CHAPTER 4

Designing Your Digital Selling Engine

Many of us grew up in the world of outside, outbound selling. Not all that long ago that was basically our only choice! I love to make people laugh in my workshops by sharing stories about my early days swinging by the bank to pick up rolls of quarters so I could stop at a pay phone to make follow-up calls on the way to my next appointment. It seems like the Dark Ages, but we closed millions of dollars in revenue every year before websites and email ever existed.

Although that’s where I started out, I certainly did not stay there. What is shocking to me is how many in this profession—even some half my age—are stuck in what I affectionately refer to as “old-school selling.” It went something like this:

First, we’d do everything imaginable to collect names and contact information. We bought mailing lists or set up booths at trade shows and exchanged tchotchkes for business cards. Entire marketing departments existed primarily to collect people’s contact information to be handed over to the sales team as “leads.” Once a salesperson had someone’s contact info, they would employ some combination of letters, faxes, emails, telephone calls, or drop-bys to try to initiate a conversation. Every touch via every medium was an attempt to schedule a meeting.

Once we got in front of somebody, or at least got them on the phone, we would start selling. The intent of the conversation, of course, was to close a sale or at least close on something. I’ve spent most of my sales career selling big-ticket solutions, so many times my win in any meeting was simply closing on another opportunity to meet with my customer. Old-school selling consisted primarily of what I call the Three C’s: contact, conversation, and close.

Today, a very affordable online subscription to a contact search and lead generation service like Seamless.AI (www.seamless.ai) or a broader go-to-market intelligence platform like ZoomInfo (www.zoominfo.com) can give you extensive contact details for nearly every person you’d ever want to meet. You can search for companies and contacts by specific locations, industries, titles, and a variety of other characteristics. Developing a list of contacts is no longer the bottleneck in sales prospecting.

Most of us can observe, however, that the return on investment for cold-call prospecting to an acquired contact list is not what it once was. I recently saw a study of hundreds of sales reps making thousands of cold calls that showed the following success ratios:¹

•   330 attempted telephone calls

•   59 calls answered

•   1 appointment booked

Maybe those numbers are typical for some sales environments, but that seemed absolutely abysmal to me. Of course, you can use some form of sales automation to accelerate the process. Using an auto dialer system, you could probably accomplish that pretty quickly. But I can’t help but think about what could be done to engage the 271 contacts who didn’t answer the phone. I also wonder:

1.   What could have been said or asked differently to influence and engage more of the 58 people who did answer but did not agree to an appointment?

2.   What other action, short of booking an appointment, might those 58 have been willing to take if they had been given the option?

Through the next two chapters, we’ll be talking about creating a business development strategy comprised of both inbound and outbound sales motions that will enable you to build e-relationships that pave the way for more productive and fruitful conversations whenever your prospects are willing to have them. We’ll also explore a wide variety of ways to engage at least some of the 329 legitimate “suspects” in the previous example that did not agree to an appointment just yet.

As a reminder, this is a handbook, not a novel. If you are super excited about building a magnetic personal brand, feel free to jump right to Chapter 6. If you need help right now on the strategies and tactics of outbound digital prospecting, go ahead and proceed to Chapter 7. When you want to learn more about how to leverage inbound demand-generation strategies to build a following of people who want to become your next prospect, come on back. These next two chapters will still be here for you.

Taking Ownership of Your Business

When I’m working with business owners, marketing teams, or individual salespeople on developing their overall digital selling strategy, I sometimes hear, “I can’t do all the things you are talking about!” The entrepreneur might conclude that they are just not cut out to be a videographer or a copywriter. As a small business owner myself, I encourage you not to limit yourself. Don’t tell yourself it’s impossible before you ever start. You don’t have to do it all. You can hire or outsource the skills you don’t have time to develop, and you can probably barter some of your own products and services in exchange for many of them.

The individual salesperson or sales leader working for a larger company is often quick to point out, “We have a marketing department that does all of that.” Well, let’s ask ourselves a question: Who’s responsible for sales results? Whose income and perhaps even job security are tied to achieving specific revenue targets? That’s who is ultimately responsible!

Whether you are running a business or selling for one, remember this: a marketing department, a business development team, or an outsourced lead generation function are simply resources to you. The person who owns the revenue number needs to intimately understand all the digital selling touchpoints—all the pieces your prospects see throughout the customer relationship journey. It doesn’t mean you have to do it all. You may not be able to call all the shots. But knowing how all the pieces work together and learning to leverage them to achieve your goals is paramount.

Because I had an entrepreneurial background, this came natural to me. Early on in my corporate sales career I adopted a Business-Within-a-Business (BWB) mentality. I paid for my own computer and whatever software applications I needed. I bought my own prospect lists and covered the cost of sending prospecting letters via FedEx to target executives (best approach ever, by the way). I even hired a part-time assistant to take as many administrative tasks off my plate as possible—on my own nickel.

