While we’ve been constantly moving towards a digital world, the pandemic has surely accelerated society’s transition to online buying. With more people working remotely and relying on online buying, it’s time to shift our selling practices towards the new age of online buying and selling.
With this adaption comes some new rules we should follow. Many practices that will be popular in 2021 we’ve already begun doing it’s just a matter of adapting completely to the change to maximize on the new sales age.
Create a Digital Customer Experience
Researching online before buying is becoming a popular thing to do. That means your website needs to be top-notch, supplying consumers with all the information they need to know to decide to buy.
With face-to-face interactions lessening during the pandemic, it’s even more important that your website is set up to give customers a great experience. Your website should be creatively designed to capture visitor’s attention with information that will convince them to engage and buy.
Customers want validation, and your website should be where they go to get it. Online buying is different than in-person buying. Users online want the information they’re seeking to be upfront. This is an advantage for you as you don’t have to use subliminal marketing online. You can be direct with your customers and not turn them away.
People respond to brands that understand their needs. So, you must give users an experience that’s relevant to them and your lifetime value. With comprehensive and compelling messaging, users can gather the information they need.
Most importantly for creating a compelling digital customer experience is being there. Listening to your customers and monitoring how they navigate your website will help you curate your digital customer experience. Try out different landing pages and calls to action to see how your potential and current customers react and direct your website towards that.
With the pandemic moving more people to online buying, it’s all about building connections digitally now.
Use technology to build curated experiences
With creating a digital customer experience it’s important you make it curated to your customers. We’ve already begun to understand the power of personalization to gain consumers’ attention and close more deals. What we need to capitalize on in 2021 is hitting that personalization hard. With digital customer experiences, it’s easy to make this goal a reality.
AI allows us to gain insight into our most valuable customer’s daily lives and understand what they want most. Data and analytics can tell us when and where to engage our customers and how. This technology gives salespeople the ability to use engagement tools that target the best day and time to call someone in each industry. By leaning more heavily on technology salespeople can learn about buyers to develop customer relationships that pay off.
While using this technology to increase sales volume, you have to make sure your messaging is still personal enough to make the customer feel as though the message was made just for them. The sales experience needs to be individually curated for each market and segment of your target audience.
Build connections
With a pause on in-person selling, upping your connection building will be important in the new year. A great way to create value for your buyers is to build a connection with them. However, with online selling, this task becomes more difficult.
A sales rep must now build that connection solely online or over the phone. It’s important that you have the basic principle of doing your research but that you also apply a different approach and adapt for each contact you’re trying to build a connection with. With in person connecting, it’s easy to read a person’s reaction but in shifting to online you’re not as easily notified as to the other person’s reaction to your pitch. This means you need to do a lot more asking and listening. Listen to what they have to say in order to read how they’re taking your pitch. Phrasing your questions and comments better can also help give you the insight you need. Without those physical cues, it’s important to key in on the verbal ones.
In building connections with your customers, you’ll associate great customer experience with your product, something others will be hard-pressed to beat. In doing your research and understanding how you can connect with your client, salespeople can up their game.
Empathize and Understand
This goes for both sales leaders and sales reps. Sales leaders need to understand that sales reps’ jobs just got a heck of a lot harder in some areas. In certain markets, people are buying a lot less. Sales leaders need to embrace empathy and provide personalized, detailed coaching techniques to help get teams back on track and confident.
Once back on track and confident in their selling, sales reps need to empathize with their potential customers. With the pandemic hitting businesses and consumers hard, it’s important sales reps understand each client’s situation and take a different approach to sell.
Don’t be afraid to ask how the pandemic is affecting your customers. You can use this information to craft custom-tailored solutions to their specific challenges. Offering discounts, deals, and delays can help you win the client’s business this time around and even push them to continue to do business with you in the future.
When you help people at their lowest, it builds customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Integrate sales and marketing teams
A major trend for 2021 will be integrating your sales and marketing teams. COVID-19 has driven sales to distance selling forcing us to blur the line between the sales and marketing department. It’s critical in these new times that sales and marketing function as one to create a plan that works towards the overall business goal. You must almost fully integrate these two departments to succeed.
Intertwining every aspect of the two departments will be critical to its success. You must share not only people among that two but also data. Don’t keep sales data and marketing data separate, integrate it into one and even consider making it transparent to everyone on the marketing and sales teams.
Both sides must know the overall goal and the part they play in working together to achieve it by practicing consistent processes. Marketing brings in leads and sales converts and upsells those leads. The two go hand in hand which explains why integrating them into one can drive revenue for your business.
Bringing both departments together should be an easier task than you think. As long as your goals are clearly stated and the basics of how to get there are laid out the two departments won’t have much trouble working together to make selling online a success.
Important takeaway
COVID-19 sped up the shift towards a digital approach to buying and selling. Many haven’t even begun the shift, and therefore the new year is a great time to get started. It can be a whole new world for some, but nothing you can’t learn to tackle. There are many advantages not only for the customer but for you too in switching to or even just adding an online community. Digital transformations are becoming the new selling point.
