Digital Sales Skills: How the Pandemic is Still Changing Everything

Two years have passed since the start of the pandemic and the world of sales has gone through huge changes. Let’s look at digital sales skills and talk about how the pandemic is still changing everything.

By now we’re able to start taking an educated guess at what’s going to stick and what’s going to last. What will a post-pandemic sales world look like? What does selling look like in a post-pandemic environment? Now, for me, I always approach such questions, not from the perspective of the salesperson, but from the perspective of the customer.

I’ve often said that if we understand the way that a buyer buys, we can reverse engineer our sales presentation to make it easy for them to do just that. So the question we have to ask here is how has the pandemic changed the buying behavior? If we can answer that question, we’ll get a better clue as to what we need to be thinking about along the lines of selling behavior in the future.

Here are five changes in buyer behavior that we have to make sure we’ve adapted to because these are still evolving even today.

Buyers are More Comfortable with Video

It’s one of the single greatest changes over the last two years in buyer behavior. Whether that means receiving videos from the salesperson, participating in a zoom call, facetime, Marco Polo, or any of the other apps that are out there. The fact of the matter is that the entire world has shifted to a comfort level with video that didn’t exist previously.

If you’re not taking advantage of that, then you’re not in alignment with what your customers’ expectations are. You need to understand that your buyers are cool with video. You need to be as well.

Video Expectations

What I mean by that is that we think we have to produce this super slick, silky, smooth, clean presentation that’s highly produced. I completely disagree. Reason being, is that when you think about what buyers are used to in video over the last couple of years, what have they seen? The videos that they are seeing are sent directly from people.

They’re embedded in text messages, on their face time videos with a grandkid, It’s a Zoom meeting, or the Marco Polo video. Those videos are not slickly produced. The videos we see that come to us from individuals, they’re raw, they’re jumpy, they’re a little shaky, and people are okay with that.

Who cares? My concern is that salespeople are not wanting to put out any video because it’s not slick. I’m going to suggest to you that your customer is going to give you a lot of grace on this. It really is the effort that counts. 

If you’re just holding your phone or just recording into a webcam and sending that quick message, they already know who you are. They already have a sense of what you look like and what you sound like. Give yourself a break. Use the video messaging tool that your customers want you to use.

More Communication

This is especially true when the buying process is difficult and elongated. Our natural tendency is that when we don’t have great news, we don’t want to talk to our customers. You’ve got to get that thinking out of your head. People want more communication, not less.

Exceeding Expectations

Set the expectations for this process with the goal of exceeding those expectations and not just meeting those expectations. When all you do is meet the expectations, you don’t earn any bonus points from your customer. When you exceed them, it changes everything.

Here’s a rule of thumb. Don’t make a promise to your customer unless you can beat that promise.

Deposits into the Emotional Bank Account

Look for ways to be able to do positive things for your customer because there are going to be withdrawals from that emotional bank account. We have to share bad news from time to time.

When we make deposits on a regular basis, then we’re assured that we won’t be overdrawn. What I mean by deposit is extra communication. It’s the extra piece of information. It’s an interesting article to send them all these little drips of things that make their life just a little bit easier and a little more understandable.

The fact of the matter is, that we’re still in a time of change that we have to adjust to. And we have to get it right. Think about these things through the buyer’s eyes.

Until next time, learn more to earn more!