How Digital Selling and Digital Marketing Work Together To Win Sales

In today‘s digital-first business landscape, simply marketing your products and services online is no longer enough to reach your revenue goals. To really move the needle, you need to master the art and science of digital selling.

What exactly is digital selling and how does it differ from digital marketing? More importantly, how can these two functions work together to drive more sales and revenue? Let‘s break it down.

Digital Marketing vs. Digital Selling

Think of digital marketing as the overture to the sales process. It‘s all about building brand awareness, generating interest and filling the top of your sales funnel with quality leads.

Digital marketing encompasses tactics like:

• SEO and content marketing to attract inbound traffic
• Paid advertising on Google, LinkedIn, Facebook to reach target audiences
• Social media marketing to engage prospects and customers
• Email marketing to nurture leads down the funnel

The goal is getting your business found online by the right people and compelling them to learn more. It‘s casting a wide net to build an audience of potential buyers.

Digital selling, on the other hand, involves engaging those leads in a very intentional, personalized way to turn them into customers. It uses digital tools and data-driven insights to connect with prospects at the right time, with the right messaging, to guide them to a purchase decision.

So while digital marketing is one-to-many, digital selling is one-to-one. And they need to work hand-in-hand to achieve revenue goals.

Consider these statistics:

• 61% of B2B transactions start online (Forrester)
• 68% of B2B customers prefer to research online on their own, up from 53% in 2015 (Forrester)
• 60% of the sales cycle is over before a buyer even talks to a salesperson (Corporate Executive Board)

What these data points show is that buyers are increasingly self-directed in their research and decision making. They‘re consuming digital marketing content to educate themselves and build a short list of vendors before ever talking to a sales rep.

This is why digital marketing and digital selling must be tightly aligned. Marketing warms up leads, then seamlessly hands them off to sales to close the deal through digital selling best practices.

5 Essential Digital Selling Strategies and Tactics

What does effective digital selling look like in practice? Here are five key strategies and tactics used by top performers:

1. Social Selling

With 75% of B2B buyers now using social media to research vendors (IDC), social selling is a must. It involves leveraging social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter to find, connect with, and engage prospects with helpful content and insights.

Instead of leading with a hard sell, focus on providing value, answering questions, and building trust and credibility over time. Share relevant blog posts, whitepapers, and industry news. Jump into conversations where you can lend your expertise. Build real relationships.

Social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower social engagement (LinkedIn). Best practices include:

• Optimizing your social profiles with customer-centric messaging
• Joining relevant industry and prospect groups
• Sharing content that speaks to your buyer‘s challenges and goals
• Interacting authentically and not being overly promotional
• Using social listening to track mentions of your brand and competitors

2. Lead Nurturing through CRM

Engaging and nurturing leads at scale requires a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track prospect interactions, personalize outreach, and move leads through the funnel.

With a CRM, you can use prospect demographics and behavior (like website visits, content downloads, email clicks) to tailor your messaging and touch points. You can set up automated email sequences based on triggers like filling out a form or viewing a pricing page. And you can score leads to prioritize sales outreach.

Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (Annuitas Group). To maximize success:

• Integrate your CRM with marketing automation for a 360-degree view of prospects
• Develop a clear lead qualification framework with sales and marketing
• Create email templates and call scripts for each stage of the buyer‘s journey
• Use your CRM to track lead velocity and identify sticking points in the funnel
• Monitor sales metrics like call-to-conversion rate to optimize performance

3. Sales Enablement Content

B2B buyers consume an average of 13 pieces of content before deciding on a vendor (FocusVision). Providing them with the right content at the right time is key to overcoming objections and speeding up the sales cycle.

Best-in-class digital sellers develop a library of prospect-facing content like:

• Blog posts and articles
• eBooks and whitepapers
• Case studies by industry or use case
• Product demos and explainer videos
• ROI calculators and assessment tools

To get the most out of sales enablement content:

• Organize it in an easy-to-use central repository
• Map content to each stage of your sales process
• Make content easy to customize for specific prospects and situations
• Empower sales with training on how and when to use content
• Track content utilization and effectiveness as part of your sales metrics

4. Personalization at Scale

In a world of information overload, personalization cuts through the noise. 88% of B2B marketers say personalization helps them deliver superior customer experiences (Evergage).

