So many people, so much information available to you clients and partners today. How do you build an engagement strategy that helps you grow your business? Two weeks ago we started this discussion and today I share several more ideas on building a more powerful connection to your best clients. If you missed the first article you can find it here at Do you have a digital engagement strategy?

The second rule for a digital engagement strategy is to work hard to create material that clients want to read and hear. For many midmarket organizations, this means partnering up with the organization to provide their potential clients with a better view of the challenges they face as they work their way through the buying journey.

I’ve been on both sides of this discussion with clients. Many large organizations are very good at creating volumes of material about their products and services. They are very good at content creation. They are able to support their own digital leadership brand on their own. Sounds great, doesn’t it? My midmarket and startup clients would die to have this capability.

Here’s one of the challenges of a digital engagement strategy. The problem is that many clients are looking to better understand their solution options. This means educating the client to the many options they have before choosing who to reach out to.

For this reason, your digital leadership brand shares research from 3^rd parties who help their potential clients better understand what their options could be. Here’s the problem, much of this information is written for a technical economic buyer.

It’s full of jargon, assuming every person on the team is familiar with the many buzzwords that are used on a regular basis among technical buyers. When I was working with a client several years ago the support material talked about a CIO as economic buyer.

We were working with a financial services company where they thought CIO meant Chief Investment Officer, not Chief Information Officer. My client couldn’t understand why their CIO should be involved in this deal. A great digital leadership brand makes sure everyone understands who they are talking about in their marketing material.

Today’s average sale has 4.6 people involved in the purchasing decision. For a digital leadership brand to thrive, they may need to develop material that others can use to help accelerate the decision. How often do you have your technical resources involved in your digital leadership brand? For many large organizations, they must invest time in helping develop this capability in their technical and functional leadership. We will discuss this engagement strategy in a future blog!

The third rule for a digital engagement strategy is to know when to move the conversation offline. Team selling will be a large part of the future success your organization has. But I’ve noticed several times over the past several months that deals are not being moved offline at the right time. Depending on what you’re selling, it might be critical to have your outside people follow up in person. There are many very capable inbound sales people who might be able to carry the deal to success, but they don’t have a complete view of the client based on their calls and research.

In many manufacturing industries, plant visits provide a better view into the client’s challenges than many calls on the phone. Not to mention when you’re walking the plant, you may also get a better view of the challenges the client organization faces when implementing your solution.

Successful digital leadership brands must be able to move between face to face contact and using extensive digital capabilities.  Managing these resources requires a different type of leader. On Friday this week, we talk about this leader in more detail. See you Friday.