CHAPTER 1

Selling the Way Customers Buy Today

As a guy who’s been around sales and entrepreneurship for a while, I can confidently say that the foundational truths of selling have never changed and they never will. At its root, business involves a buyer who needs or wants something and is willing to trade either money or something else of value to a seller who can provide it. Marketing and sales are simply what the selling party does to try to find or attract a prospective buyer and then facilitate the transaction.

This simple definition applies far beyond what most would consider traditional sales and marketing. It describes just about anyone who promotes, endorses, or recommends anything to anybody. In today’s world, the vast majority of that promoting, recommending, and selling happens digitally.

Whether you are a sales or marketing professional in a large corporation, an entrepreneur running your own company, or even a volunteer seeking support and donations for a nonprofit organization, you’re selling, whether you charge money or not! Selling and persuasion are natural and vital components of how we function as a society. As Thomas Watson, longtime CEO and chairman of IBM, put it, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”

Throughout this book I’ll use terms like seller and buyer, salesperson and customer, or supplier and channel partner, but what I’ll be describing is the relationship between any two people or entities on either end of an exchange. One of them promotes and delivers a product or service. The other consumes or resells that product or service, which could actually be a subscription, a membership, or just the adoption of some idea or opinion.

Unfortunately, a myriad of research studies—as well as the personal experiences of anybody selling pretty much anything in the modern world—reveal that today’s would-be customers are becoming increasingly sales averse. That’s entirely understandable! Every one of us is being sold to all day long every day on billboards, TV, radio, podcasts, Facebook, YouTube, and even at every gas pump! If you stand still for even a few seconds, somebody will try to pitch you on something.

As selling and promotion have become more automated and mechanical, prospective buyers have become more closed and guarded. People are mastering the art of avoiding advertisements, screening phone calls, and ignoring unsolicited correspondence. They are more and more resistant to engaging in a live sales conversation that they themselves did not initiate. That means those of us who make a living promoting a product, a service, a skill, or an idea will have to adapt to survive.

The Way Customers Buy Today

In years past, salespeople had far more latitude and opportunity to connect and meet with their customers face-to-face. Meetings at the client’s office, trade shows, industry events, meeting up for coffee, business lunches, networking groups, tickets to sporting events: for decades these were the norm. More recently, salespeople have seen a sharp decline in the number of opportunities to spend quality time with prospective clients for a variety of reasons.

Over the last decade or more, many companies have begun adopting policies that don’t allow their employees to accept free meals, trips, or entertainment of any kind to avoid any appearance of impropriety. Over the past few years community health guidelines put severe restrictions in place that left the majority of people in many industries working from home. As a result, the business world had no choice but to adopt a variety of virtual communication tools and collaboration platforms. This obviously produced a massive shift in the way businesspeople interact with each other and with their customers.

One could argue those restrictions simply accelerated the natural adoption of live-video and other virtual collaboration tools that businesses would have eventually embraced anyway. But the long-term effects of that experience have left a huge percentage of people far less willing to meet with a salesperson face-to-face and, interestingly enough, even less likely to have a conversation via live-video or telephone. That is unless they have already determined that they might need some help that the salesperson’s company can provide.

The majority of today’s buyers show a strong preference for digital interactions, whether to avoid health risks, reduce the use of fossil fuels, save time, or simply to not have to change out of their pajamas. With less and less opportunity for personal interactions, we have to reimagine how we get to know our customers and how we enable our customers to get to know us.

According to the latest research from Gartner, only 17 percent of the time a B2B buyer invests in a buying process is spent engaging with potential suppliers.¹ Another 27 percent of their time consists of doing online research, 22 percent meeting with their internal buying group, and 18 percent doing independent research offline. The balance includes other tasks like obtaining approvals and purchasing. This is illustrated in the graph in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1  Distribution of Buying Groups’ Time by Key Buying Activities²

Now, if that buying group happens to be talking with and vetting three different would-be suppliers, that means each vendor could get as little as 5 or 6 percent of the customer’s time and attention. The overwhelming majority of the time our customers invest in their buying process is not spent talking to us. Rather, it involves collecting, analyzing, and discussing information and ideas from who knows what sources while we’re not even around.

This means . . .

