Responding to the pandemic: Are your digital selling skills ready? Blog Feature
Steve Bookbinder

By: Steve Bookbinder on March 27th, 2020

Print/Save as PDF

Responding to the pandemic: Are your digital selling skills ready?

No one knows what’s going to happen.

Many sales managers and salespeople are asking “What should I do during this “coronavirus pause,” while we are all working from home?”

A better question to ask is … “a year from now, what will I wish I had done with this time?” The obvious answer is “to prepare.”

The next question to ask is… “how long do I have?” Again, the obvious answer is “since I don’t know, I need to prepare now.”

We may not know when we will be able to resume our daily life as we once knew it. But it seems that no matter what, we won’t be returning to “business-as-usual” because we will be facing a “new normal” in the post-coronavirus world.

People will say “new normal” to describe why they need to keep their distance, relying on virtual, but only when email and social and all the other digital platforms aren’t enough.

What does this “new normal” do to the challenge of selling?

It requires making a choice. And here they are:

  1. makes selling easier
  2. makes selling harder
  3. makes selling the same as it was pre-coronavirus

For those who chose C, please sit down. We need to talk.

I hate to be the one to break it to you but selling is not ever going back to the way it was.

There will be more WFH, more virtual, and less physical contact, less opportunity to get your prospect’s attention. 

As we enter uncharted territory, we need to re-learn how to make a great first impression through digital selling.

For those of you who think digital selling doesn’t matter or doesn’t impact them, please sit down. Maybe have a cup of herbal tea.

Your customers have changed. And guess what? Those changes are now accelerating while everyone has been working from home.

Your customers (yes, even your non-digitally savvy customers) will be buying digitally. And I don’t just mean e-commerce. I mean they will be shopping online for virtually everything, even cars.

B2B customers were already spending 67% of their buying journey online before talking to a salesperson. (Source: Sirius Decisions) Now, that percentage is sure to grow over the coming weeks and months.

In fact, B2B buyers are typically 57% of the way to a buying decision before actively engaging with sales. (Source: CEB)

This highlights the importance of making a great “digital” first impression. But what’s that mean for salespeople?

How are your leads, prospects and customers looking for and finding you online? Is your online content – including your emails, Inmails, posts, etc. -- making the right impression? Good enough to get a few likes?  Or good enough to build the sales pipeline you need to reach your sales targets? 

To make a great “digital” first impression, it requires a mastery of digital selling skills.

So, ask yourself: are my digital sales skills ready to face the “new normal” of selling?

To get good - or better - at digital selling, you first have to improve the essential selling skill of adapting and adopting -- learning a new skill and adapting old skills to an ever-changing world.

In a few months, salespeople all over the world will need to do something that isn’t even invented yet.  The faster each salesperson can bring “optimized” skills to the marketplace, the more they can get a competitive advantage.  

The only way to increase that speed? Training.

Training not only teaches new skills but improves your ability to learn – and apply what you learn. 

A year from now, you will wish you were even better at learning new skills. You will wonder why you didn’t spend this time improving your digital selling skills.

Don’t waste another minute. Get ready to bring your new and improved digital selling skills to your marketplace now.

If you're looking to get started on developing your digital selling skills right away, register for our virtual sales workshop coming up on Thursday April 9th at 1 pm ET!

Virtual Sales Workshop with DMTraining

 

About Steve Bookbinder

Steve Bookbinder is the CEO and sales expert at DMTraining. He has delivered more than 5,000 workshops and speeches to clients all over the world and has trained, coached, and managed more than 50,000 salespeople and managers. Steve continuously refreshes his training content to reflect his latest first-hand observations of salespeople across industries and regions. Through him, participants in his workshops and coaching sessions learn the best practices of today’s most successful sellers and managers across industries. Steve understands that sales is a competitive game. To outperform competitors and our own personal best results, we need to out-prospect, out-qualify, out-present and out-negotiate everyone else, not merely know how to sell. Through his specialty programs in Pipeline Management, Personal Marketing, Great First Meetings, 2nd-level Questioning, Sales Negotiating, and Sales Coaching, Steve trains sales teams to master the skills they need to overcome the challenges they face in today’s world… and keep improving results year over year.

  • Connect with Steve Bookbinder