Digital Selling: How to Use Social Media and the Web to Generate Leads and Sell More

That's the premise of this book. In "Digital Selling," Leboff argues that the traditional lead generation model is no longer fit for purpose in the 21st century. He challenges us to reshape and update our sales and marketing roles to reflect the digital age we live in – to reconsider the way these two functions interact with one another.

To help us transform our thoughts into action, he then puts forward a new sales model and serves up some strategies to help us thrive in the digital era.

So who would be interested in this book? Well, it goes without saying that salespeople and marketers should read it. Even if you're a fully fledged, tech-savvy digital native, you'll likely learn a thing or two from reading these pages. And if you feel that you're missing a trick somewhere, or that you're falling behind your colleagues, you'll get a lot from this book.

But its appeal extends far beyond just sales and marketing departments. If you're involved in growing your organization in any way – if you're producing goods and services, if you're responsible for brand strategy, or you're just interested in what your business needs to focus on to succeed – "Digital Selling" will be an eye-opener.

The author, Leboff, is a game-changer and thought leader in his field. Having built his own successful direct marketing company, he established a strategic consultancy called "the Sticky Marketing Club." The name clearly worked – his next move was to write two books called "Sticky Marketing" and "Stickier Marketing." "Digital Selling" is his fourth book, and it debuted at number one in the Amazon charts. Throughout all his ventures, Leboff's calling card is that he challenges received wisdom and rewrites best practices at every turn.

So, stay tuned to find out why the sales role is different in a digital environment, why content really is king, and just how old the traditional sales funnel really is.

"Digital Selling" comes in at 208 pages, and it's divided into nine chapters, plus a short concluding epilog.

The author kicks off by introducing us to Dr Karl Möbius and his fish tank of pikes and minnows. A glass screen separates the predatory pikes from the little minnows. The pikes keep trying to get to the minnows until they accept defeat and give up. When the glass screen is removed, the pikes fail to recognize the situation has changed in their favor, and they make no attempt to feast on the minnows.

It's an analogy for what often happens in sales nowadays. A whole new world of opportunity opens up in front of a salesperson, but he fails to realize it, so he also fails to capitalize on it. This failure is the book's reason for being.

The need to recognize how much things have changed is the subject of Chapter 1. There's the super-abundance of information, for example. The surge of media channels. The speed and reach of technology. The transformation of individuals and businesses into media entities, and the explosion of choice. These changes have marked the demise of the traditional economy and the rise of the digital one.

In days gone by, most people accepted, and even welcomed, advertising into their lives. TV adverts became family favorites. Flyers often proved useful, and salespeople would sometimes be rewarded for knocking on doors by being invited into people's homes, because they were seen as knowledgeable experts.

It's a different story now. People are busier. They're bombarded with information, and have more demands on their time and attention than ever before. Because of this, we pay less attention to sales pitches and adverts. We find them intrusive and annoying, and we sometimes resent them. Even when we contemplate complex purchases, most people don't consult salespeople, because a Google search can be just as useful – and it's faster. In short, people are creating their own sales journeys. Power has shifted from companies and salespeople to the customer.

All this makes it harder for salespeople to reach prospects and influence them, and to bring value to the sales process.

This is bad news for salespeople who still use the traditional sales funnel. The pre-digital model dates back to the end of the 19th century, and it relies on the ability of sales and marketing departments to reach the biggest possible audience, to suck in huge volumes of potential customers. The idea is that, if you attract enough people, a certain number of them are bound to make a purchase. But with people turning off from traditional sales approaches in droves, how can you re-engage them?

Leboff doesn't pull any punches here. At times, he sounds frustrated with those who've not moved with the times, but he offers direct, straight-talking advice to set everyone on the right path. He offers a new perspective and a new tool called the Digital Sales Funnel, which you'll hear more about later.

A key part of Leboff's strategy is that it's vital to engage with what he calls the "social web" – that's the network of blogs, vlogs, forums, communities, review sites, and social media platforms that most of us use daily. This seems like sound advice. After all, recommendations from friends, family and from other sources we trust often influence our own buying decisions, and so much of that word-of-mouth communication now takes place on the social web.

We agree that it's sensible for companies and salespeople to have a strong, vibrant presence there, to find a route into these online conversations. Salespeople have always needed to be where their customers are – that's nothing new. What is new is that the social web is now the place to be, to reach those customers.

We're not talking about just a token presence, though – a LinkedIn page, maybe, and the occasional response to a comment on Yelp. No. You need to go further. You must embrace the social web and contribute to it. Be proactive. Write a blog. Tweet every day. Post regularly on community forums. Leboff puts forward several reasons why this really matters.