If we’re not willing to leverage digital media to continue selling in between the few meetings we are able to get with our customers, we lose the ability to influence perception and help them draw favorable conclusions during 94 percent of their buying process.

If that doesn’t get your attention, I’m not sure what will! This kind of modern-day reality makes the topic of digital selling worth taking seriously, wouldn’t you say?

This book will be an exploration of how to use a variety of digital communication platforms to attract prospective clients and create new sales opportunities. But just as importantly, we’ll investigate how to leverage digital assets to continue to influence and persuade customers throughout all stages of their buying process, whether we are granted the opportunity to meet with them or not.

The Human Side of Digital Selling

Here’s an interesting bit of irony: the vast majority of buyers—as many as 92 percent in one study—express a preference for virtual interactions with sellers.³ However, the same buyers report an interest in doing business with real human beings they can relate to. Your prospective clients need and want real answers to real problems provided by a real person, but they want it on their terms and on their timetable. In essence, they’d like to feel what it’s like to be your customer before they commit to anything and ideally without even talking to you.

Now more than ever, people are attracted to individuals and brands that share their values. Modern buyers crave authentic human interactions with sellers who are genuine. They are inundated with communication and advertising impressions but at the same time starved for actual care and attention.

It seems the more virtual our world becomes, the more we appreciate what’s “real.”

What makes sellers attractive is their willingness to provide knowledge and information that helps would-be customers make decisions and draw conclusions on their own. Buyers seem to look at every potential supplier and ask more than just, “Can you sell me ________________ (fill in the blank)?” They want to know, “How can you actually help me decide what I need to buy?” and “What else can you provide beyond just the commercial transaction that will help me?” It seems guidance and advice have become just as powerful differentiators as features and pricing.

All the anecdotal and empirical evidence shows that . . .

Serving is the new selling! Today’s buyers are looking for more than just a source to buy from. They want a resource to learn from!

From my seat as a sales and marketing consultant and trainer to some of the world’s most well-known organizations, the biggest mistake I see companies make is throwing their resources behind digital marketing and social channels to deliver the same old, worn-out, seller-centric “message” that their customers have been numb to for years.

Here’s an idea worth remembering. . .

Your customers have not only changed where they buy; they have changed how they buy. Don’t approach today’s communication channels with yesterday’s sales and marketing strategy.

If effective marketing today was simply a matter of switching advertising channels, from print ads in magazines to LinkedIn ads, for example, that would be easy. If outside salespeople could suddenly fill their pipelines to overflowing just by embedding a short video into their emails or maybe sending a video via direct message through LinkedIn, there would be no need for a lot of what’s in this book.

Granted, changing the medium or delivery mechanism of your outreach can measurably improve results. We’ll be talking extensively about that as we go. But I honestly believe . . .

The big opportunity today lies in radically changing what is written or said within your sales and marketing message, not just how you deliver it.

The substance of what you communicate digitally has the power to influence and persuade. It can also give your prospects a glimpse of who you are as a person when it’s designed to do so. A big part of digital selling is empowering your customers to learn about you and how you can help them even before you have any personal interaction with them. We’ll talk much more about this in the coming chapters.

Eight Truths About Digital Selling

As I see it, there are at least eight truths that help distinguish digital selling from whatever we want to call the kind of selling we did before everything went digital. Let’s briefly talk about each one of these truths to further define what digital selling is and what we need to do to embrace it.

1. Digital Selling Is for Anybody Who Is Promoting Anything

Admittedly, not all marketing and promotion today is digital. Traditional media are still alive and well in many industries. They would be defined as channels that existed before the rise of the internet, which includes newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio, broadcast TV, and direct mail. But nearly every business in the modern world, with the exception of something like a roadside stand, is using one or more forms of digital media to attract or transact with their customers. This includes everything you see online: websites, search engines, digital advertising, social media, video streaming services, online discussion forums, and even Google Maps displaying a business profile.

Digital buying goes far beyond just ordering books, or shoes, or groceries. The latest studies show that as much as 98 percent of all enterprise purchases—even capital expenditures and long-term contracts—start with online research, even if the transaction itself happens offline.⁴ Our customers aren’t just using the internet for their up front research. The Gartner Future of Sales 2025 report predicts that by 2025, 80 percent of sales interactions between buyers and sellers even in the business-to-business space will occur through digital channels.⁵

Here’s another startling reality: The average person spends nearly six hours a day on their smartphone.⁶ That’s over 90 full days of the year! If you factor in an average of eight hours of sleep per night, we are spending over 37 percent of our waking moments—or every hour we’re awake from January 1 through May 15—on our phone. Heaven help us!

