Virtual selling isn’t going away, but it’s got to improve. The vast sea of mediocrity has created an opportunity for salespeople to differentiate themselves by providing a better digital experience for our customers. How? Over the next five days, I’ll present five ways you can make your customers’ digital experience better.
Idea #1: Make everything shorter.
With the abundance of technology developments that deliver instant gratification, releasing dopamine with every beep or vibration, our attention spans have shrunk drastically over the last 15 years. I wrote this statement about three years ago, long before the COVID-19 pandemic and the exponential rise in virtual communication. Even when we were physically in front of people, they were fighting a powerful urge to grab their phone to check if any text messages have arrived or whether anyone liked their photo on Instagram. And that was usually within 12 minutes of the start of your meeting. Now, think about their attention span when you’re not even in the same room. They can freely glance at that Facebook post or reply to emails or do whatever seems to be more urgent at that moment than the information you’re offering.
If there was ever a time for brevity, it’s now. Our customers have dealt with 60-minute webinars, 90-minute podcasts, and 30-minute training videos for almost a year. Not only has their attention span decreased over the past decade or two, now they’re sick of these digital methods of communicating. If you want to improve your customers’ digital experience, make everything shorter.
Yes, I mean twenty-minute virtual sales presentations, ten-minute podcasts, and three-minute training videos. Emails need to take less than twenty-five seconds to read and every digital proposal must have a crisp executive summary. Make everything shorter. How? Break up the two-hour training video into fifteen segments, don’t try to sell the entire world in one webinar but divide your messaging into high-priority bits and pieces. Don’t give up on your content, but deliver it in doses that will be absorbed, not ignored.
To make the digital experience better for your customers, make everything shorter. Looking forward to deliver idea #2 next week!