If you have a geographic territory, a vertical market, or a set of named accounts you are responsible for, then everything that your company does with those customer organizations is your business. Take responsibility for building your own business, your reputation and credibility, as well as your own brand as an expert in your field. See yourself as the executive in charge of helping your customers succeed, even if you need a team of nine other people internally to do it.

The problem is . . .

If you see yourself and manage your territory as “just one of the reps” at your company, then your customer will only ever see you as “just another rep” and therefore someone they’ll probably try to avoid.

Sales pros: if you’ve got a rock star marketing team that is doing everything we’re talking about in this book, that’s awesome! Partner with them and crush your goals together. But if you don’t, or you’ve only got a few pieces in place to work with, then build your overall strategy out of what you have and add in the missing pieces yourself.

For marketing pros and sales enablement leaders who see the need to create digital selling assets like we’ve been talking about, find someone in sales leadership who will buy into this approach and work with them to fully equip the sales team for asynchronous selling.

Your Digital Selling Engine

An effective digital selling strategy is composed of a combination of inbound and outbound selling mechanisms that fit your business model and sales environment. I call this your digital selling engine. The engine for an online retailer will look entirely different from that of a professional services firm and different yet from the sales engine of a high-tech manufacturer.

The engine is designed to empower customers at every stage of their buying cycle and lead them through a customer relationship journey. This includes the period of time before they even get to Point A, where they recognize or acknowledge any kind of pain, problem, or need. A great digital engine also keeps customers engaged after they buy something at Point B, turning them into repeat clients, advocates, and even champions that actively recommend us to others.

To make this idea easy to understand and implement, I break the digital selling engine down into four layers as follows:

1.   Connection Layer: This is where we make connections with people we don’t yet know or who don’t yet know us. We may use inbound strategies to drive traffic to a destination like a website, a blog, or a posted video. We might make social connections and attract people to our social media profiles. We may also utilize various outbound strategies to reach out to people by telephone, email, text, or direct messages through social channels.

2.   Conversion Layer: This is the layer where connections, followers, or visitors can be converted to some deeper relationship. It could be as simple as exchanging their email address for a free digital asset that provides valuable insight. For more complex selling environments, the conversion might result in a formal request for information or a scheduled time to speak by live video or telephone.

3.   Selling Layer: This is where selections are made, commitments are made, contracts are signed, etc. Depending on the nature of your business, this might be done completely online, through personal interaction between a buyer and a seller, or a combination of the two. Completing more complex sales transactions would also likely require demonstrations, presentations, proposals, and negotiations.

4.   Retention and Repeat Layer: This is where the next sale is made. The importance of this layer cannot be overstated. I’m convinced this represents the single greatest opportunity for growth for just about any business. We’ve all probably heard the statistics about how much less expensive it is to make a second sale to an existing client than it is to attract a new one. It also often takes far less time and energy when we can basically skip the connection stage and sometimes even the conversion stage en route to the next transaction.

Here is an important point: all of this can be done via telephone. For decades it was! But today’s buyer wants and even expects to be able to get to know us, work through a discovery process, and maybe even compare us to other providers without talking to us by phone, if they choose. A solid digital selling engine allows them to do that. Plus, it’s more scalable. There are only so many phone calls you can make and people you can talk to in a day. But by leveraging the right digital assets, your reach and capacity can increase exponentially.

This chapter was written to be a bit of an overview of some of the most common platforms and tools you can employ as part of your digital selling strategy. In the next chapter, we will focus on how we use these various components to engage people and foster e-relationships as we lead them through the customer relationship journey. Now, let’s talk about the different tools we might need in order to digitize as much of this as possible.

Assembling Your Digital Selling Engine

At the risk of being overwhelming, I want to show you a picture of what a comprehensive digital selling engine could look like in Figure 4.1. Hang in there with me! We’ll sort all this out together. Note the four layers: connection, conversion, selling, and retention. Note there are both inbound and outbound motions shown in the connection layer (top layer). Also notice a variety of other components that function in the other three layers, which we’ll unpack as we go.

Figure 4.1  Components of Your Digital Selling Engine

Of course, no two engines look the same, nor do they need to. What works best for you and your company will be unique based on what you sell, who you sell to, how they buy, and—not the least of which—the strategies that you feel confident will work for you. You certainly don’t need to employ all of these pieces, but you need at least one mechanism in each of the four layers that you consistently use to create new sales opportunities, close deals, and drive repeat business. You can expand your capacity from there.

Please keep in mind the fact that smaller organizations may not use all of these mechanisms. If you are an individual salesperson for a company with a marketing department, some of these pieces may not be under your direct control. However, it’s important that every seller understands the engine they have at their disposal and how to use it to find, create, and close new business.