In light of the way we live today, I think we can easily conclude . . .

If your prospective customers can’t find you or get to know more about you from their smartphone, you basically don’t exist.

Whether you are selling enterprise IT solutions in a corporate environment, running your own advertising agency, thinking about planting a church, or offering guitar lessons as a side hustle, digital selling is not merely an option. It’s the way business and promotion is done today.

2. Digital Selling Exists to Facilitate Digital Buying

Because of the way modern customers buy, the art of selling has been forced to evolve. By and large, today’s consumers prefer to operate in stealth mode whenever they seek out a solution to a problem or challenge. They explore options and potential suppliers and digitally “stalk” companies and individuals as part of their due diligence. And they do it all without talking to anyone. They are educating themselves and drawing conclusions based on what they can find online. Let’s explore this a bit.

If your customers are resistant to scheduling an introductory telephone call; if they prefer to keep themselves current on new technologies and services through industry-specific podcasts, Facebook groups, and TED talks; and if they’d rather watch a YouTube video on a specific topic than speak with a salesperson, here’s my question: Who’s making those videos? Who’s writing those posts? Who’s actively engaging with your potential market on social media and providing educational and perception-forming video content and articles? Is it you? Or your competitors?

Think about it like this: If other companies in your industry are helping shift market perception by investing time and energy to meet prospective customers where they are (on their smartphones), who are those customers going to call when they are ready to talk? With whom will they be willing to book a 15-minute introductory telephone call?

It only makes sense that whoever is helping your prospective customers understand how they can improve their business and their lives by adopting the very products and services you sell is the one who earns the credibility and the trust needed to get to the live conversation stage when the time comes.

I think it’s crucial to remember that . . .

In today’s world, we have to leverage technology to empower prospective clients to make digital buying decisions on their choice of media 24/7/365.

We’re not just talking about one-to-one correspondence via email, text, or instant messaging. The kinds of digital conversations I’m referring to include the variety of one-to-many or many-to-many discussions that are happening in the modern digital marketplace. We have to learn how to make an active contribution to the conversations our customers are having with their peers and other influencers online.

We need to make it possible for an unlimited number of buyers located anywhere in the world to be able to discover us, because . . .

One of the key objectives of digital selling is to develop e-relationships with prospective customers as we empower them to come to know, like, and trust us before they ever have a chance to meet us.

This is the heart of building your business and expanding your influence in today’s world. We’ll be exploring exactly how to do this as we go!

3. Digital Selling Often Combines Inbound and Outbound Strategies

Not all that long ago we used the term marketing to describe the combination of efforts used to educate the marketplace, build brand awareness, attract prospective clients, and generate leads that were then handed off to a salesperson to follow up. Prospecting was what we called a salesperson reaching out directly to a client to try to start a conversation. Somewhere along the way the business world adopted two new terms: inbound to describe a lot of those traditional marketing functions designed to help prospective buyers find us, and outbound to describe what a salesperson does to find prospective buyers and connect with them.

Depending on whether you are a solopreneur, a business owner, or a sales pro working for a large company, you may have a team of other people working with you to execute your broader sales and marketing strategy. Consequently, your role and responsibilities for overall lead and demand generation will vary. But please take a moment to read this list of the channels most often employed for both inbound and outbound. As you read, think about how you and your company are currently using each of these:

Inbound

•   Website SEO (search engine optimization)

•   Paid search advertising and retargeting ads

•   Organic social media posts and engagement

•   Paid social media advertising

•   Blogs, articles, books, and e-books

•   Podcasts, webinars, and live-video broadcasts

•   Online text-based, live-audio, and live-video discussion forums

•   Every form of traditional nondigital advertising mentioned earlier

Outbound

•   Direct postal or express mail

•   Telephone calls and voicemail

•   Manual and automated email

•   Direct messaging via social platforms

•   Text (smartphone) messaging

•   Networking and industry events (live or online)

•   Dropping by in person

If, by chance, you yawned as you read these lists, thinking, “I’ve seen this all before,” I pose to you the following questions:

1.   Which of these forms of media are you currently ignoring?

2.   How many can you afford to continue to neglect?

3.   Which of these is your competitor currently leveraging to attract, connect with, and make sales to your prospects without you even knowing about it?

