These days, traditional selling techniques are no longer enough to meet your sales quota. The pandemic made this very clear: Forced to keep physical interaction with others to a minimum, we all had to rely on modern selling methods to nurture our relationships with our customers.
While you will still get results with cold calling and emailing, modern selling techniques will get you better prospecting results with less time and effort.
“The blending of modern and traditional selling has been going on for quite some time, but the best way to think about it is in terms of ground cover and air cover,”
Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales for Life
“With ground cover, the individual seller is responsible for their total addressable market, and the accounts within it. Their job is to socially surround the customer and the buying committee. So all the champions, influencers and decision makers, they need to identify who these people are and how they’re going to engage them in a bold and different way.”
The marketing team, meanwhile, provides the air cover—account-based marketing best practices and directly at that total addressable market. This way, modern and traditional selling does the exact same thing.
Combining Traditional and Modern Selling
Thankfully, finding the perfect balance between modern and traditional sales techniques isn’t too difficult or complicated. Here’s how you can combine traditional and modern marketing practices in your sales strategy:
1. Share Content Regularly
“I’m sharing content three times a day,” says Shanks. “Every single day, I’m sharing best practices, pitfalls, and challenges.”
It’s a simple task, but it allows him to draws people in and build a community, contributing to his social branding presence. This way, he can easily connect with key stakeholders, champions, influencers, and decision makers from the accounts that make up his total addressable market (TAM).
2. Necessitate Change
When the buying committee joins your community as you share more content, you’re moving them off their status quo, making them ask themselves, ‘Why should we change today instead of tomorrow?’ Your content should answer this question, eventually forcing them to study how they can start change.
Once the buying committee has answered these questions, they should start looking for people who can help them facilitate the changes they want to achieve. This is where you come in and convince them that the solution you are offering is perfect for their needs via a cadence of targeted messages, delivered via both modern and traditional methods.
The Intersection of Modern and Traditional
To recap, you need to know the needs of the people you have to engage, and from there, you can better create stories will resonate with them.
If you can answer these, you’ll have an easier time engaging your customer in a bold and different way.
“That might be via phone, email, text, or LinkedIn. I also embed smart links for video in the emails I send,” says Shanks. “In addition, I send targeted stories to my prospects using a cadence software like Salesloft, which you can use to pinpoint certain people and direct a very specific sales conversation towards them.”
This combination of modern and traditional selling techniques allows Shanks to socially surround the buying committee within his TAM.
“So I’m doing air cover by sharing content to help attract these people into my social network, like a magnet. And then I’m engaging them very directly, maybe offline using phone or text, or online via email,” says Shanks.
Always remember: The best sales strategies need both modern and traditional methods.
It’s not a “versus” or “or” situation—the two need to be used together. Only then will your team be able to achieve the best results.