We’ll talk about each of the different pieces shown here as we go forward. By the end of this chapter, you’ll have a much clearer idea of where you are today. You also might feel a conviction to improve what you are doing in one or more of these areas or to add certain tools to your arsenal.

As we discussed in the earlier chapters, when you earnestly step into the world of digital selling, you essentially decide to become a media company. If you fully embrace what is being said here, you’ll take almost everything that you historically would ask or say to your customer—and nearly everything you would show them along the way—and capture that in one or more digital formats. These assets could take the form of written messages, graphic images, audio, or video. Then you’ll be able to serve up those digital assets at the right time in a variety of delivery vehicles, some inbound and some outbound, as the situation calls for.

You can learn to tell your company history in writing and photos. You can learn to showcase client success stories and use cases via video. You can create an infographic that helps differentiate you from your competitors. You can even continually challenge your customers’ thinking and share new ideas with them via an automated email list. As you create your digital asset library, you can use all these tools to keep selling to your customers before, during, and after any personal interaction. By doing so, you allow your customers to take steps in their buying process 24/7/365.

The Connection Layer (Inbound)

If you want to leverage inbound lead generation strategies, there are two major channels that generate the majority of new connections: search and social. Of course, there are other mechanisms that can be used to attract new connections, such as podcasting, for example. But even the fastest-growing podcasts attract the majority of their new subscribers via search and social. First, let’s talk about search, then social in two different forms—organic and paid.

Organic Search

Search is all about leveraging keywords. Every sales pro or business owner needs to know the keyword phrases that their prospective clients are typing into search engines as they relate to the kinds of solutions they provide. If you have responsibility or influence over what’s on your website, make it your business to continuously optimize your site to be found by people searching for what you can deliver.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a topic far too broad to address in this book, but your website—or wherever you intend to drive search traffic to—needs to be designed with the specific intent of being attractive to search engines. Your website also has to be designed to convert that traffic, which we’ll talk more about later on.

If you happen to have little or no influence over what’s on your website, let’s remember that all the major search engines also index articles hosted anywhere online as well as blog posts, LinkedIn articles and posts, and YouTube videos. Creating and posting content that is rich with keywords and valuable insight is within reach of any salesperson or business owner who’s willing to produce and publish it.

Perhaps you sell telecommunication equipment or services. Are your prospects going to Google to search for “5G”? That’s probably far too vague. They may never find you among the millions of other destinations on the web talking about 5G.

If you want to think more like your customer, ask yourself this: What is 5G, and what does it promise? Your potential customers who are in the early stages of discovery are more likely typing in “5G explained” or “benefits of 5G.” They might be further along and searching “fastest wireless in Chicago” or “most reliable wireless network in Denver.” They could also get very specific with something like “reduce wireless lag time and latency” or “compare costs of landline vs. fixed wireless access.”

Take the responsibility to know the keywords your prospective clients are typing in. If you have marketing support, seek to understand their organic search strategy. There are many services to help with defining keywords. Semrush (www.semrush.com) is a great one. WordStream (www.wordstream.com) also offers some great free tools for keyword research. For other options, just Google “best keywords to use for _______________ (fill in the blank) industry.” Irony intended. The idea is to identify a handful of keyword strings for which you’d like to be known and build content and insight that is laden with those keywords.

We should also be weaving keywords into our emails and direct messages (DMs). Write email subject lines and bullet points about the very phrases your prospective clients are already curious about. Remember to use words related to customer outcomes (Point C) and not just your products and services (B). Every web page, online article, blog entry, or social post should be titled and written containing the keywords your customers are typing into the search bar.

Have you noticed that when you type pretty much anything into Google these days you see a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) that relate to whatever you type? One of today’s most effective SEO strategies is to create content that answers the questions most often asked on any given topic. A blog post on something like “What are the advantages of 5G wireless?” or “What are the pros and cons of fixed wireless access?” could be written to answer specific questions potential customer are asking.

One of the most underutilized and therefore untapped opportunities is organic search for video. YouTube is actually the world’s second-largest search engine next to Google. Most of what comes up in a YouTube search is organic. Some highly competitive keywords will have paid links from Google at the top and, of course, nearly every video posted today has “pre-roll” video ads out front. But the potential for organic reach on YouTube is tremendous.

YouTube also indexes based on the words you say within your video using speech recognition technology. So, I recommend writing the script for your video ahead of time to focus on and include specific keywords you are trying to target. Create a transcript of your video using Scribie (www.scribie.com) or some other online transcription service and make sure to upload that (or a portion of it) in the notes section with your video. Also use hashtags including your target keywords and other terms for which you wish to be found. Just go onto YouTube and type in “How to drive traffic on YouTube.” There is more advice there than you could fit in 50 books.