4.   Which one or more of these channels deserves some of your attention right now?

I seldom recommend that any company try to master all of these, certainly not all at once. But one of the secrets of digital selling, which should not be a secret, is that for every additional medium or communication channel you add, either inbound or outbound, the likelihood of recognition and connection increases substantially.

When someone sees your email related to solving the same business problem they saw you or your company talking about in a YouTube pre-roll ad the day before, that drives an entirely different level of recognition and attention than an email sequence or video advertisement alone. The key is to pick one or two of these media that you are currently underutilizing, add it to your repertoire, and decide to “own it” over the next 6 to 12 months. Then, add another one or two when it makes sense as you expand your reach.

I’m often asked, “Which medium is best?” My answer is, “Any and all you believe will work and that prove they can produce results.” Now it’s true that you may not know which ones to have faith in or which will work in your market until you invest some time and energy to test them.

But please consider this . . .

If you restrict your digital selling efforts to a single medium of communication—regardless of which it is—you could be missing 90 percent of your potential to connect with prospective buyers.

Strategic experimentation and testing are vital. Mix it up and constantly test and tweak your approach. If you are using the exact same business development methods you were using two years ago, you’re probably stuck in a comfort zone and are unwittingly stunting your potential growth.

For many companies that can attract, transact, and deliver entirely digitally with little to no human contact, an inbound-only strategy can be extremely successful and cost-effective. Good examples would include traditional and online retailers, inexpensive SaaS (software as a service) providers, online education, and other self-service offerings. However, if at some point the buyer has to get on the phone, videoconference, or meet face-to-face to complete a transaction or take delivery of your product or service, you can combine inbound attraction with outbound prospecting strategies for the ultimate one-two punch.

You might see the occasional headline proclaiming, “Outbound Prospecting Is Dead.” Nonsense! Statements like that usually come from companies selling inbound lead-generation platforms, digital marketing services, or a course on social media advertising. But it is true that outbound efforts that are not supported by a strong inbound strategy are producing fewer and fewer results every year.

We’ll talk much more about both inbound and outbound initiatives in later chapters, and we’ll explore which ones might be best for you. I’ll take the opportunity here to simply say that the majority of B2B settings, as well as most medium-to-big-ticket B2C sales environments, call for a creative combination of the two.

4. Digital Selling Is Predominantly Asynchronous

If you look again at the list of inbound and outbound media mentioned previously, you’ll notice that on the inbound side only live-audio and live-video discussion forums represent real-time communication with a prospective buyer. Even on the outbound side, only telephone calls, networking events, and “dropping by” provide the chance to actually talk with prospective clients live. These kinds of opportunities for real-time customer engagement are frequently referred to as synchronous selling, where the buyer and the seller are interacting with each other simultaneously.

Every other medium or channel listed represents what we will call asynchronous selling. This includes all the situations where we would write or record something that our customer would read, watch, or listen to some number of minutes, days, or even years later.

It’s important to acknowledge . . .

The majority of digital selling is done asynchronously! Whether we like it or not, this is the future of selling because it’s the future of buying.

Actually, it’s not only the future; it’s the present!

Honestly, I’d rather just call people on the phone or drive over and meet with them, wouldn’t you? I really miss those good old days! I even recently heard one well-known sales guru on a podcast saying, “I’m just a synchronous guy. That’s who I am. I sell by talking to people!” Well, I suppose that’s fine for anyone who’s willing to render themselves irrelevant for the majority of buyers in today’s market, who are going to find answers to their questions and make buying choices without talking to anyone.

Let’s be absolutely clear: synchronous, real-time selling is definitely superior! When it comes to influencing perception and persuasion, nothing beats an in-person meeting. Live video is second best, followed by a telephone call. There are even certain steps in a complex sales cycle where I believe a synchronous conversation is flat-out required. We’ll get into the details of that in Chapter 8.

