Give Your Customers What They Want – 5 Keys to Digital Selling

1. You Get a Personalized Look at Your Customer

One thing that has made digital selling a success is big data analytics. Predictive analytics packages help marketing and sales teams hone in on buyer behavior to craft content and campaigns that match audience preferences–without having to conduct traditional customer research. Sales intelligence gives you keen insights into customer personas and helps you get to know them on an intimate level, in many cases even before they are thinking of making a purchase (isn’t that novel!) And customers are looking to be impressed: 78 percent expect sales teams to personalize interactions based on their online activities.

One EY report further illustrated the benefits of getting to know your customers intimately. After a 30-day experiment where sales teams ‘lived the life’ of the customer from a sales perspective and built new initiatives on their findings, they experienced a 46 percent spike in new client acquisitions and a 67 percent increase in revenues.

2. You’ll Learn to Anticipate Demand

Once you have insights into customer preferences, you can begin to anticipate their needs and develop marketing and social media-driven content to lay the foundation for further interactions. In the new digital selling world, buyers are empowered to research products and services through a multitude of digital channels. In fact, 77 percent of B2B buyers said they did not talk with a salesperson until after they had performed independent research. So it falls to sales and marketing teams to stock the digital shelves with appropriate and compelling content that drives the sale. Doing so speeds consumers through the sales funnel and does it cost-effectively (self-service research shortens sales cycles, uses fewer resources up front and allows you to focus on conversion and close).

3. Social Selling Is the Icing on the Cake

Social media is also hitting its stride as a foundation for successful sales. An IDC study found that 75 percent of B2B buyers and 84 percent of C-level or vice-president level executives use social media to make purchasing decisions. Sales reps are increasingly working with the marketing and content development teams to create blog posts, reports, infographics and other interesting content that can be shared virally on social networks like LinkedIn. Since they can track the success of clicks, re-tweets, and downloads, it helps them be mindful of what works to improve their creative process. And social tactics aid the sales process as well: sales reps that use social media have a 3.6 times better chance of meeting a decision maker.

4. Driven by Data, You Get Better Results

Data-driven thinking is what’s behind digital selling–before, during and after the sale. Much like big data is used to slice and dice customer information and preferences, digital selling leverages as much data as possible to keep messaging tight and ensure that programs keep pace with customer demand. Most CRM products (which online training leader Simplilearn cites are either impactful or very impactful by 64 percent of sales teams) are built to measure the results of campaigns. You establish a benchmark, run the data on how much more success you can expect with program modifications, and keep raising the bar. For sales, it pays off. The EY report shows that digital-selling companies are 5.7 times more likely to secure prospect meetings and hit 150 percent of their quotas on average. 

5. Digital Selling Makes It a Group Effort

Selling used to be a one-way street, where activity progressed from the product team to marketing to sales to the customer. Now collaboration happens every step of the way. Product teams know how to make better products by listening to customers and marketers. Marketers work hand-in-hand with sales to generate the right types of content and campaigns based on data (it’s no longer a hunch: you don’t just throw campaigns over the wall and hope they work). And finally, customers participate by pursuing and digesting content that tells you the best way to engage them.

The great part about digital selling is that it just keeps getting better. The more you use readily available data, the better you can target prospects and customers with things they really want. Digital selling is setting the tone for customer-focused sales organizations everywhere.