Paid Search

What made Google the behemoth it is today is AdWords, which is now known as Google Ads. In the early days, the return on investment of AdWords could not be matched. It was the shortcut to be found at the top of the page for every Google search. You could bid a couple of bucks on a certain keyword phrase in the morning and have leads streaming in throughout the day. I built my business for the first 10 years with a heavy emphasis on AdWords and saw a 10x to 20x return on marketing investment every year.

Today, paid search—or pay-per-click (PPC) as it is often called—is much more competitive and requires a more serious strategic commitment. But when you want traffic or leads that are in that Top 3 percent and are literally searching for what you offer, paid search is still incredibly effective. As I said in Chapter 1, “People who are looking to buy now use search.” Many experts argue that SEO is a more cost-effective long-term strategy. But when done right PPC search produces leads now!

The key to being found in a cost-effective way via paid search is the use of “long-tail keywords.” In my world, for example, the term “sales training” gets a ton of traffic. However, that term is so broad that many of the people who click on the listing (which can cost $10 or more per click) aren’t really viable prospects that convert to opportunities anyway.

More specific keywords such as “sales prospecting training for SDRs” or “negotiation training for sales managers” often allow you to be seen more cost-effectively and result in more high-quality visitors. The same is true for organic traffic. I’ve actually had good success by focusing on keywords that describe desired outcomes (Point C instead of B). A phrase like “increase lead conversion” or “improve forecast accuracy” or even “close more sales” can bring visitors who already know what they want to accomplish.

Organic Social

By far the least expensive way to start leveraging inbound sales strategies is organic social media. You can immediately start making connections first with people you already know and then with others you’ll find and meet along the way. The two most popular platforms for most businesses are Facebook and LinkedIn. Pick the one where your customers are most likely to hang out, keeping in mind that LinkedIn is the service people often use to learn and talk about business while Facebook tends to be more recreational.

Posting is easy and free! You can begin expressing your opinions, starting conversations, and sharing content immediately. Of course, you can put up advertising-type posts and undoubtedly find some prospects. But as discussed in the previous chapter, people today respond far better to insight and ideas that they can actually use. The most popular content creators are those who regularly post free material to help educate, inform, and even entertain their present and future clients. They don’t just pitch their products or services every day.

Organic social can be a fabulous way to consistently make new connections, grow your professional network, and even create a following. Just keep in mind that setting up your profile properly, connecting with the right people, attracting the right followers, and consistently nourishing your following with high-quality insight and ideas takes a significant amount of time and attention. There is no magic, simple, or easy way to grow a sizable following. It takes either time or money. Much more on how to do this in Chapter 5.

Paid Social

Paying for social exposure can be another very cost-effective means of advertising today. The true beauty of social media advertising is the ability to target who sees your content. You can target people on Facebook by a variety of demographic variables and even by their personal interests. You can also upload a list of email addresses and ask the system to produce a target list of “lookalike” profiles of other people who share characteristics of those on your list.

If you are using LinkedIn, you can leverage their powerful Navigator tool (available to paid subscribers), where you can literally sort out the specific individuals you want to put your ads in front of. It’s amazing to have the ability to focus all your resources on targeting exactly those people you want to build relationships with. Whether you are using paid ads or just want to use LinkedIn to quickly find prospects that fit your ideal customer profile, sign up for LinkedIn Navigator. If your company won’t cover the cost, pay for it yourself!

I certainly understand the natural resistance to pay for social media exposure. If you are a salesperson for a company, you might never even consider it at this point. But I may persuade you otherwise when we get to Chapter 6 on personal branding. For business owners and professional marketeers who are not already leveraging paid social, I encourage you to explore it. Get the guidance and help of an experienced professional if you need it. But you don’t need an advertising firm and a huge budget to get in the game.

Facebook ads can be a very inexpensive way to simply attract page followers, for example, but your overall cost per client acquisition is something you’ll have to test in order to determine if you are satisfied with the results. One common complaint, for example, is “LinkedIn advertising is really expensive.” If you look at raw costs per click, it may be quite a bit higher than Facebook or other options. But you have to look beyond cost-per-click and focus on how many of those clicks become paying customers. CPA (cost per acquisition) of a new customer is what you want to look at.

Most growth-minded companies eventually embrace the fact that it costs either money or someone’s personal time to consistently get your content in front of your ideal prospects on social. Since time is so incredibly limited, many companies would do well to adopt a strategy that can produce leads on-demand for money. You will eventually run out of time, but if you are getting a great ROI, you can grow your investment in paid social as you grow revenue. For those willing to make the financial investment, paid social can give you immediate, highly targeted reach and exposure.

