What is multichannel communication in sales prospecting?

- What is multi-channel communication in sales prospecting? After watching this video, you'll be able to understand what multi-channel communication is in sales prospecting. When you understand what multi-channel communication is, you'll be better able to understand how to apply it to improve your prospecting efforts. Last year, my wife and I purchased a new vehicle. After some initial research, I submitted pictures of our trade-in through the company web form. About an hour later, I heard back from a salesperson via email, asking for more information on our trade-in and asking for clarification on which vehicle that we were considering. After responding via email, our conversation then moved to text messaging when the salesperson asked that I submitted more pictures of our trade-in. Once we agreed on a final price, the quote was shared as a PDF via email for me to review and sign. Throughout the experience, there were three distinct modes of communication in which my wife and I participated in during the purchase of the vehicle. Now, the salesperson we dealt with also needed to manage communication across these channels, ensuring a consistent message and that the sales conversation continue to progress towards the close. Now, this is a great example of multi-channel communications in sales prospecting, and it's reshaping how we communicate with prospects. In this example, our communication method shifted from the web form, which was the easiest for us to use while viewing the vehicle that we were considering, to email, which was how the salesperson responded to our web form submission, to text messaging, which is convenient for both of us to submit and review photos of our trade-in. For my wife and I, keeping track of this information was relatively simple. However, when you consider that every prospect the salesperson was interacting with will have a varying mix of communication channels that they prefer to use, suddenly tracking all this communications and the information exchange can become complex. Some customers, for example, will want to speak on the phone, others will prefer email or sending text messages, and others yet may want to send messages via various social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or others. Multi-channel communications is prospect communications that offers prospects options to communicate via multiple different channels with no interconnectivity between those channels. The goal, then, is to create communication that is convenient for the prospect. Multi-channel communication is not to be confused with omni-channel communications, which is more commonly used in marketing, where messages are sent out via various different communications channels which are all interconnected, and with data being stored from a single source of information. Now that you have a basic understanding of multi-channel communications in sales prospecting, let's discuss some ways you can introduce multi-channel communications into your own sales prospecting process.