The Vengreso 10 step digital sales
program is uniquely designed to get the buy-in you want from the sales team.
Our proven method creates behavioral change and measurable outcomes that prove
return on investment. Review the diagram below along with the explanation of
each step. Think about the game-changing impact a digital sales strategy can
have on your sales team and their results.
What Is Digital Selling?
Digital
selling is the ongoing process of leveraging digital channels to find, engage
and connect with prospective buyers. The goal is to build relationships on
digital platforms and turn online connections into offline sales conversations.
The
modern buyer is savvy in their approach to identifying potential suppliers.
Salespeople who effectively apply digital selling techniques
digitally touch the buyer many times. The process requires a mindset shift to
use these digital channels to provide value, develop trust and build
relationships with buyers.
Sales
professionals who are successful at digital selling have a LinkedIn profile that
uses customer-centric messaging to address the specific challenges their
prospects face. Additionally, a digital sellers’ profile consistently leverages
digital assets, which include videos, case studies, research reports,
testimonials, podcasts and others. These content assets serve to deliver value
to the prospective buyer.
Digital
selling professionals establish a regular sales cadence so that their approach
is consistent, authentic and effective in engaging the modern buyer to start more sales conversations.
Sales Enablement Soiree Presentation on the 10 Steps
Below
we have outlined for you the 10 Steps to Launching a Digital Sales Program.
You can
read through it, or you can also watch this 45-minute video presentation that
our CEO, Mario Martinez Jr., gave on the 10 steps.
Follow the 10 steps below
to launch a digital sales program with your team to build your pipeline, create
more sales conversations, and improve your win rates!
Identify Goals and Success Metrics
Buyer Identification and Mapping
Develop a Content For Sales Strategy
Drive Adoption Through Gamification and Recognition
Measure and Adapt for Improvement
Coach for Sustained Successnd Success Metrics
Behavioral
change is critical to the success of digital sales transformation. The best method for changing
behavior is identifying the organization’s goals, and then measuring and
reporting on the behaviors tied to them. Prior to launching a digital selling
program, the first step is to identify the sales organization’s goals and its
success metrics, and then determine how these will be measured. The focus
should be on KPI’s, along with making adjustments to the CRM to track them.
Built
into effective CRMs are tools that help salespeople open opportunities.
EveryoneSocial, LinkedIn, and Sales Navigator among others, are tools used to
open opportunities while tracking their impact and use.
Loading
all selling tools into a defined, mandatory field within the CRM that allows
salespeople to choose which tool or tools they want to use, provides a simple
way to acquire reliable feedback for ROI measurements while removing the
possibility of the step being missed. Another way to look at this is: “Tools
That Help you Open an Opportunity.”
Because different tools may be used throughout
the opportunity process, adding a compulsory pop-up when the opportunity closes
is another way to obtain reliable data, and again, another means of measuring a
tool’s ROI.
The “tools” field is also effective in
measuring KPIs of each of your tools and how they are used to fill the top of
the funnel with prospects and in closing deals.
KPI’s for sales teams should not be limited to
revenue performance. In digital selling, goals are geared toward creating more
sales conversations with more qualified buyers using tools that track their use
and impact.
InsideView, Outreach, LinkedIn, and Sales
Navigator are examples of sales prospecting tools salespeople
should be able to select in their CRM. This should be a mandatory field that
measures the use and impact of tools used for setting up appointments.
To maximize success, these goals should be
established with executive buy-in from sales leadership and the frontline sales managers.
It is critical that sales managers are given clear expectations in order to
monitor and measure their salespeople’s performance.
Another key success metric is broadcasting the
accomplishments of high performers through a gamification / recognition plan to
motivate sales teams to reach their goals. Sellers need a vehicle for sharing
stories, discussing best practices, giving feedback and asking questions. Consideration
should be given to the communication channel and how it will fit in with
your sales culture.Buyer Identification and Mapping
It is important to identify buyer types by
persona and / or vertical industry and how you engage them by sales role.