The Connection Layer (Outbound)

Inbound lead generation is obviously not the only way to cultivate relationships and make new connections. Outbound prospecting is still alive and well for any who are willing to do the work! Outbound engagement can be synchronous, in the case of a live telephone conversation, or asynchronous, in the form of written, audio, or video assets sent to prospects via some delivery mechanism.

Sadly, the way so many organizations are using outbound these days is becoming increasingly ineffective and downright annoying to prospects. Best practices such as research and preparation, genuine empathy, conversational discovery, and a desire to actually help people are being abandoned for the sake of expedience and playing the numbers game “at scale.” We have to rethink our strategy and get creative in our approaches if we want to remain relevant among the ever expanding “noise” in the marketplace. We’ll cover much more on prospecting strategy in Chapter 7.

Outbound Telephone Connections

As crazy as this sounds, outbound telephone calls can be a “secret weapon” in our current digital-first marketplace. Fewer salespeople seem to be willing to make telephone calls these days. That’s a good thing for those of us who are willing! The reluctance could be just a good old-fashioned lack of confidence in themselves and what they sell. Or maybe they just don’t have faith that the reward is worth the risk of being ignored or rejected.

It’s true, many customers would probably rather not receive a sales call, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon the practice altogether. We simply need to do it really well, test and perfect an approach that works, and be willing to take some noes on our way to find the yeses! And remember that the effectiveness of telephone calls can be amplified dramatically with some form of a connection or correspondence with the prospect before you make the call.

Making a surprise telephone call when your prospective client least expects it can still work, especially in certain sales environments. I will never stop making calls to strangers when it seems like the best approach. But that’s no longer the only method I use to approach people I don’t already know.

For my own prospecting work, and that of so many salespeople I train and coach, setting up a time for a scheduled conversation consistently produces a more positive outcome than simply hitting people out of the blue. The question is: how do you get those appointments? That’s where using inbound strategies or outbound approaches via email and direct messaging come into play.

Outbound Email and Direct Messages

Despite its frequent overuse or misuse, email can still be a terrific medium for getting people’s attention, selling asynchronously, and booking appointments. The belief that most prospects totally ignore or instantly delete emails from people they don’t already know is a gross overgeneralization.

In fact, a well-crafted email that talks about your customer and their business (not about you and your business) is likely to stand in contrast to the dozens or hundreds of emails they receive every day from their internal colleagues and obvious spammers. Here again, it’s the substance of what is in the email that determines its effectiveness. But just because they look at your email does not necessarily mean they are going to respond to it or do anything with it.

The long-standing marketing rule of thumb was that it took an average of seven advertising impressions before a prospective client really took notice. Recent statistics suggest that these days it’s more like 10 to 12. In the same way, outbound prospecting usually takes multiple attempts before you get a response.

That being said, an automated sequence of emails that are little more than a string of advertisements or an incessant series of requests for a telephone appointment are often ignored, deleted, or marked as spam. Your message has to add value! It needs to deliver insight, information, and aha moments that cause the reader to think differently than they thought before they read it. You have to sell people on why they should make the time to talk to you.

Later on, I’ll show you how to weave together a multipronged approach that includes a variety of media such as FedEx letters, direct messages via LinkedIn, voicemail, handwritten notes, text messaging, and many others. This will increase your likelihood of getting noticed exponentially.

Throughout all of our efforts to make new connections either inbound or outbound, we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of playing the “numbers game” or chasing vanity metrics. The number of social followers we have or the number of likes and comments you receive for social posts are useless if they never convert into viable prospects and sales. Likewise, the number of telephone dials you make in a day or even the number of people who answer their phone doesn’t always directly translate to revenue. The whole reason you make connections is to eventually convert them into something beyond just a connection. Conversion is the key! Let’s talk about that.

The Conversion Layer

There are several different mechanisms for converting connections, as shown in the second layer of Figure 4.1. One of them, of course, is a live telephone conversation. This might result from a prospect proactively contacting you in response to something they found through search or social. It might also be a reply to an email or voicemail. But inbound telephone calls from prospects are becoming much harder to come by. You can obviously also drive impromptu conversations by making outbound telephone calls.

Many of the most effective telephone conversations occur—and much deeper exploration happens—after a prospective client visits one or more online destinations such as a website, a social profile, or an online sales funnel designed to convert the connection into a conversation.

In recent years, sales funnels or “lead funnels” have become incredibly popular. Basically, a funnel is a streamlined website (landing page) designed for the express purpose of converting visitors into leads. Many companies use lead funnels in lieu of or in conjunction with a traditional website. Definitely keep in mind that your social profile can also act as a very effective conversion device if it’s written for this purpose. If you don’t have any control over what’s on your company website, your LinkedIn profile can be made into a powerful lead funnel. More on that later.

