Customers are rapidly evolving the way they learn about and buy products and offerings from various channels. At the same time, the tools, data, and analytics that direct sales activity are becoming dramatically more sophisticated.
As business leaders understand the importance of effective selling, they are faced with a rapidly changing environment around how customers engage and buy. As new competitors go-to-market in different ways, to stay relevant in the usually undifferentiated market, businesses need to re-imagine products and offerings for the changing digital world. The cost of waiting is usually too high.
This is due to four major trends that are affecting how salesforces work. It’s time to transform the salesforce by merging these new trends with the still powerful, traditional sales enablers - customer targeting and messaging. It’s time to transform the go-to-market approach by taking these factors into consideration.
Digital can help in sales transformation in the following areas
- Uncover opportunities for continuous improvement
There are many untapped opportunities to enhance sales efficiency and improve effectiveness. Solving key strategic, operational, and organizational sales issues can help businesses thrive in challenging environments.
- Generate significant value
Companies spend a significant share of efforts and revenues on sales. Therefore, improving sales effectiveness can directly impact revenues. If managed well, it can even free up resources that can be used to create value elsewhere in the business.
- Digital optimize sales efforts of every salesman
The sales function is strongly linked with other business functions, such as marketing and services. With digitization, the gaps between marketing and sales are further getting blurred.
What you must get right first
- Choose a strategy for getting started
First, begin with where the opportunity lies. The very first question you should ask is, "Where do I start with digital sales organization?" And the answers can differ based on the way you design your digital experience.
- Put your 100% into your sales operations
If you're designing your customer experiences around digital, how you enable your salesforce becomes really important. In a world where you’re dealing with digital customer experience, basing sales operations on analytics become mission critical if you're dealing with a digital customer.
- Keep your sales organization automated
It means to have automation, not only at the marketing level but also at the customer relationship management (CRM) level. It also means that you have to take your salesforce off spreadsheets and put it into more flexible and scalable platforms.
If you want to see what your customers are looking at, what their patterns are around and what product they are most probable to buy next, you have to fall back on data. Data alone can give you the required answers to all your mission-critical questions.
One of the greatest benefits of moving to an automated digital customer experience is being able to capture the data on the back end, and then provide recommendation engines that data to predict what product customers need.
For your salesforce, there are many hidden capabilities that open up when transaction and exploration is on a digital platform. True sales transformation comes from behavioral changes among managers and sales teams in these areas. Applying these trends across the organization can lead to significant growth.