are creating whole departments focused on research; with content connoisseurs reading everything written and becoming experts on specific topics. This exhaustive and continuous research is with a view to creating large volumes of valuable sales content to help sales teams educate their customers and guide them along the new buyer journey.

Digital selling focusses on writing content specially for groups of customers in a specific product category in a specific territory. The content writer crafts an engaging narrative for the social sellers who reach out to leads; start social selling conversations with a view to warming them up for the salespersons to close the deal.

IMPACT OF DIGITAL SELLING

Many of the world’s leading organizations have already created these digital selling departments. These departments consist of content writers, social sellers and salespeople now operating as one business unit focused on revenue generation. Traditionally these tasks would have been executed by many different departments across the organization.

The integrated nature and structure of these new digital selling departments are well aligned with the new buyer journey.  Today’s buyer is digitally focused, always online consuming information on vendors, products and services and is normally 70% along the way with the purchase decision before engaging with a salesperson.

Success at digital selling is an iterative process that can be measured by tracking for consistent rates of buyer engagement, which is the ultimate litmus. There are plenty of advanced data analytics tools flooding into the market to help forward thinking sales leaders drive engagement, customer conversion and revenue attainment.

The future of sales is all about the buyer journey and how to stay ahead of the competition in this regard.

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