Digital Sales Transformation for Explosive Growth
Mario Martinez Jr. – Vengreso Founder and Chief Executive Officer

June 2017 marks a historic month in digital selling history with the launch of Vengreso as the only full spectrum Digital Sales Transformation company, servicing clients ranging from the small business professional to the enterprise. I couldn’t be prouder of this 7-way merger of the world’s top Digital Selling minds now under one brand. Vengreso is committed to one thing – your sales success!

THE DIGITAL SELLING ECOSYSTEM

I began planning the launch of Vengreso in late 2016 after spending that year delivering social selling training and coaching as a sole proprietor and after implementing social selling strategy, training and enablement for a $300 million sales organization in my previous job. I recognized a major flaw in the approach most take to social selling training and coaching.

There was nobody out there helping business professionals and companies bring alignment between Sales and Marketing through a combined mindset, skillset, and toolset to form an effective digital selling ecosystem.

I, along with my competitors, addressed portions of these pillars and left it up to clients to figure out how to piece them together on their own.  No one firm was servicing the entire spectrum of the digital sales ecosystem…

Until now!

Vengreso is:

1. The Largest full spectrum Digital Sales Service Provider
2. The Largest Social Selling Training Company, having collectively trained more than 85,000 professionals from small business to large enterprise.
3. We have worked with more than 2,000 companies from small businesses to large enterprises.

Our founders’ mission is simple.

• To align marketing and sales for maximum effectiveness
• To equip you with the mindset needed to engage online consistently
• To provide you the skillset needed to win in the digital economy
• To provide the toolset to navigate the digital sales ecosystem efficiently

DEFINING THE DIGITAL SALES ECOSYSTEM

What is this Digital Sales Ecosystem? Simply put there are 4 pillars to the Ecosystem:

Pillar 1 – It starts with marketing having a documented content strategy that aligns with the buyer’s journey. Most social selling training companies teach reps how to engage in digital channels as well as how to find content to feed or nurture their networks.  Until now, no one helped Marketing develop a content and distribution strategy.  A well-planned content distribution strategy ultimately creates more productive selling time. Inviting employees to share content through an employee advocacy program substantially increases brand awareness, lead flow, and employee morale. You’ll hear more about this from our Chief Marketing Officer Bernie Borges below, as he discusses the alignment of Sales and Marketing.

Pillar 2 – The modern digitally engaged professional has the mindset of Me Inc. Many training companies and individuals teach salespeople and business owners how to create a personal brand. But, they leave it to the sales person to “write” their own content.  It’s like giving a WordPress website to a sales rep and saying, “Hey, create your own website that speaks to your buyer!”  Thus, reps and business owners were taught how to fish but were never given the opportunity to have their hook baited for them.  As a result, they would begin fishing without a baited hook! You’ll learn more below on how to attract your targeted buyer from our Chief Visibility Officer – Viveka von Rosen.

Pillar 3 – The modern digitally engaged business professional requires the skill set to engage with the digitally engaged buyer. This requires Social Selling Training and Coaching (aka Digital Sales Training). This is where most compete in the industry.  Most training companies and consultants come in and deliver a workshop or virtual webinar and then they leave.  The training is often not customized to the client’s needs. Business professionals and reps get excited then leave and the next day they go back to their old ways.  Or even worse, sales leaders and business owners do nothing because of fear, uncertainty or they’re unsure how to navigate… Whether it’s one-on-one coaching or training, you’ll hear below from Brynne Tillman our Chief Learning Officer, Kurt Shaver our Chief Sales Officer and Phil Gerbyshak our Chief Digital Officer on what you should be thinking of when considering digital sales training and coaching.

Pillar 4 – Once transformed to have the mindset and toolset of the digital sales professional, clients need more people to deliver their explosive revenue growth potential. That’s where talent recruiting comes in.  I can’t count how many times our founders have heard the following after training a sales organization “Can you help me find a sales person who has the right digital selling mindset?”  And now the answer is yes, we can. You’ll read from Colleen McKenna, our Chief Administrative Officer about our Talent Recruitment Practice, where we can deliver your future sales candidates. She says, “How they appear on Google, LinkedIn and social networks can make or break a candidate in minutes.” We sift through the noise and can help you fill the gap with the candidate with the right mindset, skillset, and toolset.

JOIN THE DIGITAL SALES TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT

The movement has begun, that is the digital sales transformation movement.  Today’s modern buyer has changed the rules. As sales and marketing professionals we must be aligned with our understanding of the buyer’s needs. We must meet the buyer in their digitally connected, socially engaged, mobile attached, video-hungry preferences. Today’s buyer only wants to talk with professionals who can add demonstrable value. If you recognize the powerful reality of this, then join our movement.

