What is Digital Selling?

Dave Harries: Grant, tell me what exactly is digital selling?

Grant Leboff: Digital selling is responding to the need for sales people today and marketers as well to use social media and the web. To leverage that effectively in order to generate leads and to nurture prospects and to bring them closer to the sale.

Dave Harries: How has the world of digital changed selling? I mean selling is selling, isn’t it?

Grant Leboff: Yes, selling is selling. That’s true but the golden rule is that you’ve always got to be where your customers are. What’s happened with digital is increasingly, customers are using digital as their first point of call. They’ll go and do a search, they’ll look at what their social network say, what other people are saying in review sites. Much of the buying journey now takes place within the digital environment. The sales people just have to make sure they’re there as well in order to be able to react to that, respond to that and find opportunities.

Dave Harries: Do you think there is a problem that people have not embraced this new world?

Grant Leboff: Yes. I think that I see a lot of sales people who still think that picking up the phone feels like they’re being proactive and doing something, even though the response rates are in permanent decline. Yet where their customers are looking which is review sites, doing searches on Google, looking in social places, looking on forums, sales people feel like they’re not being proactive enough. I suppose the point is, is that responding on LinkedIn forum doesn’t necessarily feel like you’re doing anything really fundamentally proactive. Whereas bushing away at the phone for 3 hours, does. I think that a lot of sales people at the moment are neglecting social and digital generally. More importantly, I suppose, is that they don’t know how to use it effectively.

Dave Harries: Then the challenge I suppose is for somebody who’s been perhaps brought up in a career, that is already 30 years or 35 years old, adapting to this new world when they’ve been very used to these old techniques, the cold calling and the traditional marketing and so on?

Grant Leboff: Yeah, absolutely. I suppose sales people and marketers have always been good at adapting to changing customer requirements, demands, behaviors. These demands and behaviors have become so fundamentally different over the last few years. The rise of the smart phone, the way that we communicate. The changes are so fundamentally different that I suppose for some people who are midway or even towards the end of careers. Trying to relearn and under the change in behaviors is quite difficult.