Building brands online, for example, is crucial. Having strong company, product and personal brands helps establish your reputation, your visibility, and your credibility, for sure, but in the digital arena it goes further. It helps you to earn what Leboff calls "mindshare" – customer awareness and trust that will put you and your offering in mind when they're making a purchasing decision, before they even make contact with you.

The incredible appetite for content is another key reason why it's crucial to embrace the social web. In the digital age, missing an opportunity to influence people's decisions with insightful, informative, consistent content doesn't only mean lost sales. You're also missing out on the chance for other people to spread the word for you, to share your content with their networks and build awareness of what you're offering.

Just embracing social media, though, isn't enough. If you still cling to outdated sales models, you're unlikely to get very far. For example, there are salespeople who still approach people on social platforms, uninvited, as they might once have done with unsolicited emails and cold calls. Their aim is to reel the same huge volumes of customers into the sales funnel as they attracted in the pre-digital economy. But Leboff is unambiguous in his feelings about this: at best, it just won't work. And at worst, it could do your reputation a whole lot of damage.

The author's answer to this is the Digital Sales Funnel. The best way to understand it is to compare it with its older cousin.

The traditional sales funnel is shaped like, well… a funnel. The wide top represents the large number of prospects entering the sales process. The funnel tapers toward the bottom as fewer and fewer people progress towards a purchase, until a small number of people decide to take the plunge.

Leboff's new digital version is starkly different. It's less a funnel and more an inverse hourglass, with a long, thin stem, top and bottom, and a fat bulge in the middle. The narrow top represents the fact that unwanted and invasive ways of contacting people no longer cut it. Engagement now matters more than volume. So instead of an advertising or cold-calling campaign, say, that generates sudden influxes of interest, we have great online content that produces a steady trickle of engaged prospects.

The bulge in the middle represents a kind of "holding pen," which prospects fall into after they enter the funnel. The salesperson's job is to keep them engaged, hold their attention, encourage them to share content, and stay in contact. The objective is to build their enthusiasm for your product or service so they entice more prospects from their own networks into the Digital Sales Funnel. Eventually they may make the decision to buy. This is where the funnel narrows again at the base.

The new sales funnel is the book's central offering. It formalizes and gives structure to the author's ideas and arguments. But more importantly, it provides salespeople and marketers with a modern, relevant sales tool designed specifically for the digital age.

So what else can you learn from "Digital Selling?" The chapters that follow look at ways to turn the theory into reality, and they're packed with sensible advice. There are some great recommendations in Chapter 5 about the vast potential for collecting data from the Digital Sales Funnel, while Chapter 6 might be a revelation for some people. It walks you through of a host of different content types, some of which will be more familiar than others. In fact, you might be surprised by just how many there are.

We like the author's framework for creating compelling content too. This involves thinking of material in terms of what he calls "the five Fs": facts, freedom, fortune, fun, and fame. There are alternative frameworks, but "the five Fs" is a particularly promising starting point.

Our favorite chapter, though, looks at how to get noticed. It's one of the shorter chapters in the book, but potentially one of the most encouraging. For businesses, salespeople and marketers who've yet to make the jump into digital selling, this chapter will be an inspiration.

It turns out there are countless ways you can build a Digital Sales Funnel – from paying to get attention, to adding tags and keywords to shareable content, and from leveraging existing contacts to engaging with industry influencers. Although some of the advice might seem quite obvious, for anyone struggling to adapt to digital selling, this chapter could help you to get going from a standing start.

The final chapter provides lists of platforms, networks, and tools that could prove really useful. There are some obvious social media sites here, like Facebook and Instagram, along with some that might be new to you – VK and Blab, for example. You can also find out about a range of mechanisms for digital selling – website visitor identification software, content curation tools, and influencer trackers, to name just a few.

So what's our last word on "Digital Selling"?

We think this is a really useful book. We can't argue with Leboff's premise that the sales and marketing landscape has changed dramatically, so this could be a crucial book to read, particularly for professionals who haven't quite moved with the times. We certainly had several "lightbulb" moments as we read it.

Leboff writes with confidence and clarity, and he backs up his ideas with examples and case studies throughout. Most importantly, he provides a wake-up call for sales and marketing people – they need to pull themselves into the digital age, fast, if they haven't done so already. Doing this doesn't just mean ditching traditional sales models in favor of a digital one. It also means reassessing the way that sales and marketing work and interact.

"Digital Selling" is a bit repetitive, in places. The same points seem to be made time and again throughout the book. Another slight frustration is the long, unbroken lines of text. The chapters would have benefitted from being broken up a little, into more easily digestible sections. Despite these reservations, though, "Digital Selling" is a readable, incisive book. It would be a significant addition to the bookshelves of any sales or marketing department.

"Digital Selling," by Grant Leboff, is published by Kogan Page.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.