Verticals might include: small/medium business, enterprise accounts, industry
specific and/or multi-channel groups. Sales roles might include: sales
development rep, account executive, small business account executive, key
account manager, etc.
From a tactical perspective it is critical to
create buyer personas that include titles, their business pains, and also
keywords associated to their topical interests. Specific details should be
identified as they will be used to determine the content production plan
(explained in the next section). They also help to define what clients are
searching for online. These insights provide a framework for deciding the types
of additional filters to use when developing Boolean logic search strings for
prospecting on LinkedIn.Step 3. Develop a Content for Sales Strategy
Step three is the most critical element of the
10-Step process… Note, that this step should occur BEFORE you
conduct training (step 7)! Disregarding or short-selling this
step greatly reduces the chance of successfully implementing the remainder of
the Digital Sales Transformation Plan. In order to connect and engage buyers on
their terms, it is vital to develop a sales content strategy that maps to their
journey and pain points.
The buyer’s journey includes the following
phases: awareness, consideration, and decision/purchasing. When developing
content for each of these phases, it is crucial that content serve as a resource for buyers uniquely in each phase of
their journey. Content should answer questions and provoke critical thinking.
It should provide useful tips, define terminology and concepts, suggest when to
take action to solve a specific pain, how to avoid mistakes and give buyers a
reason to want to consume your content because it’s helpful to their journey.
Valuable content answers the why, the how-to,
the what-to, and the when-to questions.
Vengreso advocates a “vaulted content”
approach whereby content is stored in an online platform that is accessible to
Sales by login. Adding a robust repository of content assets – complementary to
your existing content marketing assets – for private messaging with buyers as
well as social engagement enables sales teams to quickly share content with
people in their social networks.
Content developed for sales enablement is the
most valuable content to produce because it’s used to create and sustain
conversations with buyers.4. Choose Digital Sales Tools
Digital sales tools are a critical success
factor in digital selling. We recommend licensing LinkedIn Sales Navigator for all sales employees to allow
leaders access to each salesperson’s networks. This tool reveals the entire
breadth of everyone’s connections across all sales teams, and accelerates the
connection power of the sales organization because each connection will be
visible to all users resulting in better collaboration and a stronger overall
network.
Employee advocacy tools such as EveryoneSocial or
GaggleAMP can increase adoption of content sharing across the entire employee
population, maximizing its potential. This might require having an
enterprise-wide license for all employees.
Another key tool that can set you apart from
your competition is a video sales acceleration tool such as OneMob. We
recommend this platform partly because it includes sales landing page
technology with robust metrics to know who has viewed your content.
We also recommend deploying an online calendar
that is fully integrated into the Outlook or Gmail calendar system to make it
easy to schedule appointments.
Additionally, we also recommend deploying an
auto text expander tool to create memorized shortcuts for often-used words or
phrases used by salespeople throughout their digital selling activities such as
messaging to new LinkedIn connections.
These tools represent must-have components of
your successful Digital Sales Training program.5. Develop
Customized Playbooks
Simplicity is very important to sales reps.
That’s why we recommend developing customized playbooks to streamline the
digital sales onboarding processes. A LinkedIn Profile Makeover should be the first playbook
introduced because it includes everything needed in each sales rep’s profile.
The user only needs to copy the content that was professionally written for
them and paste it into their profile. Vengreso LinkedIn Profile writers write
the content and your marketing team supplies rich media assets.
The next playbook in the digital sales process
contains messaging templates, scripts and search strings that map to the buyer
personas defined in step two. Each salesperson needs to know what to say when
connecting with a potential buyer. The playbooks should contain templates or
guides for creating InMails, messages requesting a referral, and other forms
of sales engagement, e.g. birthday messages, etc. Our
professional writers write the messaging playbook too.
In addition to simplicity, sales reps value
lessons learned from their peer’s successes. That’s why we also recommend
creating a playbook made up of sales success stories that originated through
digital selling practices, as we did for Reliant Technology during their Selling with LinkedIn training program.
