Companies with traditional sales process have struggled in 2020. In order to remain competitive, current and crush sales you need to roll with the digital times.
The pandemic forced many companies to rethink their go-to-market strategies for the better. These changes have forged the way for more potent and cost effective ways of selling that are here to stay.
Travel bans and social distancing impeded our ability to attend networking events, trade shows and have traditional face to face sales meetings. It has forced us to rethink how companies can leverage digital tools to improve sales effectiveness.
Sales effectiveness starts from the buyer’s journey and 90% of the buyer’s journey starts online. The better we are at targeting our ideal future clients, providing value and thought leadership to build a digital relationship, trust & credibility, the better the quality of the lead, and thus in turn improving conversion rates and sales cycles.
It has been reported that in 2020 it takes 20 to 24 touch points to bring on a new client. Furthermore salespeople using traditional selling methods usually give up after three touch points.
So how do we close the gap from three touch points to the 20+ required to win new business?
We need to augment traditional sales processes with digital sales processes to influence, keep front of mind and to remain relevant.
Using marketing automation to create modern sales funnels is a great way to do this. We also need to think about social selling platforms such as Linkedin.
Linkedin is a powerful business tool that many companies underestimate. It is not to be compared with other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram as these are more for “social” posting. Linkedin is about “business”, and it is a serious business tool that enables companies to identify their ideal future clients, understand the size of their addressable market, connect with them, influence them to stay front of mind, start conversations and identify real opportunities to fill their depleted pipelines.
Conversations are now the new leads and Linkedin is a great way to start conversations with the right people.
Linkedin should be part of any professional sales organisations growth strategy. It is a great format to create trigger events, to gain the attention of your ideal target market. “Attention” is the new currency. Creating lead magnets, high value downloads in exchange of prospects details is a good start to the buyer’s journey.
Many savvy companies are using Linkedin as their primary source of marketing, as it is measurable, and a great way to produce high quality leads, at low cost. As long as you know what you are doing!
Social distancing has forced companies to meet virtually which has normalized buyers agreeing to meet salespeople screen to screen. Think what this can do for your sales effectiveness, more meetings and no travel time means cost of sales comes down. It also opens up the world to you (time zone permitting), think about other markets that you may now be able to sell into now the high cost of travel has been removed.
The modern salesperson has to excel at developing rapport, conducting a consultative interview and presenting solutions via video conferencing tools such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, MS Teams etc. To be effective at selling, salespeople need to understand technology, etiquette, sales strategies and techniques to their advantage.