Live Video or Telephone Conversation

Given the option, I’d prefer live video conversations to any other mechanism if I can’t meet with my prospect face-to-face. I really enjoy meeting and talking with new people. But it’s not just personal preference. It’s also because many of the projects we deliver for our corporate clients are highly tailored professional services. Nearly every major engagement is custom configured based on the client’s specific needs, goals, and objectives. So, a live conversation to talk about all of that is ideal.

However, in recent years we have proven that enabling e-conversations with our prospective clients before an initial live conversation has been a game changer. I am stunned by how much of the sales conversation we now have with our prospective clients happens asynchronously. Our customers love it! They want to be able to watch videos, look at options, and even test-drive some of our online programs from their smartphone whenever they chose to visit our website.

If what you sell simply demands a telephone conversation, I get it. But we’ve found that by making at least part of what we would say or ask in that live discussion available online, our prospects are able to get a feel for how we can help them even before we talk. When we do this, two amazing things happen.

First, this gives the client a chance to check us out a bit before they commit to the conversation. This results in even more people choosing to have that live discussion than if we ask them to meet with us cold. Second, the quality of those conversations is much richer. We have some common ground based on what they’ve seen and read. And after they’ve watched a bit of video prior to a live conversation, they feel like they are talking to someone they already know.

While a real-time discussion may well be the ultimate opportunity to “sell,” we’ve found that the asynchronous selling that can be done via digital assets before the call happens can improve the likelihood of success on the call. More of those calls convert into sales opportunities and closed projects.

Once again, there are only so many 15- or 30-minute slots on your calendar each week. Wouldn’t you rather fill them up with people who have already drawn some favorable conclusions about you and have chosen to meet with you to take the next step in the exploration?

Your Company Website

The true heart of your digital selling engine is your company website—or at least it should be! I still find small business owners who operate with only a Facebook profile and a business card. But, in most cases, if you want to grow beyond what I refer to as a “friends and family” business, you’re going to need a website where people can get to know you and better understand what you can do to help them.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be elaborate or expensive. You can build your first website yourself with an inexpensive tool like Squarespace (www.squarespace.com) or Wix (www.wix.com). Either of those will get you up and running. You might choose to go upmarket a bit and invest in a site built on a platform like WordPress (www.wordpress.com) or something even more powerful and flexible than that. For most small businesses, a WordPress site will do most of what you’ll ever need a website to do. I always suggest starting simple and upgrading to a custom site when you need to.

What’s most important about your website is not the platform it’s built on but the content within it and its ability to convert traffic. Your website is where people will read the sales copy that you write. It’s where you will embed videos for people to watch even if those videos happen to be hosted on YouTube. It’s where visitors can download a free report, a free guide, or a checklist that provides valuable insight.

Your website should be your primary conversion tool. A great website converts visitors from one stage of the customer journey to the next by enabling them to do as many of the following as possible:

•   Follow you on any social platform where you have a presence

•   Subscribe to your YouTube channel

•   Subscribe to your email list

•   Subscribe to your blog

•   Join a discussion group or online forum

•   Download a digital asset in exchange for their contact information

•   Register for an upcoming webinar or masterclass

•   Book an appointment with you

•   Contact you by email, telephone, or live chat

•   Request additional information

•   Enroll in an online course you offer

•   Sign up for a free trial

•   Buy now!

•   Leave a customer review

Each of these actions that your website enables moves your customers forward and deepens their relationship with you, which we will explore further in the next chapter. If your website doesn’t enable your prospective clients to do most or all of what’s listed here, you might need to add some capabilities to support today’s more digital buying behavior.

For now, let’s embrace this critical point . . .

Your website needs to be more than just an online brochure. It should be designed with the intent of propelling visitors through their digital buying process.

Creative companies are using custom landing pages not just for certain product lines or specific vertical industries. Some of my clients are adding pages for individual salespeople designed to foster e-relationships and convert visitors into meaningful connections and conversations in all the ways described throughout this book.

You might be saying, “My company’s website is terrible! I have no hope!” Please step back from the ledge. Thousands of salespeople will hit their quotas this year with an awful website. I’m just giving you an idea of what great looks like.

Social Profiles

Your social profile can be an outstanding mechanism for converting strangers into followers and visitors into subscribers. A great social profile should be designed just like a landing page of a website with conversion in mind. You can post nearly any kind of digital asset there and start publishing your insights immediately.

Your LinkedIn profile, for example, could be one of the most valuable pieces of digital real estate you could ever have. This is especially true if you are a corporate sales pro and you don’t have your own blog or website where people can find you or you can publish content. You can do all of that right on LinkedIn. You can even publish your own newsletter to which your followers can subscribe.