If you believe that sales and marketers should use all available traditional channels – phone, networking events, and referrals – and digital channels – email, text, social, and video – to reach your buyers, then, join our movement.

If you believe that today’s talent is leveraging digital channels to research us just as much as we are researching them, don’t delay, join our movement.

Finally, if you are as passionate about explosive revenue growth as we are, join our movement at Vengreso.com

Request some time to meet with one of our founders to learn how and why over 2,000 companies have trusted us to create explosive revenue growth.

Mario Martinez Jr.

CEO and Founder of Vengreso

Marketing and Sales Alignment – Bernie Borges – Vengreso Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer

Marketing and sales alignment is a decades-old challenge. One would think we’d have figured out how to resolve it by now. As wonderful as the digital age is in many ways, it’s also made the misalignment worse.

In too many organizations marketing operates in its own silo. There exists a perception that if marketing drives leads, it’s getting the job done. Sure, leads are important. But, in today’s fast-paced, digitally connected world, marketing must create relevant and compelling content that addresses the needs of the buyer in each phase of the journey.

Marketing is now as much a part of the sales process as service is. What was once sole territory for the sales team is now a triad between Sales, Marketing, and Service – or Customer Success as is commonly labeled in many tech companies.

When marketing delivers a solid coupled with an employee advocacy program and easy to use distribution methods, along with the proper training and coaching, businesses and entrepreneurs can achieve digital sales transformation and all the accompanying benefits.

The proliferation of social media has created the need for salespeople to learn how to use it properly. Enter “social selling” as the practice of engaging in social media with prospects and customers. The role of the marketing department in social selling is all over the map from company to company.

The approach we’re bringing to market at Vengreso is digital sales transformation. As Mario explains, it’s the creation of an ecosystem where alignment of mindset, skillset, and toolset come together to transform an organization’s sales and marketing efforts to enable great results.

Personal Branding on LinkedIn – Viveka von Rosen – Vengreso Co-Founder and Chief Visibility Officer 

A personal brand is how you appear to the world. Tom Peters first wrote about Personal Branding way back in 1997.  In an article called The Brand Called You, he said “Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are the CEOs of our own company: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

If you want to control how you are seen by the world, then you really need to stand out. And one of the best places to create and share your brand is on LinkedIn.  Why?  Because there are 500 million users – many of which could help you build your business.  But if you don’t have a strong personal brand on LinkedIn, you could be invisible to those prospects, or worse yet, lose credibility.

Creating a strong personal brand on LinkedIn starts with having a strong personal profile that’s visually engaging and written with “client-centric” copy.

Make sure your background images, media, and logos reflect your website and other digital platforms.  And when writing (or repurposing) the copy of your profile’s Summary, Experience and Projects section, make sure that you focus on your audience’s wants and needs. If you have one, your LinkedIn Company page should also reflect this strong visual and audience-focused content.

Attention to these details will allow you to stand out, build your credibility and encourage engagement and business on LinkedIn.

Social Selling and the Modern Buyer – Brynne Tillman – Vengreso Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer

Buyers are on a different journey – their way of gaining insights into solving problems no longer relies on the sales rep. Buyers are now researchers, explorers, self-educators and collaborative decision makers – and it’s significantly impacting the traditional sales process. The Know, Like and Trust mantra is now Attract, Teach and Engage. If you are not breaking through the noise, gaining access to stakeholders and positioning yourself as the thought leader and subject matter expert, your competition will.

So, just as email has become part of the fabric of sales, so has social. Social selling is the evolution of sales, it is not a methodology like SNAP selling or Solution selling or Spin selling or Challenger Sales. Social Selling is about leveraging digital tools that can and should align with your current process and approach to help access more decision makers through a warm market, attract your stakeholders through relevant content and position each professional as a subject matter expert and vendor of choice.

Here are the 7 essential elements sales leaders need to include in their social selling initiatives to see adoption and success:

1. The program should be customized down to the business unit level.
2. Online profiles, such as LinkedIn, should to be templated and easy to tweak for sales reps to represent their company in a consistent and productive way.
3. Messaging templates must be written at the business unit level so that it is simple for the sales reps to engage quickly and effectively.
4. A daily activity playbook should be in place with a step-by-step guide that leaves no questions around productive actions.
5. Content should lead buyers to your solution, not with your solution. If your content is a pitch, it won’t work well with social selling initiatives.
6. There should be a daily reinforcement of best practices and the ability to track and measure success.
7. There should be ongoing support either internally or externally to help sales reps grow and learn as they hone their prospecting processes.

