Building Sales with Your Digital Dialog

Have you adapted your sales cycle to accommodate the Digital Dialog? It used to be that your customers ordered printing from you either by a voice-to-voice conversation on the phone or a face-to-face conversation at your front counter. That still happens, of course, but with the Internet being at everyone’s fingertips, the conversations about ordering printing often start with social media, email, and the use of your website’s order forms.

The Online Version of You

Is the online version of you able to sell printing as effectively as the real you? It’s worth taking some time to study the answer to that question, considering how often the print ordering process starts online in the digital world. You need to think about the Digital Dialog when you’re ready to answer that question. The Digital Dialog is, very simply, conversation facilitated online. The Digital Dialog is the online version of you that starts conversations, builds trust, and develops relationships online, so you can sell more printing.

The Dialog of a Printing Order

Before we get into the details of the Digital Dialog, let’s pull back the focus and look at the dialog of a printing order. To sell printing effectively you have to manage this dialog, whether it happens voice-to-voice, face-to-face, or online. The dialog of a print order is illustrated here:

The dialog of a printing order starts when your customer asks for help. They know printing is the way to spread their message, and they need your help to get the printing done. You receive their request for help, and you respond to their request by asking for more details to clarify all of the information.

When you respond to your customer’s request your customer receives your message, and after considering your message your customer responds to your message. This dialog keeps going around the circle until all questions are answered and all loose ends are resolved. Once that happens, you can move the printing order into production, and you get to the center of the circle where the good stuff happens: You deliver printing and the customer delivers money!

I think we can all agree that the center of the circle is a very good place for you to be!

Why is the Digital Dialog Important?

You want to be very effective with your Digital Dialog because you want to get to the center of the circle as quickly and efficiently as possible to exchange printing for money.

Keep in mind that this dialog can happen very quickly if it occurs as a voice-to-voice or face-to-face conversation … perhaps in a matter of seconds! Even though the online world promises efficiency in everything we do, this is one area where doing business online can fall short. Questions and responses that may take just seconds in person can stretch to minutes, hours, or even days if one party in the Digital Dialog ends up waiting for the other party to respond.

And that’s the teaser we’ll leave with you today. In future blog posts we’ll explore how to make sure your digital dialog is as efficient as it can be, and we’ll show you some of the very best conversation starters to get your digital dialog underway!

For today, though, consider that conversations facilitated online deserve just as much attention as voice-to-voice conversations on the phone or face-to-face conversations at your front counter that you are already so familiar with.