Go out to Google and search your own name; there’s a good chance your LinkedIn profile will come up as the very first listing, or at least within the first few. Try it right now and see if I’m right. When you type my name into Google, my LinkedIn profile is the first link displayed at the very top. It appears above Amazon.com, where my books have been listed since 2004, and even above my own company’s website!

Invest the time to optimize your LinkedIn profile to be a captivating destination for people who happen to search your name as well as anyone who reads one of your articles or posts. Our research, surveying thousands of active LinkedIn users, shows that 88 percent of them “routinely” visit a person’s profile before they decide whether to accept a request to connect or agree to a live conversation. Incredible!

Start by fully completing your profile. Both LinkedIn and Facebook offer guidance on the various sections available. Leverage every field you can to share what your customers can accomplish by working with you. This is especially important when it comes to the imagery you use throughout the profile and the posts, videos, or articles you choose to feature.

Notice I didn’t say use every field to talk about yourself. Just like everything we’ve discussed so far, your social profile shouldn’t be about what you do. It should be about what your customer can do with your help. You can feature written or video testimonials and recommendations from your clients and even offer free digital assets that are designed to foster awareness and build e-relationships.

For more ideas on creating a profile that is fine-tuned for conversion, download my free guide How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile to Attract Followers and Convert Leads Like Crazy at: www.salesexcellence.com/handbook.

The Selling Layer

Put simply, the selling layer is where you connect the dots between what your client needs and wants and what you have to offer. It’s where you:

•   Earn trust and rapport

•   Position yourself and your value promise

•   Present the buyer with options

•   Overcome any obstacles standing in their way

•   Mitigate risk in the buyer’s mind

•   Ask for a commitment

Let’s just take a quick look at the two main ways this is done: either via personal interaction with customers or entirely digitally.

Meetings, Telephone Calls, and Live Video Calls

For many environments, especially in the world of professional services or complex technology solutions, selling takes one or more live conversations at some point. This is especially true where you need to:

•   Conduct some form of discovery or needs analysis

•   Build relationships and rapport with the various stakeholders involved in the buying decision

•   Bring other key people from your company into the conversation

•   Collaborate on an implementation plan or delivery schedule

•   Present a custom presentation or proposal

•   Negotiate contract terms and conditions

•   Close on a commitment to move forward

In this type of sales environment, leveraging digital assets to help customers make decisions and draw new conclusions—even between meetings—can turn more of those meetings into closed deals. We’ll talk extensively about the digital assets we’ll need for selling complex solutions in Chapter 8.

Online or Fully Digital Selling

In a strictly online selling environment, most or all of your selling is done on one or more “sales pages.” This is where carefully worded “sales copy” would, in essence, lead your customer through the same series of questions you’d ask if you were sitting in front of them or speaking by phone. You’d share the same kinds of examples and use cases. You’d present your recommendations and even handle objections (perhaps presented as frequently asked questions) all with the written word, graphics, and video.

What if you could so effectively lead your customers through their buying process online that they’d either buy right there or call you up ready to buy? I encourage you to ask yourself this question: How much of what I would normally ask or say in a live conversation could I turn into some digital asset that my client could access asynchronously?

Many old-school sellers might cringe at this suggestion. As I said earlier, you lose some of your perceived “control” when you allow people to consume information and gain insight asynchronously. But if you don’t put the content out there, someone else will. You don’t have to publish everything. You can strategically hold back key bits of information that can only be obtained by speaking with you live.

Of course, the ideal situation for many of us would be to figure out how to sell more of what we offer in an online, self-service model where people can buy without having to talk to anyone. This is why we’ve invested so much energy into building our Sales Excellence Academy (www.academy.salesexcellence.com), where people can buy our online courses and even some of our blended course options right on our website. For markets where this is a possibility, why not explore how you could empower your clients to buy at least some of the things you offer entirely digitally?

The Retention and Repeat Layer

There is a strong psychological tendency in business to always feel like we need more new customers. In some cases we do. But in just as many cases, salespeople and business owners tend to fail miserably at taking care of the customers they already have. There are two reasons why this is a huge mistake.

The first reason is obvious. If a person or a company has already spent money with you—assuming you’ve held up your end of the bargain and delivered as promised—the next sale is simply a matter of helping them recognize the needs they may have at their new current state (Point A), envisioning their new desired future state (Point C), and presenting the next logical solution (your new B).

Don’t forget that your customer will always have the next need that begs to be filled. If you don’t stay engaged to help them achieve their next goal or objective, your competitors gladly will.

My best advice for repeat business has always been . . .

Treat your existing clients like brand-new clients. No matter how you’ve helped them in the past, reassess where they’re at now, where they want to go next, and offer a way to get there.

The second reason you need to take better care of your existing clients is that some of them may become advocates and even champions who can provide great reviews and testimonials. Some will even become an extension of your sales team and actively refer business to you!

