Digital Selling vs. Social Selling: What the difference?
Digital Selling is a new term that we will be hearing a lot more about in the next few years. At the heart of the digital transformation is the blurring of the lines between sales, marketing and customer service and the ultimate merging of these roles into one revenue-generating business unit. At the core of this transformation is the establishment of new departments responsible for the creation and distribution of content to educate and influence the modern buyer.
DIGITAL SELLING
Digital Selling does include social selling but also many other assets like advanced data analytics, sales intelligence and automation, digital documents, customer relationship management, online presentations and more.
Digital Selling is the use of digital assets to identify, engage and drive revenues from buyers. It takes a holistic view and brings together many elements across the organization to guide buyers through a journey that ultimately leads to better engagement and ultimately more closed deals.
In this the age of the digital transformation; the sales industry has been slow to change despite the fact that marketing has been evolving over the past decade through digital marketing and explosive inbound marketing. Now its time for the sales industry to join the digital party.
This transformation has started and will ultimately take many years to become mainstream as forward-thinking multinational organizations lead the way whilst the more cautious small and medium-sized businesses watch and learn.
What's the future for digital selling? According to Kevin Neary its Data Science. A recent trend is for digital selling pioneers and innovators to use data science concepts like natural language processing and machine learning to power new digital selling tools to:
- Identify relevant buyers
- Start digital conversations across multiple channels
- Personalize sales messages to engage buyers meaningfully.
One company using data science to power digital selling is Orcawise, a digital sales intelligence platform that uses semantic web and graph technologies to identify and profile buyers.
SOCIAL SELLING
Social Selling is just one component of Digital Selling. It can be defined as "hanging out where the buyer hangs out, in an online context". B2B buyers and sellers looking for deep relationships tend to use social networks which are optimized for relationship building. Increasingly B2B sales teams think of social selling from the perspective of the buyer. Buyers increasingly use their peer-to-peer networks to consume content and arm themselves with information to make well informed buying decisions.
The Social Sellers job is to meet the modern buyers online and guide them along the new buying journey.
Social Selling has three key elements:
1. Insights social selling
2. Trigger social selling
3. Referral social selling
These three elements of Social Selling can be automated with social selling tools.
Summary
Social Selling means leveraging content around social networks to drive buyer engagement.
Digital Selling means leveraging all the digital sales assets at an organizations disposal to drive buyer engagement.
References: Kevin Neary, CEO, Orcawise
References: The Irish Times, New Innovators
Faith-Driven Entreprenuer | Developing African Workforce & Human Capital | Future of Education & Work Researcher | Championing Apprenticeship Education in Africa | Raising Social Entreprenuers | PREACHING CHRIST
2yWow....after 5 years...it's still evergreen. Thanks for the insight Kevin J. Neary
Senior Customer Success Leader | Experienced, Award-Winning Post-Sales Leader Proven Experience In Building & Scaling Customer-Led Growth Engines
5yHi Kevin, thank you for the read. But I do take exception (as I have done with various articles) that the Social Selling and now Digital Selling ideology refers so specifically to sales, and sales alone. In today's world of business we are seeing the creation and maturing of the subscription economy and now evolving to what I call the "outcome economy". Customers irrelevant of whether they are software customers or not, are buying into a desired outcome. For example and at the very basic level, customers do not buy a hammer to bang a nail in, they buy it to hang a picture up - that is their desired outcome. So when we talk so specifically about the use of social media and other digital assets to sell I think we are limiting the power and impact. Social Selling for me was always "Social Business" allowing the critical roles outside of sales to influence and participate, and where my role and that of my team and peers participate as Customer Success professionals is just as critical in utilsing social and digital channels to understand our stakeholders and users, our customers and potential customers and our industries we play in.
Executive IT & Digital Transformation Consultant
6yI work for a financial services company. I am looking for new ways of increasing sales productivity ( cover more territory to sell more with less resources). Digital and social selling are interesting propositions. Can you help a bit more with assistance in how to implement this ?
I had not considered the differences, and the various inputs. Very insightful read, thanks Kevin.
Great article Kevin Neary . Digital Selling is the next wave and sales organisations need to have it on their agenda. Matt