What we have to decide is whether we’re going to empower our prospective customers with the insight and information they need to draw smart conclusions asynchronously or watch them make buying decisions based on whatever else they can find on the internet.

Especially in the early stages of their exploration process, today’s buyers strongly favor a more self-directed, asynchronous approach to buying for several reasons:

1.   They truly don’t have time. Many buyers are slammed wall-to-wall on video calls all day long. They’re not inclined to schedule yet another meeting when they think they can just as easily gain some insight and answers to their questions with a simple Google or YouTube search or an inquiry post to their peers in a LinkedIn group.

2.   They want to maintain control. Anybody who’s not ready to buy right now—and even many who are—want to keep a certain distance from a salesperson so they can disengage anytime they choose without the embarrassment or the social pressure of canceling or telling someone no.

3.   They demand convenience. Customers today get some of their best online “exploring” done late at night after everyone else in the house is asleep, while sitting in their car in a fast-food pickup line, or during a particularly uninteresting but required internal videoconference. They want to be able to access information whenever and wherever they choose.

There is little room in today’s marketplace for sellers who insist on a telephone call or videoconference as the only way to start a sales conversation or advance a buying process. Your customers have too many other choices of people to work with and sources of information who are willing to engage digitally.

Please circle this, underline it, and put a star next to it . . .

If the only objective of our asynchronous sales efforts is to try to book a synchronous conversation, we are totally missing the true potential of digital selling.

Only a small fraction of the prospective customers in any market are ready or willing to get on the phone with you right now. It’s what you say and ask in those early-stage asynchronous digital communications that leads people to the place where they are willing to get on the phone or videoconference with you when the time comes. If your digital selling is effective enough, you’ll help your customer move one or more steps in your direction. Ideally, they will soon be calling you to request the appointment to speak on videoconference!

We’re going to delve deep into this as we move forward, but I just can’t resist making one of the most important points of this entire book right now . . .

The true art of digital selling is proactively influencing perception and helping customers draw favorable conclusions about us before and after any real-time conversations!

In the coming chapters, we’ll be exploring how to help customers recognize their need for what we offer, communicate a value promise, and help them conclude that we are the best choice for them to explore moving forward with. And we’ll learn how to do all of that without ever talking to our prospective client, if we have to.

This is usually the point where some sales and marketing leaders who are stuck in the past tell me, “That’s not possible!” Sadly, they’ll soon be watching their competitors—who are willing to embrace and apply what’s in this book—do all of these things and much more entirely digitally.

5. Digital Selling Is More Than Just “Social Selling”

Earlier, we talked about the average person spending more than six hours a day on their smartphone. What’s really mind-blowing is nearly two-and-a-half hours of that is spent on social media, and approximately half of that time (one out of every five minutes an average person spends on a smartphone) is on Facebook.⁷ Of course, millions of people never use Facebook, and millions of others probably never shut it off, so averages can be deceiving. But there’s no denying this: if you want to get in front of a lot of people these days, social media is a great place to do it.

A commitment to a strong social media strategy is one of the best ways to produce a consistent flow of new connections with prospective clients, but it’s certainly not the only way. A daily or weekly show on a YouTube channel that is subsequently released as a podcast is another spectacular mechanism for building a loyal following today. There are a variety of other approaches we’ll get to later.

Despite the amount of time people spend on platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, 68 percent of online buying experiences that result in a purchase begin on a search engine.⁸ The difference is “buyer intent.” People go to a search engine to do research, get answers to their questions, or find something that they need. If they already know they need to buy something, a search engine is the quickest way to find someone who can provide it. People who are “buying now” use search!

People don’t log on to Facebook to buy things or be subjected to marketing. They go there to wish their friends a happy birthday and see the latest pictures of their neighbor’s baby. But a platform like Facebook is the perfect place to deliver a carefully crafted bit of insight or knowledge about what matters most to your target customers when they least expect it.

People don’t go to LinkedIn to be sold to, either. They go there to find a job, network with like-minded people, and most importantly, to find prospects to whom they can sell their own products or services. A large percentage of the people who initiate connections or accept your requests to connect on LinkedIn are actually prospecting you! But if your approach is right, LinkedIn is still one of the best places to build e-relationships and create a social following of people who share an interest in the kinds of business outcomes you can deliver.

