Digital Selling skills are no more for B2B Sales professionals as it has opened up a new and incredibly effective avenue to sellers as traditional sales techniques like cold calling no longer interest or convince today’s digitally savvy customer. More and more customers are now preferring to interact with sellers digitally that not just saves time for them, but also allows them to meet more vendors before they make a purchase.
To excel in this fast-paced digital world, sales professionals and sales leaders need to learn and hone several key skills to become successful digital selling professionals. For sales reps, it is important to understand what skills help engage and win over the customer in a digital selling environment. For sales leaders, it is imperative to know what are the ways to coach their sales teams to adapt to these new digital ways of selling and also to put the right metrics in place which are more relevant for the process of selling digitally.
Here we bring the top 3 skills to learn to excel in B2B digital selling
Digital selling means that the entire process of sales is complete without physically meeting the customers. While some might argue how is this even possible, there is empirical data to show that digital buying and selling is now being adopted at a seriously fast pace and one will only feel left behind as a sales individual or a sales organization if they do not adapt to this new way of selling.
Let us try to understand the 3 most critical skills to learn to adapt as well as excel at digital selling.
1. Social Selling Skills
Social selling is no longer an option but a necessity in the business. Sales reps can no longer rely on prospecting strategies, they must learn the art of social selling and cultural intelligence.
The goal of social selling is to build relationships with prospects through authentic human-to-human conversations formed through digital platforms. Social selling includes becoming adept at exchanging ideas, helping others, and bringing the community closer together. It’s time to go out there, meet people, and learn how to make people feel a part of your business. Social selling is an important skill for B2B sales professionals.
Cultural intelligence is essential if you want to leverage your network and build relationships with potential B2B leads. If you want to get the most out of social selling, you’ll need to get out of your head and understand how different industries operate.
2. Skills to Create Engaging Virtual Meetings
Virtual meetings are all the rage these days. If your face-to-face meetings are old-fashioned and boring, it’s time you learn to create engaging virtual meetings. A digital meeting will save you lots of time and energy traveling, parking, and waiting for colleagues or clients.
Before the pandemic, a group of buyers and sellers could network and build relationships in your conference room before the meeting. However, post-pandemic things have changed. Engaging virtually frees up your time (so you can do something other than wait around in an office) and they’re much more convenient to set up. They also provide a level of engagement that face-to-face meetings can’t match, which makes it easy to generate more interest and ultimately sell more. Plus, making them by yourself is incredibly hard — you’re going to need an audience for that!
Sales reps are busier than ever. Sales best practices have evolved in recent years with changes in technology, allowing companies to better leverage their time through virtual meeting technologies
3. Follow-Up: Building Relationships
The new era of digital sales means if you want to have a significant impact on your business, you need to focus on long-term relationships and one way to achieve this is to send follow-up messages.
You might think that contacting a prospect/client once to let them know you made a follow-up would suffice but chances are that most of your prospects and clients would be missing out on leads, opportunities, and the opportunity to win an account.
So the follow-up message should be specific. This means your follow-up message should give your prospects and clients an important message, providing a strong reason for them to respond. Then make it personal, by creating a human relationship with your prospect or client.
Conclusion
The importance of developing skills for today’s digital selling landscape cannot be overstated. Two recurring themes transcend all other topics: adapting to change and evolving with the times, and mastering your craft.
We at Zipteams are building X to 10X Digital Selling Teams. Do follow us to keep learning the new age selling skills every day. Cheers and happy Digital Selling!
