Digital marketing benefits businesses by giving access to the mass market at an affordable price. It gives you a global reach, web analytics, personalization, social marketing presence and social currency.

Traditional sales methods will often involve one-to-one sales calls, presentations and the use of a well-placed advertisement or strategic content marketing.

While both digital and traditional sales and marketing techniques can help with technical sales, they are not enough on their own when solving customer problems. These techniques can complement each other.

Because of the move toward virtual interactions, more and more B2B customers prefer remote sales interactions to in-person sales. In this article, I will discuss some tips that will enable companies to recognize that many advantages of traditional face-to-face sales calls can be translated to virtual interactions with some careful thought and small investments.

Technical sales will require more face-to-face interactions where the end user can ask questions and the technical engineer can provide detailed presentations. These interactions are also opportunities for demonstrations if the product is specialized equipment or software.

If one asks a seasoned technical sales engineer to show you how he/she conveys value to the customer, it almost always ends up being a conversation rather than a single message. They would speak from the knowledge they have gained from their own experience and research on industry and technical trends and their prospective company’s position in the competitive marketplace. Instead of offering mounds of irrelevant information that overwhelms the end-user, good sales engineers would focus on what data will meet the consumer’s needs.

This requires understanding your audience and their pain points. They can then use data and technical details to demonstrate how the specialized product or service will solve that challenge. If they are experienced in the field, they could present themselves as a technical expert or at least a technical peer. It is of course, risky to pose as a technical expert or peer if the sales engineer is not one.

Essentially the sales engineer establishes oneself as a resource and potential collaborator from the world of business. They then engage your technical colleagues in a conversation that they didn’t realize they ever wanted to have with you.

The essence of this conversation is difficult to craft in a single corporate message.

However, when companies are in a business that requires technical or engineering-based selling, here are some examples of some of what is in that sales engineer's conversation that can be converted to successful digital communication.

1.Digital Tools to Help Customize Solutions

Digital tools that can customize solutions could include configurators or design tools where the customer has to enter significant data or drawings. If the tool helps the customer reduce the number of hours spent on a design or configuration, at this point, they will usually be willing to provide their contact details to allow the use of these digital tools. They, of course, can have the liberty to opt in or out of future communications from your organizations. Digital tools help improve customer affinity.

2.Clear Value Creation and Value Proposition for the Customer

Even in the case of the sales engineer’s conversation, it is highly likely that they would have engaged heavily in the technical details of their own products. They may have touched on some pain points for the customer in doing so if they are lucky or experienced. After solving many customer problems that field sales engineers have solved for customers, it should be clear, perhaps with some probing, what the top few values are that converted past customers. These values should be documented digitally in a form that a large customer base can relate to it.

3. Ready Access to Standard Specifications & Drawings

In many industries, sales engineers are useful resources to customers in helping them write specifications or create engineering drawings. In companies that depend on specification-based selling, it is almost certain that sales or other engineers have developed several specifications for customers. These specifications and drawings can be made generic and stored digitally and provided readily to a customer who wishes to access these.

4.Ready Access to Codes and Standard

While many codes and standards have copyrights and are available at a cost, information about these standards can be shared digitally with the target audience. Examples of this could include links to websites where product listings are documented by standards organizations, declaration of conformity to standards and links to relevant standards purchase sites. Furthermore, technical papers and blogs related to these codes and standards showing how your products conform can be a great tool to demonstrate the value of your products. Digital media can also be used to disseminate information or blogs educating the customers on the essence of the relevant codes and standards.

5.Detailed Guidelines on How to Design, Install and Commission

We have all no doubt discovered in our everyday lives that finding post-sales support for simple products like a dishwasher or a complex tool like a SaaS product is close to impossible to find digitally. The ease of product installation and the ease of finding information for design, installation and commissioning is part of the customer journey. A good experience will create an enriched customer experience.

Perhaps, one of the reasons that post-sale support documentation is difficult to find is that this aspect of the customer journey is outside the eyes and target of communication specialists in most companies and is often managed by product management and engineering arms. The latter can be meticulous at creating accurate documentation but lack specialization in creating a communication channel to the customers.

The industry has seen the development and availability of many digital pre-sales configurations and pricing tools that are available to customers. There has been almost no presence of equally important digital tools to assist with post-sale design, installation and commissioning. Companies, which invest in this aspect of digitalization, will find yet another way to differentiate themselves by easing the customer experience.

6.Access to Calling a Technical Person When Needed

When you have purchased a product or are about to purchase a product and would like to ask some technical questions, how hard do we find to track down the right person to talk or chat to? Tools like online 24-hour chat services with technical support at the end would be a ready-access tool for customers to make their journey easier.

Many chat services are designed to push customers towards buying a product, and greater recognition is needed that technical support is also part of that customer experience. Additionally, companies should consider a technical hotline phone to be available to customers for problems that cannot be solved by chat service.

7.Case Studies of How Past Customer Problems Were Solved

If you have identified and solved a customer problem through the application of an engineering solution in the past, the chances are that other customers may have the same or similar problem, which they may or may not recognize. Sharing case studies through blogs, technical papers, digital magazine articles, and website is a great way to increase customer confidence in your company and its products and services.

8.Posting Biography of Experienced Employees Who Can Solve Customer Problems

There are many employees with personal experiences that make every company innovate and progress. These employees are almost never the face of the company that customers see, meet and recognize. Celebrating and sharing the biography, life stories, experiences and point of view of employees in digital mediums like websites and LinkedIn can be a great way to showcase the inner strengths of the company.

In creating digital marketing, companies should recognize the value that it created for the customers historically and ensure that this value continues to be integrated into its digital initiatives

In creating digital marketing, companies should recognize the value that it created for the customers historically and ensure that this value continues to be integrated into its digital initiatives

9.Creating a Virtual Personality on Social Media

The traditional method that sales engineers used to create a good reputation was called networking. This was done through meeting contacts of contacts, as names of other interested industry personnel are often shared in conversations. Through these face-to-face meetings or phone conversations, the contacts the sales engineer develops a persona over time. Other traditional mediums for creating a good personality industry are industry forums, presence in codes and standards, writing articles, tradeshows and conferences.

Similar to how a positive personality can be created by these traditional means, social media platforms provide a great opportunity for sales engineers and marketers to create a virtual personality. Just like traditional networking, creating a virtual personality and identity takes hard work and a concerted effort.

The posts that you create on these mediums have to be well thought out. Your comments to other people's post can be spontaneous by nature, but it is strongly recommended to have these well thought out so it is in line with the personality you are creating. Sharing of technical pieces, blogs, information on industry associations, and work site images can all be used as a means to create a positive personality. Sharing information on useful training, relevant codes and standard and industry practices can also enhance your usefulness in the social media space.

When organizations embark on digital marketing and transformation, there is a risk that the values created for the customer through traditional sales and marketing may be lost. This can mean the organization find lower-value new customers at the expense of losing loyal legacy customers. In creating digital marketing, companies should recognize the value that it made for the customers historically and ensure that this value continues to be integrated into their digital initiatives.