Digital Selling and Sales Training Journal

Social Selling Tips Watch this video on social selling tips. When it comes to sales prospecting and lead generation, sales people are finding that the road to success is utilizing social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pintrest, Snapchat plus other niche social networks to create awareness and to connect with influencers, buyers and decision makers. This is why s ocial selling along with digital selling has become one of the dominant tactics to find and engage with new prospects. Well trained sales people are now using social media to provide value to customers and prospects by contributing to conversations, sharing knowledge, , replying to comments and off course sharing quality content. They map the buyers journey and the digitally influenced buying process, from awareness to consideration to decision, engaging and nurturing the prospect until they are ready to have a sales discussion. The life of every sales person is changing rapidly. The who

Lead Generation: A Beginner’s Guide to Generating Business Leads via Social Networks Lead generation is never easy even with the openness of social media. Whether you are just beginning in business or are well established, the effort and work to nurture potential customers can be demanding. Add in the fact that the older traditional forms of lead generation such as cold calling, trade shows and emailing are in decline, you may be scratching your head as to how exactly to find new customers. Two words – Social Networks. What is lead generation using Social Networks? It is a solution that can help you engage buyers where they gather to source information and avoid you becoming another annoying, disruptive cold caller who still engages in disruptive practices. Before you start trawling the social networks looking for buyers, you need to identify your Ideal Customer Profiles plus define what the term lead means. Next, we will cover what lead generation is, why you need to spend 2

Sales Prospecting Tips – Video We hope you enjoy this sales prospecting tips video we created to help improve your sales training. Today’s best sales people use social media to support their sales prospecting and buyer engagement efforts, they understand that the modern approach to sales is to help customers consider not just what to buy but how. Key tactics they use: mapping the journey, identifying barriers, designing prescriptions, and tracking progress. But they also share two overarching characteristics: First, they avoid focusing on getting customers to buy from them and instead concentrate on how customers make purchase decisions. Second, they tightly align their sales efforts to support the customer journey from start to finish. As a result, these sales people create consistent and relevant engagements, valuable messaging, and guidance to shape and simplify the purchase journey, drive sales, and ultimately increase customer loyalty.

Digital Selling or Is It Social Selling? At times, there can be confusion over the terms “Digital Selling” and “Social Selling”. The sales training and enablement industry interchange these terms without proper explanation.  Digital Selling is the act of using digital assets to engage buyers, while Social Selling is the specific act of using the social networks to engage buyers. So, what’s the difference?  Well firstly, think of all the digital assets you could use to target buyers, you have email templates, video, articles, images, infographics and online presentations. Digital Selling is the strategy of having marketing and sales work together to share and distribute these assets in a programmatic way. So Digital Selling is a big picture overview of how a business can use assets, data, sales people plus other people who touch customers to promote their brand using the digital channels. Social Selling is a tactic, an additive approach to the sales process which involves 1

To prosper in today’s digitally influenced market, social sellingtraining and the use of the social channels to sell should be part ofeveryone’s digital sales strategy. Across the entire global sales community, social selling is being blended into the sales process, tapping into the vast amount of insights that the social networks provide to both buyer and seller. Probably the first time since John H Patterson created his sales training methodology for NCR, sales people have to adjust their skill sets as the now traditional forms of selling such as cold calling have an ever-decreasing success rate. Preparing and learning the skills so that sales people can harness the power of social selling to engage buyers is now critical, not a nice to have. The buyers journey has changed along with the profile of a typical business buyer, their wants, needs, values and how they conduct business has altered completely from 10, even 5 years ago. So social selling should be a genuine communic

Sales to Social Selling Transformation Strategy for Business Leadership Course Highlights This course is for sales and marketing leadership considering how to implement a formal social selling program for their business. Focus is on strategy. Defining and making the case for social selling as a key element of your marketing and sales process. Why it can be used as a vehicle for social transformation and integration into the sales strategy. The modules cover how a successful prescriptive social selling and digital sales program would look inside your organization. To some business leaders “Social Selling” can at times seem like an overused buzzword. The proof is here that it can provide an enterprise with tremendous value but, without the right perspective, enterprises can find themselves adopting it prematurely or not sufficiently preparing themselves for the demands of a social selling program. This course helps identify your company’s readiness. What the Course Covers

Learn how to social sell. The Digital Sales Institute will help train you in all aspects of social selling.  Because when it comes to your sales efforts, tell me if this sounds familiar.  You constantly need more prospects to engage with, and spend hours trying to find them. Your cold calling has limited, even zero success. Inbound leads only get you so far, so  everyday you search the social networks to find leads to fill your pipeline. Maybe you are frustrated with the results of your social activity. maybe your efforts are not getting results you expected or you are paying too much for a sales lead using Google etc. You see, The buyers journey has changed. B2B BUYERS have adopted consumer-like behavior. They now conduct product research online, they self discover, seek out information via the social channels, and often make purchasing decisions without any sales rep’s involvement. Those customers who engage with sales agents are already 57 percent of the way through the buying

Traditional sales methods have diminishing returns and tactics such as cold calling have become an unwelcome intrusion in the buyer’s journey. To sustain business success, sales and marketing professionals need to adopt digital techniques as part of any efficient selling strategy. Social selling skills are transforming sales, prospecting and lead generation. The Digital Sales Institute course in Social Selling is ideal for a variety of sales professionals, from inbound and outbound consultants and reps, to business development executives, account managers and sales team leaders. If you want to enrich your selling techniques, develop your digital capabilities, and maximize your career potential, this course is for you. What the Course Covers Introduction to Social Selling The introduction module will help you understand what is social selling and why you should use it in your sales process. It answers questions such as; “Who is your customer?” “What is their ne