It has been a long time since I traveled for work, in fact, earlier this week I crossed the 250 day mark! Its been over 225 days since I last stepped foot in the office. Back in March when we were all told to work from home, I would have never have guessed this would still be the new normal for so many people. What I did know back then and still firmly believe is that the way we all do our jobs would be vastly different for years to come. Being a sales professional who makes a living traveling and talking to people – I needed to find new ways to be stay successful.

At first, I did what a lot of people did – I turned to our marketing and training departments and asked them where all their digital content was. Where are the webinars? Where are the e-Learning courses? Where are the professional videos? What about a newsletter? I could go on and on about all the things I was looking for. But I realized something pretty early on – most of this content did not exist and its next to impossible to pivot your entire marketing/training strategy overnight.

But how does that realization actually help anyone, but more importantly, how does that realization help my customers? I had two choices at the end of the day: sit back and wait for those groups to adapt or figure out how I was going to make Digital Marketing happen.

Making Digital Marketing Happen

First off, let me start off by saying that it isn’t easy to be good at marketing. I’m not going to pretend that this is a skill everyone can just learn overnight. But it is an important skill for sales professionals to at least know the basics of. It has never been easier for someone to take an idea, turn it into something that looks professional and get it in front of thousands of people. I’m doing it right here on LinkedIn by writing an article – once I’m done writing this, I’ll click the big blue Publish button and, voila, its out in the wild for all the world to see!

I know many marketing professionals who cringe at this – they put in controls to tell you what you can and cannot do. They talk about brand, identity, and messaging and how important it is to ensure these are well polished and perfect before being released for all the world to see. Those are the types of marketing professionals who have decided to make their jobs harder. Embracing the fact that publishing information has never been easier and coaching people to create good marketing material can result in mountains of new content with little to no energy.

The first step to making sales professionals into good Digital Marketers – teach them! Earlier in the year, I created a short video on how to create a LinkedIn post, how to include a picture or a video, and then shared some best practices. I shared this with our internal sales teams and all of a sudden you started seeing people posting on LinkedIn who had never posted anything before. Others in our company showed people how to write articles and now I see people from my company writing all sorts of articles – sometimes its about our products, other times its about their unique skills or items they are passionate about.

Once you teach people how to use the tools, the next important step is to share best practices as a group. I check my LinkedIn feed regularly and when I see something that a co-worker, customer, or even competitor posts that I like, I share it as a best practice. This does not mean I share it on LinkedIn with my network, but rather I screenshot the post and include it in a monthly webinar with my channel partners as ways they could be promoting themselves and my company.

Let me share an example. Earlier in the year, I saw a channel partner had posted a picture of a delivery truck pulling up to their dock. They were promoting that they stock my product locally to get their customers up and running faster. When I shared this example, all of a sudden a dozen more channel partners created similar posts. I did not tell anyone to post about their local inventory, instead I shared a good example and it inspired them to spread their own message to their local markets.

Just being able to do Digital Marketing isn’t enough. Good Digital Marketing requires a cultural shift which encourages collaboration, trust, and most importantly, the ability to fail.

Fail fast, fail often, but always learn from failure

‘Fail’ is one of those 4-letter ‘F’ words which is rarely tolerated. In fact, I have heard more people say the other 4-letter ‘F’ word at work more often then I hear the word ‘Fail’. Here is the thing, failure is one of the best ways for someone to learn. How many people do you know who are proud of failing at the same thing over and over again? When sales professionals start trying their hand at Digital Marketing, they will fail by: (a) Making a silly mistake like spelling errors or the dreaded branding faux pas; or (b) creating content that does not magically have a million likes. Lets first focus on what to do when people make mistakes

Mistakes are easily correctable

In the case of mistakes, it is important to acknowledge that we are all human and will make mistakes. It is also important to note that its easy to learn from those mistakes. Let me share an example. Working for a big company, we have branding guides and requirements for just about everything you can think of. If I want to print a memo, it must go on a certain letterhead. If I am doing an external PowerPoint presentation, I need to use a particular PowerPoint template. We even have a whole spectrum of acceptable colors – red, blue, green, you name it, I have to use my companies specially designed color pallet.

I created a tool in Excel where you could do a quick comparison of my product versus my competitors product across dozens of specific requirements. When you printed the file, it was nicely formatted and had my companies logo in the top left hand corner. Well that was a mistake – our logo is only allowed in the top right corner of that sort of technical document. Two different marketing professionals approached me about this after they found out what I shared with our channel partners. One of the marketing professionals went on the attack, asking me who authorized me to release the document without their review and approval and spent time telling me this is the reason why we can’t just publish things all willy-nilly. The other marketing professional marked up a PDF and showed me how to make the tool be brand compliant. They also shared some resources that I could reference so I understood the rules and offered up their services to do quick checks before I published things in the future.

Interestingly enough, had the first marketing professional been the only person I talked to, I would not be spending the time writing this article. I would be that annoying sales professional who sends an email once a week asking for content and being upset that they were not spending time helping me. The other marketing professional acted as a coach and a teacher to help me understand my mistakes and learn where I could find more resources to create something that would look professional.

This eventually lead to feeling comfortable launching an external webinar series and even trying our hands at doing videos. Ironically, the first time we did a webinar with a video included, the video was choppy because the internet was slow. That is not stopping us from ever producing another video ever again – we will learn from that experience and either use different footage or find a new platform to do our webinars on. But another sort of failure might prevent us from making additional videos – the fact that “only 50 people attended”.

Recalibrating expectations when you do not go viral

Creating webinars and videos takes time. It takes time for someone to create the content, time for multiple people to review the content, time to record the session, time to edit the recording, and lastly time to actually run the webinar. It is easy to add up all that time and then compare it to the attendee list to justify continuing to dedicate resources to such a project. It gets even more difficult to justify when you have had 300 people show up to one topic and another, more niche topic, only has 50 people show up.

When I was traveling, it would take me almost a full week of traveling to get in front of 50 people who were actually interested in what I had to say. I even had to bribe them with lunch sometimes – I could get really big audiences if I brought in food from the favorite local establishment. Lots of those attendees would be gone halfway through my presentation and anyone who remained usually bolted the minute I was done talking. So why is 50 people on a webinar all of a sudden not good enough?

Reminding sales professionals of the way things used to be is a good first step to making them recalibrate and realize that even 20 people attending is a positive thing. But Digital Marketing has a secret card up it’s sleeve – nothing ever disappears on the internet! By taking the video I mentioned earlier and uploading it in HD, we now have offered up an option for people to watch the content On Demand. So for years to come, existing and potential customers will be able to learn something about my product without any additional investment of time from anyone involved in creating the video.

This can go even further though – in the case of the webinars, we are able to share the PowerPoint decks with our channel partners and they can either host their own webinar or even talk to a customer in person. No one had to create a new slide deck for that topic – the time investment to create the content will continue to get a return as long as that topic is still relevant to our product/industry.

Closing Thoughts

This year has definitely been stranger then most. It has required people to change and adapt in ways that most people never thought were possible. As we look to the future, it is more important than ever to embrace the tools available to us all and inspire people to do things outside of their comfort zones. There is never a better time than now to start thinking of how you can inspire Sales Professionals to take time to become better Digital Marketers. Mistakes will be made, but we can learn from those mistakes and do better the next time.