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I sat there staring at one of the eight screens on my desk: laptops, cell phones, tablets, and more. I had been mandated to create awesome content for the online newsletter that we’ve been pushing out (almost) every week for over a decade.

I did what came naturally and instead of typing, pulled out a legal pad and began to write down all of my random thoughts on the subject — in cursive! You remember cursive, don’t you? It’s that special code that only we baby boomers can now break, as the succeeding generations have abandoned it for digital.

My notes would be somehow transformed into an intelligible article that I could be proud of. But for now it was just a jumble of ideas about videos, e-newsletters, texting, social media, postcards, telemarketing, direct mail, VOIP, streaming, collaterals, QR codes and the like.

Sales and marketing professionals of every generation are re-learning how to communicate in the digital age. Old-timers (like me) need to learn new technologies and protocols; newbies need to be aware of the established boundaries, and whether or not it is prudent to break them.

Selling is communicating, and communications have undergone a radical shift. As the notions about the various methods of getting our messages across flowed onto the page, I realized that we were witnessing the triumph of quantity over quality.

With the plethora of choices available, communication best practices must be established and followed, I opined. So, I set about transcribing my gibberish into pixels and saving the file up to my Dropbox, to be cloud-shared at a later date.

What followed was a decision on how to best relay the message, being acutely aware of the generational differences in comm style, such as the Boomers’ loathing of texting, and the fact that Millennials will rarely respond to a voice mail.

In various Skype sales meetings, I’ve cautioned my team to determine the prospect’s preferred method of communication and then to always try to initiate contact through that method. In conferenced cell phone calls, I’ve warned them to always respond to a person in the method in which they contacted you. We are all responsible for 100 percent of interaction (as 100 percent + 100 percent /  2 = 100 percent), I proffered.

Customer touch-points are vital, I tweeted, and leaving a message is not considered making contact. Professional salespeople needn’t hide behind their electronic security blankets. Relationship building requires so much more from us. Always assume that they didn’t read your last e-mail!

While we’re on it, e-mail cannot be dismissed as ephemera. It has morphed into the de-facto company correspondence of our time and must be treated with the care that business documentation deserves and requires.

Our understanding of the paid-earned-owned media continuum will figure prominently in our future success. Marketing mostly consists of push these days, and our messages lose their impact in the cacophony of similar cries for attention. Whatever space you are trying to occupy whether “free,” or paidfor, must be maximized through engagement and interaction, and optimized for mobile.

Mining social media for buying signals constitutes our next frontier. Giving potential buyers the opportunity to “kick the tires” can still represent the differentiation that your sales efforts require in a world of selfies posted to Instagram and Vine.

Choose where and how you speak to your clients wisely, redouble your efforts, build relationships and turn those digital 0’s and 1’s into real dollars and cents.