Digital Selling and Sales Training Journal

Originally published The Essential Sales Skills - The Digital Sales Institute : In this article we discuss the essential sales skills that every salesperson should seek to master as selling moves into the next phase of its evolution. Nearly every sales skill that is essential for engaging buyers today can be acquired with regular sales training. The world of selling is moving fast around us, moving towards digital, moving towards soft skills and moving towards helpful consultative selling without the hard sales pitch. Regardless of how we consume our sales training, the program content should ideally target the essential sales skills. Make sure the online sales training program includes some of these sales skills. Soft Essential Sales Skills Salespeople who excel at the soft skills outperform their competitors by more than 30%, outperform them in areas such as close ratio, size of sales, and customer retention. Success in today’s marketplace is all about the soft skills.

Sales Training Programs Online Sales training programs online could become the preferred delivery channel over the next few years. Online sales training has both advantages, disadvantages, and parity with the more traditional approach to up-skilling salespeople. Remote working, flexible working hours, cost, productivity, and preference will lead to sales training being delivered online with a decline in traditional instructor led classroom training. The hard reality facing salespeople and sales leaders is that the selling environment has changed dramatically. Whether that is as a result of disruption, digital platforms, and buyer preferences. The impact is an increasingly competitive market, meaning that every business has to fight their corner to avoid revenue decline, customer churn and competitor moves. As salespeople are to the fore of human to human buyer interactions, training them has to mirror the digital journeys most customers now take. Add in the fact th

These sales insights for the years ahead to 2025 and even beyond will probably shape how sales organizations go about selling. Old sales strategies and sales tactics playbooks will be torn up as rapid innovation is changing how buyers buy. Technology and social media is opening up new ways of accessing information while disruption has engulfed nearly every salesperson. Unfortunately, many organizations have been slow to respond, preferring to rely on traditional sales strategies. One of the critical sales insights to accept is that B2B buyers are now being influenced in their buying behavior by their own experience as a consumer. Business challenges are often more about change management as the buying group can be inundated with choices and data. Plus, most decisions now have to consider the other business departments and stakeholders. These considerations are shaping the buyers journey alongside how they buy. The B2B buyer no longer just wants to buy products or solutio

Some sales tips for 2021 and beyond as we ponder some important questions.  It goes without saying that 2020 shook the sales world and a new reality was born.  No matter what happened in 2020, the continued rate of change is driving an increasingly competitive selling environment, lowering barriers to entry for companies and products. Add in the fact that expectations and preferences of customers continue to evolve. These forces are changing how businesses and salespeople operate, from selling tactics and business models to product offerings. In 2021 and beyond, salespeople with the right mix of technical and soft skills will become more important for business success. As the sales skill needs of business evolve, so too does the sales force. Our sales tips begin with sales expertise. The talent of the salesperson and the sales experience delivered will remain the top reason buyers choose a supplier. So, industry knowledge and a good cultural fit will take on a renewed si

What is a sales cycle definition What is a sales cycle? Let us begin by explaining what is a sales cycle and why it is a critical component of any sales strategy. A sales cycle is a map that lays out the step-by-step process that salespeople will follow that maximizes the possibility of a sale.  They can be long (in enterprise sales a year is not unusual) or short (in transactional selling it can be less than 30 minutes). It is the roadmap for a salesperson as they undertake sales activity because it guides them along the path to reach their end destination. Most sales cycles are aligned to the buyer’s journey that a customer follows to buy a product. Understanding the Sales Cycle When sales activity is broken into steps, a business can gather information on where customers enter or leave the buying journey. The success of each step becomes

  Sales techniques examples for an ever changing world to which all salespeople now find themselves selling into. We know that sale success is a based on two main things, hard sale skills, like product knowledge, and soft sale skills, which are harder to define. There is no doubt that selling today is highly competitive. Customers are more demanding than ever and even getting their attention is a huge challenge. Advancements in technology have made it so that customers can buy the products they need without you, or they can buy them from someone else without ever even leaving their office. So, every salesperson has to try to differentiate themselves. This means the needs and goals of any sales professional should be secondary to the needs of the customer. But first, maybe a good starting point to is try and define what sales means today. What Is Sales? Selling means exchanging value for value. The basic rule of selling is that people do not buy products; they buy benefits

Selling techniques are a moveable feast, to keep pace with the dynamic change in the selling environment as digital channels overtake traditional B2B sales methods. The role of a salesperson is to be effective, so your sales activity facilitates the decision making for the customer.  To do this, you must be able to. Open meaningful conversations with a customer. Understand the business issues of the customer. Help customers to understand these issues. Build an effective solution. Link your solution to the identified issues. Change Your Mindset in your Selling Techniques Before you work on your selling techniques, consider changing your perception of what it means to be in sales today. Sales techniques are not about picking up the phone or sending LinkedIn messages to people you know nothing or little about. Selling is about the exchange of real value, if you have real value to offer so