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How To Align Digital vs Traditional Sales Strategies

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Having digital sales strategies and traditional sales strategies aligned with one other is one of the most optimal ways to achieve sales targets.

While digital sales strategies have become more prominent in the marketing and sales industries over the recent years, traditional sales strategies still prove to be equally effective, especially when working alongside digital strategy.

Kevin Kelly, managing director at Pace Digital Sales, has shared the following expert advice on successfully aligning digital and traditional sales strategies.

What are digital sales strategies?

In digital sales strategies, digital marketing is used as a means to reach target consumers and inform them of your products or services. Digital sales strategies can be executed through digital advertising platforms such as Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Instagram ads, as well as digital PR/outreach campaigns that involve bloggers and journalists to promote brand awareness.

What are traditional sales strategies?

In traditional sales strategies, digital marketing is not a major factor. An example of a traditional sales strategy is ‘cold calling’  or ‘outbound telesales’, where salespeople actively call consumers to offer them products or services.

Here, digital marketing is not used to inform potential customers of a brand or product. Rather, digital sales strategies focus on building a relationship with the customer by providing them with useful information and using this specifically tailored content to nurture leads into customers. By establishing trust between brand and consumer, businesses make it more likely that their consumers will choose them over a competitor’s product or service when making a purchase decision.

How digital and traditional sales strategies can be used together:

When digital and traditional sales strategies are combined, marketers can drive higher engagement with their target audiences, for example; digital ads generate interest in consumers while the cold calling process creates qualified leads for marketers to follow up on.

As well as this, aligning digital and traditional sales strategies means that digital marketers can use the information obtained from digital ads to inform their traditional outreach campaigns. For example, if a consumer clicks on your digital ad but does not purchase anything online, you know for sure that they are interested in what your business has to offer. This is valuable information that can be used to tailor traditional sales strategies to be more successful.

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When digital and traditional sales strategies are not aligned:

Digital and traditional sales strategies are not aligned when digital ad platforms are utilised on consumers who were never reached through traditional means, such as offline marketing channels. This can confuse potential leads and hurt your brand image.

Of course, having a failed sales strategy has many negative effects on your business, such as reducing your bottom line, wasting resources and lowering consumer confidence.

This is why it’s vital that any sales strategy you implement has been tried and tested before being put in place.

Ways to align digital and traditional sales strategies:

– Target the same audience: digital and traditional sales strategies can work alongside each other if you’re targeting the same target market. This ensures that your digital ads reach consumers who were also reached through digital and traditional means.

– Integrate digital ads into cold calling or outreach campaigns: digital ads such as Google Adwords allow marketers to track consumer engagement with their product or service displayed on the ad, so it’s more likely that they will receive a higher click through rate when these digital ads are integrated into their cold calling/outreach strategy.

– Use inbound marketing techniques in combination with digital and traditional sales strategies: Inbound marketing is a form of marketing where a company creates high quality content that contains information relevant to potential customers without directly selling to them. When digital and traditional sales strategies are combined with inbound marketing, digital ads can be used to attract consumers’ attention while the information provided through inbound marketing will help nurture prospective leads into customers.

– Deliver digital ads on top of traditional ad campaigns: Having digital ads running alongside or on top of your television commercial or online video advert will significantly boost digital ad clickthrough rates, because consumers who didn’t want to watch an entire TV commercial or video advert for whatever reason could skip past it quickly but still see your digital ad.

– Make digital ads easy to find: digital sales strategies that allow consumers to access digital content quickly and easily will generate better results than digital/traditional ad campaigns with no digital component.

By establishing trust between brand and consumer, businesses make it more likely that their consumers will choose them over a competitor’s product or service when making a purchase decision.   

Where can digital and traditional sales strategies be used?

One example of where both digital and traditional sales strategies can be used together is on LinkedIn.

Using cold outreach techniques to send messages and reach out to people, a conversation can then be had on the site, before gaining knowledge of information and inserting it into a CRM. This information can then be passed on to salespeople, who can then reach out to the potential client/customer.

This of course can be used with other methods of online communication, including emails and social media.

Overall, it’s important to use both digital and traditional sales strategies in your business’ sales strategy to ensure maximum outcome.

While both work well respectively, combining the two means you have a much improved chance of getting your brand in front of potential clients.

About the author

Samantha McKenna is an award-winning sales leader and highly sought-after speaker who has spent her career doing two things – breaking records for herself, her employers and now her clients, and putting others first to ensure every client engagement she has delivers an exceptional client experience.

Since 2008, Sam has worked for some of the most notable names in the Bay Area, including ON24 and LinkedIn, and spent years as an individual contributor in net new Enterprise sales before moving to scaling teams and revenue in executive leadership. She is the creator of #samsales, which has a significant following on LinkedIn for her tangible sales tips and actionable advice for sales executives and teams. In addition, #samsales has led to Sam being the highest-attended speaker at dozens of conferences, including Outreach’s “Unleash 2020,” that netted over 8,000 registrants. She has been named a Top 50 Woman in Revenue, consistently ranks as the most read author for countless publications, is proud to be one of the faces of LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s marketing campaigns, and was named a Top Ten LinkedIn Sales Star 2020.