The key is using the demographic and behavioral data in your CRM and marketing automation to segment leads and tailor outreach at scale. This can include:

• Dynamically changing web page content based on visitor characteristics
• Customizing email messaging based on persona or lifecycle stage
• Curating different content offers or retargeting ads based on web behavior
• Developing industry or account-specific sales plays

Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates (Experian). And 77% of B2B buyers have chosen a vendor due to a positive experience with personalized content (DemandGen Report).

5. Data-Driven Optimization

The beauty of digital selling is that almost everything is measurable. Track the right metrics across the sales and marketing funnel to continuously optimize performance.

Key metrics to track include:

• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated
• MQL-to-SQL (sales qualified lead) conversion rate
• Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate
• Opportunity-to-close rate
• Average deal size and sales cycle length
• Content engagement rates

Use this data to A/B test tactics like subject lines, CTA placement, and follow-up cadence. Analyze what content and touch points move prospects down the funnel fastest. Double down on your highest-converting plays.

The Importance of Sales and Marketing Alignment

Implementing these digital selling strategies requires tight alignment between sales and marketing across people, processes, and platforms.

Sales and marketing need to be in lockstep on:

• Target buyer personas and lead qualification criteria
• Key messaging, positioning, and content strategy
• Lead routing and handoff processes
• Service level agreements (SLAs) for lead follow-up
• Revenue goals and reporting

When sales and marketing teams work closely together, companies see 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates (MarketingProfs).

Here are some ways to improve sales and marketing alignment:

• Hold regular cross-functional meetings to share feedback and ideas
• Develop a unified dashboard with shared KPIs
• Enable transparency with a connected CRM and marketing automation
• Create a feedback loop on lead quality and sales collateral needs
• Implement a lead scoring system agreed upon by both teams
• Coordinate campaigns with integrated content and social strategies

The Future of Digital Selling

As digital technologies continue to evolve at a rapid pace, so too will digital selling best practices. To stay ahead of the curve, focus on:

Integrating AI and automation
Artificial intelligence can help sellers identify high-potential prospects, recommend next-best actions, and automate administrative tasks. Tools like conversational AI can engage web visitors in real-time and surface qualified leads. Look for ways to leverage AI for efficiency and insights.

Optimizing for voice search
With the rise of virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, more B2B queries will happen via voice. Optimize your web content for how people ask questions verbally vs. typing keywords. This often means using more natural phrases and long-tail keywords.

Embracing video and interactivity
Cisco predicts that by 2022, 82% of all online content will be video. For B2B sales, video is a powerful way to build rapport at scale.Record personalized videos for prospects, embed demos on your site, and use video CTAs. Also look for ways to make content interactive with things like quizzes, calculators, and 360-degree product tours.

Engaging across the full buyer‘s committee
The average B2B purchase involves 6-10 decision makers (Gartner). Sellers need to engage a wider group of stakeholders across different channels. Use your CRM to map out key players and develop targeted content and touches for each person. Coordinate with marketing to surround the account and build consensus.

Winning at Digital Selling

Mastering digital selling is essential for meeting the expectations of today‘s self-directed buyer and maximizing revenue performance. It‘s not just about doing more online, but fundamentally rethinking how you find, engage, and convert prospects into customers.

As a sales or marketing leader, start by assessing your current digital selling strategies and identifying gaps. Audit your tech stack and content library. Talk with your team about roadblocks and skill development needs.

Then create a plan to level-up your digital selling across the five key pillars we covered:

1. Social selling
2. Lead nurturing through CRM
3. Sales enablement content
4. Personalization at scale
5. Data-driven optimization

Explore new tools and training. But don‘t just focus on tactics. Aligning your people and processes across sales and marketing is just as critical. Develop a true revenue team mindset.

The B2B organizations that will win in the future are those that find ways to create a seamless, end-to-end digital customer experience – from initial touch to closed-won deal.

By combining the reach and intelligence of digital marketing with the relevance and urgency of digital selling, you‘ll be well on your way to achieving your growth goals. And you‘ll be ready to adapt as digital behaviors continue to evolve.