Our existing customer base is a highly coveted asset, so . . .

We should be working at least as hard to keep our existing customers as our competitors are working to steal them.

The standard, old-school method for driving repeat sales has always been to seek a new telephone conversation from time to time. Often, that call is positioned as a means of “checking in” to see how things are going since the last time they bought something. I think we can do much better than that, and in Chapter 7 I’ll share seven good reasons for having a conversation with your customer that are far better than the tired old “touching base” cliché.

Today, there are also several digital options for continuing to pour fresh insights into your clients and lead them to the place where they recognize they need your help again. Ideally, we want to be able to do that between telephone calls and conversations if we can. As I said earlier, I truly believe this represents the greatest opportunity to grow revenue and profitability for just about any company.

Sequenced Email or Text

In the world of digital selling, a list of opt-in subscribers including email addresses and/or mobile (text) numbers is solid gold. It’s literally like money in the bank. Social followers are great! But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who understands the inner workings of search and social algorithms who didn’t agree that an email or text subscriber list is far superior.

Social algorithms only show your content to a fraction of the people who follow you unless you pay for increased exposure. The big social platforms have to make money somehow! However, until an email subscriber changes their email address, they have basically given you a direct channel to reach them whenever you want at no charge.

Text messaging is truly the next frontier and the Holy Grail for anyone willing to publish content that subscribers deem worthy of showing up in their text inbox on a regular basis. The general trends for email read rates and response rates have been declining in recent years. Meanwhile the average open rate of a text message currently sits at about 99 percent, with 97 percent of messages being read within 15 minutes of delivery.²

If you have not yet begun to build a list of subscribers, start today! Of course, you’ll need to serve up something they find valuable enough to stay subscribed to. Otherwise, if you just deluge them with a series of pitches, they will unsubscribe just as fast as they join. In the next chapter, we’ll talk extensively about how to build your subscriber list and how to keep them hungry for more.

Podcasts and Live Shows

Perhaps the hottest tool for adding value to a subscriber list, attracting new prospective clients, and turning existing clients into repeat customers is a podcast. Another option is a live show delivered via Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or even a videoconference platform like Webex, Zoom, or GoTo Webinar. This is truly the next level in terms of retaining and serving your follower community.

You can host your show live or prerecord it and release it as a podcast and/or a video on YouTube. You can have guests that add texture and credibility or just share your own insights and ideas. It can be long form, ranging from 20 to 60 minutes, or shorter bites of 3 to 10 minutes.

If you don’t enjoy writing but love to talk and tell stories, a podcast or a show might be perfect for you. It seems to fit me like a glove! If you feel you don’t possess the expert status you’d like to have just yet, host a podcast with guests that you can interview. One of my favorite approaches is to showcase happy clients who can talk about how you’ve helped them achieve their goals and objectives.

A podcast or a live or recorded show can add tremendous value to your subscribers and is a spectacular approach to differentiate yourself from competitors. This is a great way to stay atop your customer’s or your channel partner’s mind and hopefully empower them to recognize they need your help again in the future.

Social Audio

One newer platform for organic social that has tremendous potential is social audio. At the time of this writing, Clubhouse (www.clubhouse.com) is one of the biggest players in this game. Twitter also offers Twitter Spaces, Facebook offers Live Audio Rooms, and LinkedIn is now offering Audio Rooms for select content creators. An individual user can host their own audio show and invite other users to be part of the audience. It is very easy to allow any audience member to join the discussion, ask questions, make comments, etc.

This can be a very nice platform for retention but can also be quite effective to create new connections. Many people who begin hosting high-quality discussions are able to grow their audience and following very rapidly. And because anyone in the room can raise their hand to take part in the discussion, these kinds of discussion rooms can be a great way to foster many-to-many conversations on any topic imaginable. This is definitely worth exploring for any business owner or corporate salesperson who is willing to initiate and lead a group conversation to build relationships with people who have an interest in any particular topic.

Before we get into more of the specific tactics of digital selling in the next chapter, let me emphasize this: please don’t try to create a digital selling engine that is so complex that it’s unsustainable over time. The complexion of your engine needs to be proportional to the amount of time, money, and human resources you can allocate to running it. Starting a podcast that you abandon three months later looks worse than never starting one to begin with. Setting up social profiles on platforms you’re not willing to dedicate at least a little time and attention to gives the exact opposite impression from the one you hoped it would.

One social channel that you are willing to invest time in to make new connections is plenty to start with. One great landing page on your website or a sales funnel that is designed to convert web traffic to an email subscriber is awesome for the conversion layer! And starting an email list of even a few hundred people you can keep in touch with weekly or monthly by providing something really valuable to them is a huge accomplishment. Start small. Perfect what you are currently doing and upgrade your engine over time.

Putting These Ideas into Practice