Like any good social-selling method, this book will cover building a red-hot social profile that is designed to convert visitors into followers, initiate sales conversations, and drive a steady stream of traffic to your door. But while most other programs focus primarily on making social connections and driving conversations, this is only the first layer of our overall process. We’re going several layers deeper than that.

We’re going to study the psychology of what drives people to take action and buy in the first place as well as what causes customers to choose one supplier over another. Then we’re going to look at how to build that into your overall social strategy and the stories that you tell through your profile, your posts, your comments, your direct messages, and every other facet of your overall digital selling strategy.

Those of you who sell in a more complex environment—where there is still a lot of selling to be done after you receive an inquiry—will learn how to leverage a variety of digital assets to convert more of those leads into viable sales opportunities. Then you’ll learn how to direct and manage those opportunities using additional creative digital assets throughout the sales process to close more business and maximize your revenue results.

6. Digital Selling Is Not Just Online Advertising

Some might think that digital selling is just a different name for banner ads, search engine advertising, YouTube pre-roll videos, and sponsored social posts, but it actually encompasses far more than just online advertising. Digital selling and persuasion also involves defining the intent of any organic or paid placement. The idea is not to just get your logo in front of more eyeballs but to literally change the beliefs and perceptions of the people who read, listen to, or watch what you publish.

Webster’s dictionary offers us this definition of advertising: “the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements.”⁹ Most would agree the vast majority of advertising is just that: “calling attention.” But drawing attention to our brand or our product is one thing. Helping a prospective client conclude that we could help them solve a business problem they have—or maybe even helping them realize they have a problem they didn’t know they had—is quite another.

In the next chapter, we’ll be talking about the difference between advertising and insight. Most advertising tends to focus on letting people know we are here if they need us. Insight, when properly delivered, is more about helping people draw the conclusion that they might have a need for us in the first place and helping them determine that we are the organization best suited to fill that need.

I want to save the real meat of this topic for the next chapter, but the point I’ll make here is . . .

Digital selling is much more than just building awareness; it’s about literally changing what your readers or viewers believe about you and, more importantly, what they believe about themselves.

To do this, we have to focus less on ourselves and start to focus on what our customers would get out of a relationship with our company. We have to sell by telling stories about how our prospective customers can derive measurable value by partnering with us. A powerful brand is one that tells a story in which the prospective customer is the protagonist! In our story, the customer becomes the hero who, with our help, overcomes all the obstacles and gets the desired outcome or result they already want.

How much of what’s on your website, in your LinkedIn posts, or in your outbound emails is about you as opposed to the person you hope will read them? When you look at your own advertising, is it mostly about what you do? Or is it about what your customer can do with your help? The shift from “advertising” to digital persuasion through sharing insight and storytelling represents a huge departure from the majority of what we see and hear around us every day.

7. Digital Selling Is Done Primarily in Writing, Audio, or Video

As mentioned earlier, the majority of the time people spend during their exploration and buying process these days is asynchronous. They tend to do things like read websites, watch videos, and listen to podcasts at odd times between the other events in their day (or night). It’s not that they may never meet with you or speak with you live by phone. It’s that they may not be willing to talk live until they have read your LinkedIn profile, skimmed through a white paper your company published, or watched a short introductory video you sent them first. They might need a little more information before they decide if it’s worth their time to talk to you!

An enormous percentage of digital selling is done using the written word, infographics, audio, and video. That means a lot of the “selling” we do in the future will be less about talking to people and more about engaging in what I like to call e-conversations across the internet. Much of the time, we’ll be engaging people we don’t yet know in one-to-many e-conversations via blogs, social media posts, automated email, podcasts, etc. I believe the aptitude to sell verbally will always be in demand and is still one of the most valuable skill sets in the world. But getting a scheduled appointment so you can sell verbally often requires great writing skills.

For decades, I professed that the most coveted competency a salesperson or marketer could ever develop—the one that could catapult their career to the next level more than any other—was public speaking. I still believe that facing and overcoming the fear of speaking in front of a group can do wonders for a person’s confidence and self-esteem. Over the years I have seen people’s lives and careers transformed after they complete our executive presentation skills workshops. But the most indispensable skill for selling in today’s marketplace is not talking. It’s the ability to influence, persuade, and sell via the written word.

