Selling in the Digital Age is a Massive Paradigm Shift. Yet B2B Technology Sales Has Not Adjusted!

We must realize that to sell effectively in the Digital Age we have to rethink just about everything we do. I suppose the reason we have not adjusted is that the changes have come gradually. But, gradual or not the cumulative impact is massive.

We may not realize it but just about everything is different now that digital is well established. To understand how profound this change has been let's compare B2B selling before the digital age and after.

Prior to the digital age prospects wanted to talk to salespeople, we made in person sales calls, most sales cycles started before a prospect was an active buyer, we did all our presentations on premise, We used print media to advertise our products, and we had field marketing that built campaigns for specific prospects and targets.

These days according to Gartner seventy-five percent of buyers prefer a salesperson free experience and no one wants to talk to a salesperson until they are interested. We rarely sell in person and do most of if not all the sales cycle over video. The concept of field marketing is all but gone. We use the web for all our advertisement and print media is also all but gone.

We have applied technology to all our sales efforts that we did not have prior to the digital age. But we have applied it to basically the same processes. This is the reason productivity has not improved.

The entire buying and selling process has changed. But the industry has done little to change its processes. The truth is you must change the way you build pipeline and the way you manage and execute the selling process.

Since prospects do not want to speak to you until they are interested you must get them to reach out before they become active buyers. Most of the sales calls prior to the web were made on the latent market (95% of the market). This gave sellers the opportunity to build credibility and trust prior to the buyer entering the active market (5% of the market). More importantly it gave them the ability to impact bias prior to a prospect becoming an active buyer. To do this, you must make them aware of you and create curiosity.

Since the prospect is not interested in you or your solutions you must create campaigns about them and not your company or product. This is done by focusing on them. You must create reach out campaigns that are targeted directly at what they care about. They care about themselves, their careers, their challenges, their friends and associates, families, and individual interests. You have to research them and give them something that speaks to these things. Perhaps it is an introduction through a person they know, or about an initiative or objective they have or something else they care about.

You cannot use corporate marketing for this. Corporate marketing is meant for the masses. Companies are not instrumented to build digital campaigns that target individuals. Companies cannot set up servers and web sites that cater to small numbers of targets or dedicate marketing resource to build massive numbers of campaigns. The time and resources make it too costly and too time consuming.

You need to use resources like Amazon to set up multi-channels. Multi-channels such as blogs, web pages, videos, while papers, e-books, social media that targeted prospects can access. The reason you will hear most for this is that you do not know what channel a prospect will decide to use or will be exposed to. However, there is another reason that is at least as important. The reason is that prospects are not likely to engage initially through a medium that will require a direct response. Remember most prospects do not want to engage a salesperson. They are more likely to read a blog, or watch a video, or read something about a subject area in which they are interested. Once they are curious enough, they may reach out to learn more.

This means you must create an environment where salespeople, SDR's and field marketing people can create and deliver content that can be built and hosted in an environment where targeted prospects have access.

Currently companies try and hammer the market with their company and product information in the hopes of building pipeline. But the only prospects that will typically engage over this medium are those that are already interested. You cannot build a scalable pipeline and business when you ignore the ninety-five percent of the market that is latent. Since you do not have any other delivery medium other than your website and your corporate marketing you are currently limited severely in reach. This is why you must rethink field marketing and hosted environments.

The second big change is the amount of selling that happens over video. The most important sales training you must initiate and reinforce is selling for the camera. Everyone assumes that that as long as they say the things, they would say in person over video that they are effective. This is simply not true. Communication over video is much different than communication done in person. The ability and skills required to communicate over video are much different and require training.

Everyone knows that an in-person call is more effective than a video call. But in the digital age this is most often not an option as so many people work from home or remotely. This means we must consider how we use video and what we can expect from it. People are not going to share the same information over video on a recorded line that they will share in person. You must make one on one meetings more personal and not recorded. You use recorded meetings when you want the meeting to be shared with others and when you want to communicate general information. You cannot read a room nearly as effectively on video and as such you need someone on the call other than the presenter with the responsibility of reading the room the best they can and taking notes when presenting to a large audience.

This skill is so important that you should consider not only video training but a coach that works with the team on video skills on an ongoing basis. Video is often used from the initial call through the close. Video permeates the entire sales cycle!

Speaking of training the digital age has also impacted that! Prior to the internet the number of things a salesperson had to do, and master was fewer. This allowed for more concentration, reinforcement, and assessment of skills. The digital age has created the need to master far more tools, skills, and activities. People still learn by repeating actions over and over. However, these days they repeat a more diverse set of activities less often. Additionally, they are exposed to far more stimulus and distraction. Therefore, when you train you should include follow-up coaching and mentoring so that the training sticks.

Finally, your use of the CRM needs a massive overhaul. You are using it as a recording device and not as a tool and resource to help salespeople. The CRM is not a system of record when it comes to sales. The CRM is a system of engagement. Most all of what is in the sales portion of the CRM is opinion not fact. Since everyone is possessed with making sure every detail is updated by everyone that touches the account is in the CRM you really cannot use it as a tool to drive sales or account strategy. The sales portion of the CRM has become a mass of information entered from a variety of sources, that is relatively useless other than to count and to ensure people are busy.

The correct use of the sales portion of the CRM is to first limit who can update it and with what. When updating with facts such as contacts, appointments etc. it is ok to allow those with these facts to do updates. But when it comes to opinions and interpretations of interactions only the salesperson should be allowed to do the updates. Yes, this means the salesperson must know about other interactions and speak to the people that have them. What a novel concept!

You also need to understand that not everything is going into the CRM. The most sensitive and confidential information that is needed to strategize and win deals will not be in the CRM. The best managers and salespeople know why it should not be there and they do not enter it or expect it to be entered. When you have confidential information and you put it in the CRM there is a good chance someone will slip and mention it to the wrong person. After all, how are they supposed to know it is confidential. Secondly, people leave the company, and no one wants sensitive information to fall into the wrong hands.

When you strategize accounts, you want the CRM as a basic back drop to help you and the team understand the sales situation, the key players, and where the deal is. But you must have an account review process that vets the CRM and where additional information is added to a discussion that drives account strategy. The idea and pure stupidity of thinking that you can set account strategy simply by using the CRM is ridiculous. Any manager that believes this simply does not know how to manage a sales team or bring it value!

Finally using the CRM to track activity is about the most nonproductive thing you can possibly do next to trying to strategize accounts from it. Activity that has no impact on developing pipeline and moving an account towards close is non productivity. Most managers assume that high amounts of activity lead to more sales. Yet they have no proof that this is in fact true. I think we all know what happens when we assume! The truth is the most activity tracked in the CRM has no impact. This can be proven! Simply take each activity you track and see if a prospect has even engaged based on it. Then take the engagements and see if they have moved forward in the sales cycle in the past 90 days. Then look at the percentage of activity that had impact. Perhaps then you will stop the ridiculous activity tracking and start tracking metrics correctly! How do you do that! measure results and then look at the activity that produced those results!

I suspect most people that read this will agree with most of it. But the majority will say that making these changes would be too much and require a ton of other changes to work. But doing the same ineffective and suboptimal things are going to continue to lead to stymied growth and high cost of sale.

These changes are very doable and with far less risk than you think. But you need the right technologies, many of which you have and some of which you need to learn about. You also need a person that understands how to implement both the processes and the technologies correctly to deliver the positive results you seek. When you have this person, they will instrument the change and improve the productivity without breaking the machine.