Digital Selling and Sales Training Journal

Sales Strategy Plan : A sales strategy plan is your strategic approach to winning new customers plus developing and retaining existing customers. It also outlines in detail your sales goals and objectives for the period it covers including all the major marketing or sales tactics to be used. To create real, lasting growth for your business, you need to create your own grand sales strategy plan and then make it happen. The plan will outline in detail the who, where, why, when and how that will guide all your sales efforts for the period ahead. While your sales strategy plan should identify what your business will do differently to achieve the sales goals, it should also consider your capabilities. Capabilities such as the skills required, knowledge and the processes to carry out the plan. A plan without building these capabilities will struggle to achieve the desired results. Your sales strategy plan may be sound, but ask yourself, do you have the capability to make it work? Do

Creating a salesskills definition is unique to every business as they need to reflect the overall sales strategy alongside the expected sales activities of the salespeople.  Sales skills differ depending on inside V outside customer facing sales plus which part of the sales process a salesperson is involved with. Technology, social media, the internet and the digitally connected buyer has in effect driven the change in how we apply sales skills definition to a sales role. Sales Skills Definition This will bepersonal to each business. However, an overarching sales skills definition is the specific set of sales skills (prospecting, cold calling, nurturing, engaging, presenting, negotiating, closing etc) and knowledge (product, markets, trends, business etc) a salesperson possess to enact the exchange of value between a buyer and the vendor. Sales Skills Reflect the Business Environment Sales skills will always reflect the prevailing environment and the buyer’s acceptance of

Social Selling Meaning : If a business can outline their social selling meaning in relation to the overall sales process, they are ahead of the curve in becoming a social business. In other words, they see social selling and digital selling as an integral part of their sales strategy. Many sales leaders still struggle to put into words their social selling meaning or may just not understand the role social selling now plays in everyday sales interactions. Well, social selling is social by nature and remember that buyers are human, and humans are social by nature. All of us as consumers like to get opinions and advice from those we trust when it comes to making purchases. The same now goes for the way we buy and sell in the B2B world. The reality is that social media has given us the resources (buyer or seller) to expand out how we get opinions and advice, making us all more savvy and educated in our buying decisions. Social selling meaning Social selling meaning The first

Cold Calling Techniques : Cold calling has evolved from a standalone blunt prospecting activity into a tactic that when combined with social selling and data is a powerful customer recruitment method. Not every business can rely or wait for inbound marketing to produce enough leads to grow revenue, so more outbound sales tactics need to be implemented, to reach out and engage potential customers.  It may surprise you but 1000’s of buyer meetings and webinar attendance have come about as a result of “cold calling techniques”, in fact the success rate of cold calling is improving not declining. Cold calling techniques Cold calling is NOT DEAD but it has evolved. The reason for the improvement in cold calling success is that it has become more data driven, more targeted and blended to work with social selling and social media. Cold calling techniques now form part of a planned sales prospecting strategy and not just a numbers exercise. Remember that selling is fundamentally

Sales Prospecting Definition : A sales prospecting definition is the sales activity involved in profiling, engaging and nurturing prospects so they become paying customers. Sales prospecting is NOT about trying to find buyers in the market now to purchase your particular product or service.  It’s not that easy!! The end goal is to eventually move prospects through the sales funnel until they convert into revenue-generating customers. It is associated with a goal of increasing the customer base of the company and generating new revenue streams.  This definition can be customized to a particular business to account for their ideal customer profile, market, products and business model. Without new customers, a business will have limited potential to grow, while some sales growth will come from existing customers, it is not sustainable due to customer loss, churn and circumstances. This is why sales prospecting is one of the most important sales activities any salespers

Sales Skills Training : Sales Skills Training Sales skills training should empower the salesperson to reach a higher level of sales performance when selling to customers and prospects. We know that the role of a salesperson is evolving at a faster pace since sales skills were codified over 100 years ago. The main catalyst for the changing role of salespeople has been the amount of information buyers can access on the Internet and social media.  In fact, reports now show that the B2B buying process is not too dis-similar to the way consumers purchase, hence the growth in the SaaS and Freemium models. This has had the knock-on effect of the traditional sales process being no longer valid placing an onus on sales skills training to accurately reflect todays buyers journey. The challenge for both the business and the individual is to invest more time in sales skills training to learn and understanding the core selling skills for today’s digitally driven buying environm

Sales Training Exercises : Here are a few sales training exercises to liven up your sales training. The goal of sales training is to give salespeople a set of skills and tools that radically improves their sales performance. The use of sales training courses is an essential part of the whole sales industry, but we need to continually ask what value it adds to sales growth. In fact, up to 85% of sales training fails to deliver a positive ROI. The reason for this is that sales training sessions can vary from being brilliant to being absolutely boring. So hopefully the below sales training exercises can help positively impact on a salespersons experience when it comes to sales training. Sales Training Exercises: 1. Expectations. What will sales training have done for you? Get the sales course participants to imagine it is 1 year from now, they have been using what they learned during the sales training course continuously as part of their sales activity.  Get them to writ