The stories should include how the sale was achieved, which digital tools were
used in the process, and other variables to teach other salespeople tactics and
best practices for successful digital selling outcomes. Our professional
writers also write the success stories playbook.
The outcome of creating playbooks is a
scalable and repeatable sales cadence that ensures each salesperson knows
exactly what to do, when they need to do it and how they need to do it
throughout the selling journey. The key is keeping it simple for the sales reps
so they can easily implement the elements of each playbook.Create
Buyer-Centric LinkedIn Profiles
A buyer-centric LinkedIn profile is the result
of transforming a resume style profile into a resource page on LinkedIn. Each
salesperson’s profile should be written through the eyes of their buyer, which
means phrases like “quota crusher” or “great negotiator,” aren’t included.
Instead, the profile should use phrases that demonstrate knowledge of the
persona’s needs or of the needs of their vertical industry. To establish
credibility and trust, use terms that show care and understanding of the buyer.
Using buyer-centric words also increases the probability of being discovered
when the buyer conducts a keyword search. This is called LinkedIn SEO.
LinkedIn profiles should showcase client case
studies through rich media that relate to the buyer’s problems and should also
include a clear call-to-action that drives engagement.
A strong LinkedIn profile communicates value
to the buyer, which is a pillar of social selling.
Another way to look at the sales rep’s profile is like a mini website for your
company. If you have 100 sales reps, that’s like having 100 additional websites
that are on-brand and SEO rich.. Digital Sales Training
Here we are… Now, we’re ready for digital
sales training. With the first six steps in place, the sales team is eager to
dive into the training because the simplicity of the process is obvious and so
is the potential power of digital selling.
Digital sales training should be customized by
sales representative type. For example, inside sales, enterprise sales, channel
sales, vertical industry sales, each should go through the training customized
for their role. The training should be specific to each group so that each one
will embrace it and put it into action.
The optimal approach to training is through a
three-part program using On-Demand, which is
a a self-paced guided online learning program; Instructor
Led live training, which can be in-person or virtual; and Live Coaching for reinforced behavioral change.
This three-part training program supports the
six phases of transforming businesses into modern sales organizations.
This three-part training method comprised
of On-Demand, Instructor Led Training and Live Coaching is
the most optimal cadence to achieve behavioral change.
8. Drive
Adoption through Gamification and Recognition
In step one we mentioned the importance of
motivating sales reps to accelerate adoption. Recognition of success is key to
this. And, leveraging gamification in digital selling is key to spreading the
word.
We recommend setting up KPI reinforcements
such as new connections, SSI score growth, referrals requests, etc. Then, build
and present leaderboards with incentive prizes such as cash or non-monetary
rewards such as paid time off or donations to their favorite charity, etc.
Company communication tools such as Slack,
Salesforce Chatter, etc., are recommended to recognize high performers and to
motivate sales people to reach their goals. Vengreso’s On-Demand system
includes a built-in communication tool for easy collaboration.
Referring back to step one, changing behavior
to achieve digital sales transformation occurs through ongoing measurement.
This is why we recommend reviewing KPIs weekly with a focus on consistent
improvement.
Video and social engagement by sales reps
should be recorded in the CRM for reporting, and for enabling leadership to
identify what is and isn’t working. Using these insights, the playbooks should
be adjusted accordingly. Identifying positive and negative outcomes is paramount
to keeping the playbooks up to date and ensuring salespeople are achieving
sustained behavior change and are as effective as possible in their digital
selling activities.10. Coach for Sustained Success
To create long lasting behavioral change,
salespeople should receive ongoing coaching to reinforce successful behavior
and overcome areas that need improvement.
Most sales leaders are skilled at coaching
reps on activities such as account planning, presentations, contract
negotiations and even closing. But we’ve found that few sales leaders have the
experience to deliver effective digital selling coaching.
That’s why we suggest sales leaders reinforce
the coaching that salespeople receive from Vengreso in the context of their
overarching sales strategy and their culture. Leaders should use the data
obtained from the CRM as the guide to coaching and focus on fundamentals such
as creating more conversations, which will lead to more opportunities.
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