The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

As a Senior Consultant with The Center for Sales Strategy, I’ve reviewed a lot of proposals from salespeople over the years.

As I analyze the ideas sellers plan to present to clients, I often push them to make their proposals stronger by asking, “Where’s the plan to achieve the desired business results? How can you make it easier to buy?”

These prompts often create the awareness that we need to do a little more fishing. So, grab a fishing pole and have a seat on the dock. Today we are taking a virtual fishing trip!

As we get ready to roll in the new year, selling digital marketing solutions will continue to be a top priority and requirement for success.

To say there is one thing that will influence your success or failure at selling digital marketing solutions is a fairly bold statement… and I am going to make it.

Imagination. It’s a wonderful thing as a child, but as an adult, it can often keep you from engaging in specific scenarios.

I see it often from media sellers when it comes to being asked to sell new digital solutions… “if I engage in this conversation, what if they ask me…fill in the blank.”

Digital sales teams today have to know more than how to sell. They need to understand how to develop integrated solutions that produce the business results the accounts they work with want. And they need to have the talent to be successful.

If you are in the process of building a digital sales team or upgrading your current team, here are five things you should consider.

I will often hear sales managers confess that their most tenured, and sometimes best traditional sellers, struggle when it comes to selling more or higher value digital solutions.

As consumers spend more time with digital media and digital marketing budgets increase, it is no longer viable to have your best sellers not participating or fully participating when it comes to digital sales.

So, what is the best way to help your most talented sellers who haven’t found their digital groove?

Improving the performance of a sales team, or a specific seller on the team, is a top focus for any sales leader.

Often, we hear sales managers say they just need more activity or need to add more into pending, but the answer is rarely that simple. To know what is needed to improve performance, you need start by diagnosing where the problem is and what is causing the problem.

Simply said, you need to identify the bottlenecks in your sales process because adding more into pending doesn’t do you any good if your sellers aren’t closing what they propose.