Without all these elements in place in an enterprise, social selling program leadership can expect less than desired results, including the possibility of total and complete failure of the program.

Digital Sales Training in Corporate Sales – Kurt Shaver – Vengreso Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer

The Internet and social networks have shifted the balance of power between B2B customers and sellers. Before the Internet, customers were dependent on salespeople to provide the latest product information. Now, everyone has instant access to the information they need to make a buying decision. So, what’s the role of the B2B salesperson in the era of social networking?

Surprisingly, the goals remain the same; build relationships and be a valuable resource to help solve your customers’ problems.

What has changed are the tools. LinkedIn replaced the Rolodex as a tool to manage relationships and most information is shared digitally now. That means a new mindset and skill set are required to maximize the results from the new digital toolset.

Left to their own initiative, individual sales reps at a company will acquire a wide range of social selling skills. A few may master it. A few will be apprehensive or maybe even defiant about having to learn new skills. Most sales reps will dabble in it. No sales leader would think about foregoing training on the company’s CRM system. Why should digital sales skills be relegated to a Do-It-Yourself project?

The biggest gains for a company come when Sales and Marketing align on a strategy and then implement a comprehensive digital sales training program. This strategy offers a corporate sales team three benefits:

1. Social networking skills help salespeople grow relationships at greater scale.
2. Social sharing skills help salespeople amplify Marketing’s social branding and lead generation efforts.
3. A corporate strategy creates a standardized process that can be managed and, thus, improved.

Digital Sales Coaching for Individuals – Phil Gerbyshak – Vengreso Co-Founder and Chief Digital Officer

Digital sales training is tough for individuals, entrepreneurs and small businesses alike – but it’s never been essential to the long-term health of a business. What ROI can you get from training? For some, personal coaching is the answer for measurable ROI.

Let’s start with the “what” – what can you expect from a social selling coaching program? Simply put, a coaching program should teach you how to brand, engage, connect and nurture your relationships online to drive conversations offline. Period.

Consider these 4 pillars to begin attracting your buyer:

To begin, be someone worth connecting to on the social channels where your buyers are located.  Develop an engaging buyer-centric profile which serves as a resource, not a resume. As our CVO, Viveka von Rosen stated above “Attention to these details will allow you to stand out, build your credibility and encourage engagement and business…”

Be a valuable part of your community. This includes where you live, in the industry you work, and with your peers. Use other’s work as a springboard to your own work, sprinkling in your opinion on why it is a good idea, or why it isn’t, and why you think it’s important for your prospect and customer to know about it.

Use video to explain articles you share with your customers and prospects individually, to give them a sense of your personality and bring them closer to you, because if you’re not using video, you’re going to get beat by someone who is.

Change the channel! Get the conversation off LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and into a one-on-one video and or a face-to-face.  Remember the phone isn’t broken and digital alone won’t accomplish results. Rather, integrating digital into your sales methodology will help you stand out. Don’t be surprised if you shatter your sales results.

Talent Recruiting – Colleen McKenna – Vengreso Co-Founder and Chief Administrative Officer

Every company is in continual pursuit of great talent, especially salespeople. With more assessments, tools, and apps than ever, you would think bringing on new talent is easier than ever. Not so much. Finding, recruiting and retaining top talent is more challenging than ever. Why? The game has changed and the skills needed to be successful today are different. They require not just a new skill set but a retooling. And, many people, especially salespeople have not yet adapted to the digital sales paradigm.

There has been and will continue to be a digital divide. Salespeople who have not effectively built their professional brand online are at risk of becoming obsolete. Those who lack a robust professional and personal network are lagging their peers (or competitors) who work from a growth mindset. Those who intentionally learn new skills and employ new tools to find, engage and nurture relationships outperform those who don’t.

Clients who ask me to review their LinkedIn profile or resume of a potential sales candidate often hear me say, “This person has no digital presence, no visible network on LinkedIn and does not appear to understand how to use social networks to build their pipeline. I would not consider this salesperson for your company’s sales team.”

Recruiters spend their days online searching for an ideal candidate. How they appear on Google, LinkedIn and social networks can make or break a candidate in minutes. Candidates need to know that they can enhance their career through their professional brand. Employers should skip the mediocre candidates and get to the candidates who understand how to shine in the digitally connected world.

Join us on this movement. 

The earth has shifted. Marketing and sales must be accountable together for driving revenue. Business professionals who want to succeed must embrace digital sales transformation or risk becoming obsolete. The modern buyer (external or internal) only wants to work with sellers who understand their needs and add value. The transformed modern seller demonstrates empathy and interacts with the buyer through relevant content and personalized engagement. Join us on this digital sales transformation movement for mutual success.