10 steps to digital sales

Introduce a new tool, adapt a few processes and sales will develop in the right direction – unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Because end-to-end lead management and a digitally positioned sales organisation don’t happen overnight. Employees have to be taken on a journey into a new era. We will show you how to do this in the next ten steps.

1. Define Buyers Persona – The concept of the target group no longer works. We no longer want to force our product on the potential customer, we want them to come to us. To generate targeted content that leads the prospect to us, we need to develop a buyer persona. It’s no longer just demographic data that counts, but psychographic data as well. Find out what your customer’s wishes, goals, interests and problems are.  It is also important to find out which media (LinkedIn, XING, Twitter, …) your Buyer Persona uses. By collecting this data, you can discuss what drives customers to make a buying decision and through which channels you reach them.
2. Topic research – If you know the challenges of your buyer persona and which media they consume, you can do targeted research on topics that interest them. You can imagine what trade shows and conventions she attends, or what webinars and digital events she participates in. Of course, it is not helpful if you prepare a topic that engages the Buyer Persona but does not match your product/service.
3. Campaign implementation – Focus on how you can implement campaigns adapted to the buyer persona and what kind of content is suitable for which platform. A campaign is not about creating four white papers and then making them available. If you have ideas for four white papers, you can create a separate campaign from each of these ideas. There is an intellectual effort and value behind a white paper. With the content, you can pull out many individual pieces and use them to build a campaign.
4. Comparing the Buying Centre and the Customer Journey – The alignment of the Buying Centre and the Customer Journey is essential in B2B. In order to create content tailored to the buyer persona, we need to know which role in the buying centre is in use at which point in the customer journey. Often, the user conducts the first research and the decision maker only comes into play later. If decision maker content is placed too early, it does nothing but waste working time.
5. Storytelling – Develop a story, a hero’s journey. Try to build the topic in a narrative thread consistently along the customer journey. This helps to pick up prospects at an early stage and take them along on the customer journey to a successful conclusion of a contract.

6. Investing in the right software – Look at what software is best suited for running digital sales processes. There are standard software providers that have integrated many processes into one system or individual systems that can be merged. Make sure that you can map the customer journey in one system if possible and have all data in one place.

7. Progressive profiling – Don’t ask for too much information from your leads in the beginning. Instead, use the technique of progressive profiling. Ask only the basic questions on the first form you want the prospect to fill out. When the prospect, then next time retrieves information from your website, more advanced questions can be asked in the form that will help the sales representative to target the prospect more specifically. The higher the level of trust, the more will be revealed in the forms.

8. customer journey – The path from the prospect to the conclusion of a contract must be mapped on the basis of a customer journey. This way you always know at which point of the journey the potential customer is and can react with appropriate content.

9. Lead Nurturing – For the different touch points of the customer journey, the customer must be provided with appropriate content. For example, you might receive an email when the prospect has downloaded something, next would be a webinar and then an online consultation or video call to provide further knowledge and ask again where the lead is at the moment. In this way, you can prepare them to become a customer in order to conclude a contract at the end.
 In B2B, this process is not quite as simple to work through in four steps, but the digital sales process can still be automated as far as possible.  It is possible to monitor how the lead reacts to the information offers. This gives a good overview and the sales person can react with a conversation and know which information the prospect already has and which still needs to be conveyed to them.

10. Review – Once all the steps of digital sales have been carried out, you need to regularly review whether your measures are working. Set a time period in which you will review the results. With the findings, you can adjust the measures, discard them or establish new ones. This results in a cycle of checking again and again what is working and what is not.