While people are eagerly looking forward to in-person interactions, it is safe to say that remote selling is here to stay. As technology advances, the remote selling experience needs to be as natural and fruitful as the in-person sales experience.
Digital selling is an important channel for meeting buyer expectations, prospecting and communicating in a hybrid work world.
Top digital selling trends:
- Social selling is going to scale
- Coaching reps will optimize the training process
- Accessing multiple touchpoints will be crucial
- Selling will be based on relationships
Let's do a deep dive into the digital selling trends that will shape the sales landscape in 2023.
Social selling is going to scale
Social selling means selling on social media. It refers to the process of building a relationship with the potential customer and finding an audience that benefits from your services.
98% of sales reps with 5000+ LinkedIn connections meet or surpass sales quotas, according to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing Report 2021 — making it crucial to have a personal brand for hitting sales targets. Building a personal brand to aid social selling not only proves credibility as an expert but also helps the sales rep leverage the power of social media to generate leads.
The effectiveness of social selling is determined by showing up where your audience is. For B2B professionals it is important to have a personal brand on a platform like LinkedIn to build an audience and amplify networking.
Mathias Thulin, CSO at GetAccept rightly says, “We are in an era where personal brands are now becoming equal to, or even bigger than company brands.”
Even if you are acing the sales game through phone calls or emails, think about the value you can provide—and gain— through social channels. Connecting with prospects and peers, sharing new opinions and engaging with your audience are just the beginning of the list. Truly, it is the holy grail to quicker success.
Daniel Disney, Founder of The Daily Sales, says that ‘building a personal brand is not a requirement to be successful, but it’s a requirement to be as successful as you possibly can’.
Coaching reps will optimize the training process
To excel in the remote selling environment it is vital to help sales reps gauge customer behavior.
Flavia Colombo, Sales Director at Nordilux Hubspot says ‘Hubspot is creating more and more programs for sales reps to build the right content and proper engagement.’
Regular training programs can help sales reps be better prepared for online interactions with customers. It implements a set of best practices to create engagement and leverage the right content to build a trusted network.
Coaching sales reps to properly navigate the digital sales environment is going to be one of the biggest selling trends of 2023.
“If I am thinking about my sales rep, it depends on the training and communication and training we are providing them in a remote sales interaction. You have to be sure that you are giving them the tools to be effective in a remote selling environment,” says Flavia.
Coaching tools like Gong, record, transcribe and analyze all sales calls so you can predict customer behavior to help guide sales decisions.
Accessing multiple touchpoints will be crucial
Effective digital selling means accessing different touchpoints to make the buyer experience personal and trustworthy—all in a virtual environment.
To have some semblance of the in-person experience in your online communication channels– using video tools can help. ‘95% of the message retains with video whereas only 10% retains through text mediums. Videos are personal and make you memorable," says Mathias, CSO at GetAccept.
‘Videos give a sneak peek into people’s lives — messy rooms, kids, cats— and help build up relationships’, adds Maddie Schneeman, Customer success manager at G2.
Similarly, team communication and management tools like Slack and Zoom help you stay updated on current deals while keeping other stakeholders informed.
Mathias says, “It is useful to have targeted meetings in the digital sales space. Instead of one 2-hour meeting with everyone in the room, you can have 15 minutes with legal, 15 minutes with product teams, and so on to make the exchange relevant for both parties. You can record these meetings and then put them in content groups.”
Digital sales room is a tool of the future that has made remote selling quicker and more reliable. It offers a secure digital environment that brings buyers and sellers together, allowing them to review every aspect of the sales process.
‘It’s a place where you can have conversations where you can add content and proposals. User-generated from sales reps' video meeting summaries. You don’t need to go through email threads," says Mathias.
Selling will be based on relationships
Maddie says, “Digital selling is more about relationships and less about products. Being able to have that relationship and build it quickly is the way forward. Any platform that offers that — might be your billion-dollar idea.”
Selling needs to become a two-way street — customers communicating what they want, and brands picking up on these needs and delivering. But this communication is often implicit and hard to delineate.
Which is where relationship-building comes in.
Relationships allow for conversations to take place without them seeming transactional. The quicker your sales reps build relationships, the quicker — and better— you understand your audience.
But there are a few kinks that need to be ironed out to ensure rapid relationship building.
Customers want to access all the details of the sales process from one platform and sales reps want to have a system that isn’t fragmented across departments — essentially a single source of truth for all sales-related information.
Integrating information into one platform solves the problem by enhancing efficiency and keeping all stakeholders updated in real-time.
To further strengthen relationship building, automation can create personalized experiences for the customer — integrating the tools with your CRM and bringing relevant content to the forefront.
Relationship building is about understanding and identifying the problems the customer is facing and then outlining the path to the best solution.
To sum up
“2023 will be the year of the competitor. The solutions in technology have tripled each year – next year there will be 3 times as many software competing products as there are now. People will not buy from those who offer the cheapest solutions or the most features but those who know the space best, who are the most personalized in the sales process and who communicate that value the fastest,” says Dailius Wilson, VP of Growth at GetAccept.
