Sell Like You Are from the Future

The Evolving World of Digital Presence Selling 

The Internet does much of today’s heavy lifting in sales by empowering people to seek answers and opinions with ease. 90% of significant consumer purchases and 60% of B2B purchases are influenced online. 

Digital Presence Selling (DPS) techniques transform your prospect’s computer screen into a selling stage that you pitch from. Digital Presence Selling is an idea you can run with to change the way your business connects with the world. 

In the B2B world, the average sales call is approaching $300.00. In the last decade, marketing departments doubled down on Internet marketing with great success but, the Internet has a hard time developing complicated prospects. 

CRM is the single largest marketing technology investment today. CRM is great at designing process and control into sales pitching. It’s a multi-billion-dollar business on a rocket ship trajectory yet it’s not quite enough to vastly improve close performance. CRM systems are data management tools, not pitching engines. Only 3% of cold calls get connected, and most prospects have amazing defenses that prevent you from getting through the company firewall of people.

Digital Presence Selling has been evolving for the past 20 years. The webinar is ubiquitous in the world of corporate sales. The problem is that the webinar is an older-school way of doing things. Getting people to grant future time and show up is hard. Webinars are appointment viewing which doesn't empower you to strike while the iron is hot, they take time to organize. Because selling is hard what we need is a bit of creative disruption transformed into a competitive advantage, and that's DPS. What we are creatively disrupting is field sales by helping them spend a bit more time in the digital world. 

People spend much of their time living within their screens. Digital Presence Selling compels sales organizations to invent new ways of turning those screens into powerful sales platforms. Your prospect’s screen is a canvas that enables both marketers and sales professionals to start developing new methods of being persuasive. 

When the world moves at the speed of tweet, being responsive in the moment is a real competitive advantage. Looking brilliant, being compelling and meeting the needs of your prospects in real time will accelerate how you sell and how much you sell. DPS allows you to ramp your sales focus nationally or globally. With the Internet’s open borders, the ability to reach new markets around the world becomes a real possibility without massive investment.

Since 2010 high-speed Internet and web video have become ubiquitous everyone can video conference and consume rich content via the Internet. The internet has evolved from information appliance to connection appliance. Our digital lives are now anchored by how we connect with each other online. This rewiring of interaction sets the stage for a revolution in how we sell. Inside Sales and Field Sales are going digital and creating the need for both new tools and rules. DPS is possible because of the mix of technologies we now have available given the explosion of cloud computing and massive increases in bandwidth. 

DPS melds the best of field sales, webinars, video conferences, digital marketing, and personal connection then wraps them up with a series of best practices designed to provide the modern sales team with a new set of persuasion methods. 

DPS enables: 

1. No long waits to book appointments. A digital sales meeting is easier to setup and schedule avoiding long waits to book appointments.
2. Elimination of travel cost.
3. Digital sales materials and support materials can be presented during the online pitch. 
4. DPS can have a complete integration into CRM to make certain opportunities never slip through the cracks.
5. Reduction in travel time increases the time available for both prospecting and digital pitching which can help dramatically increase sales revenue and sales team efficiency.
6. The very nature of the medium requires well designed digital sales tools which create strong professional impressions. It lets you reimagine your digital selling assets. 
7. Creates greater ability to connect with the client on the client's terms and timetable thereby gaining the responsive edge in a competitive pitching situation. 
8. A massive reduction in the cost of one-to-one selling without the loss of human connection and trust building which is common with call center focused sales.
9. Get the cost of sales calls down below $50.00.
10. DPS enables global influence and sales reach for even the smallest of companies.

DPS is not merely a video call. The methods of Digital Presence Selling are much more sophisticated. The sales process is unique; with sales deliverables designed for persuasiveness and screen-based digital selling. Sales teams need to learn the skills of presenting well, looking professional online and building strong connections through a camera. Digital Presence Selling is a way to link the efforts of marketing and sales together into a cohesive online persuasion engine. Digital Presence Selling is the future of selling. 

Best Practices for Digital Presence Selling. 

1. Creating sales stories and designing online show and tell materials
2. Training staff to sell through a camera
3. Reading digital body language
4. CRM skills to manage the pre, during and post-sales phases
5. Direct Integration of the Digital Presence Selling System with existing website and marketing campaigns.
6. Use sales studios, cube studios, sales sets, and proper staging to deliver a professional appearance with correct lighting and audio. 

The alternative to DPS is what many do now by using poorly designed digital sales processes, awful aesthetics (bad lighting, disastrous camera angles, terrible staging), disjointed webinars and video conferences that are at the worst damaging to brand perception. Digital Presence Selling forces you to ramp up professionalism. 

Getting face to face in a pleasing way is critical. Getting face to face instantly and digitally is game changing. There are only three key goals with DPS: 

• Increase the number of pitches.
• Reduce the cost of those pitches. 
• Dramatically improve the messaging of those pitches. 

Meeting these three goals will significantly improve the sales performance of any organization. 

DPS is about taking the sandbox of currently available technologies and melding them together to create a new way of reaching people. If you imagine sale meets the home shopping channel meets the vlogger meets the webinar meets digital sales materials, you get a pretty clear picture of what Digital Presence Selling is all about. If you can mash all these together, then you will be selling like you are from the future.

If you're intrigued check more at dps.bradygilchrist.com 

Brady Gilchrist is a Serial Entrepreneur, Inventor, Innovator, Futurist, Investor, Advisor and Strategic Marketer with 25 years’ experience creating companies, technologies and advising some of the biggest brands in the world. He also is very fond of dogs.