Anyone who intends to stay relevant over the next five to ten years—or maybe even the next two—should commit to learning more about the art and science of copywriting. I’ll admit, just a few years ago I didn’t even know exactly what that term meant. Writing “sales copy” is basically using words to create digital assets, such as:

1.   Social media profiles and posts

2.   Subject lines and the body text of emails

3.   Scripts or talking points for telephone calls or voicemails

4.   Scripts or talking points for prospecting or educational videos

5.   Websites, landing pages, or any other mechanism to convert visitors into leads or customers

6.   A wide variety of sales assets we can use to do the selling for us when the customer isn’t willing or able to talk to us in real time

The value of writing compelling copy cannot be overstated, because . . .

Effective writing is quickly becoming the difference between those who have the “gift of gab”—but very few appointments to use it—versus those who are able to seize the attention of today’s busy customers in writing before they quickly swipe, delete, or click away.

Historically, the practice of copywriting has been reserved for advertisers and other professional writers. But today, every salesperson, marketeer, or small business owner desperately needs a variety of digital selling assets like those just listed. If you can hire someone else to write them for you, that’s great. But you’ll also need the ability to craft compelling emails, texts, and direct messages on the fly. If you want to begin to foster closer relationships with your readers, you’ll also need to capture your own voice, expertise, and personality and weave that into what you write. Of course, you can get someone to help you if it makes sense. Every marketing department needs to be actively engaged in helping create digital selling assets that salespeople can quickly and easily leverage. But I also encourage every professional seller to learn to create these kinds of digital assets themselves!

I believe this so strongly that I’ve even created an online course called Copywriting for Sales Professionals to help those who want to improve the effectiveness of their sales writing. If that topic sounds interesting, you can download a free tip sheet on writing more compelling sales copy, which is based on major themes of that course, at: www.salesexcellence.com/handbook.

8. Digital Selling Is Not Just a Job for the Marketing Department

Some who read this will think, “Well, Bill, if our marketing department had a better SEO strategy, a stronger LinkedIn presence, or a more customer-outcome-focused email campaign, it would be a lot easier for our salespeople to book meetings.” No doubt! I’m sure you’re absolutely right! I’ve yet to see a marketing organization that couldn’t—or didn’t want to—do a better job of attracting clients than they are doing today.

But here’s the thing . . .

Very few salespeople will ever have the luxury of a marketing team that supplies all the qualified leads they will ever need. You’ll probably have to create at least some of your opportunities yourself!

Of course, you can outsource the telemarketing function. You can build a team of sales development representatives (SDRs) or create an inside sales department to do a lot of the day-to-day outreach to prospects. But some aspects of prospecting, business development, networking, and referrals will always be the responsibility of the salesperson who “owns” the territory or the entrepreneur running the small business. Whether we like it or not—or think we have time for it or not—digital selling is not just a job for the marketing department.

Part of what is required to stand out in the marketplace can only be done by those who have the business acumen and the sales experience to open doors to hard-to-reach executives. That’s good news! That means you and I will never become obsolete. I personally believe that today’s sales professionals and business owners need to be as much demand generators as closers. This is especially true if you want to leverage social media or other platforms to build a magnetic personal brand that enables your best prospects to find you, which we’ll be talking about in Chapter 6.

As we step forward, I want to point out that the contents of this book are not organized by platform or medium. You won’t see a chapter dedicated to using video for business development or a separate chapter on how to use LinkedIn. Both of those are simply tools we can employ in a wide variety of ways to accomplish any given objective. The use of social media, YouTube, email, text messaging, and others will be referenced in nearly every chapter as it relates to the subject matter at hand.

This book is outlined around the major competency areas of digital selling. Each chapter builds on the last, but it’s organized as a handbook so you can use it as a reference guide for any of these topics as you see fit. So go ahead, thumb through it if you want. Read some of the bolded callouts that are designed to highlight many of the most important takeaways as they draw you into the material wherever you happen to turn.

I absolutely believe you would benefit most by reading every chapter sequentially. But the book is in your hands now, so you can decide! Feel free to read page-by-page or jump around as you see fit. No matter how you choose to consume it, I hope you will devour what’s here and start putting it to use immediately. I’m confident you won’t be disappointed.

Putting These Ideas into Practice