Introduction
The digital revolution has affected every aspect of a business equally – be it operations, marketing, or even sales. Organizations are taking an entirely novel approach to improve their functions and achieve goals, which includes using automation and remote employee training.
The sales departments, especially, are beginning to reimagine their workflows and construct a mechanism that enables them to not just “win” a customer but “guides a buyer to value” in the long term.
In short, empowered by digital prowess, sales teams are zeroing in on customer loyalty as the long-term goal and realigning their operations by approaching this goal through granularized milestones. Your sales department can match its steps with the digital wave by adapting to and assimilating the new-age solutions it brings to the table.
For example, chatbots. These technological implements, augmented by artificial intelligence, are an excellent way to offload mundane, routine customer inquiries for sales reps.
A customer relationship management tool helps sales representatives keep customer data handy to close more deals in less time. It can be safely assumed, thus, that an insightful, data-backed method to execute sales operations can deliver more returns to the organization than the straightforward, traditional, classic sales model.
Let’s understand in detail how the sales team can keep up with the digital wave and thrive.
Leveraging Digital Offerings as a Part of Product Sales
Digitality has seeped into every aspect of a customer’s buying journey. Businesses and their sales departments need to figure out a way to offer digital value as part of a non-digital product. The evolving customer sentiment regarding each purchase has led to higher expectations.
Consumers now expect digital conveniences to be included with all their purchases – whether or not a product is inherently digital.
For software and services (provided over SaaS models), sales departments have begun to capitalize on digital models that help clients scale up their products over time, as and when the need arises. The message is clear: the business has readjusted to make the most meaningful, retentive sale instead of the biggest, most expensive one.
For the non-digital products as well, a similar model can be leveraged where the product comes bundled with a digital offering or incentive. For example, with the sale of each laptop or mobile phone, sales have now started to offer extended warranty and insurance upon completion of device registration online on the dealer’s platform.
More such inventive ways to combine digital benefits with a sale can be created.
Readying Sales to Navigate the Digital Natives
Easy information accessibility and the rise of social media have turned the modern consumer into a digital-first, digital-native entity. This holds true even in the case of B2B clients.
Every business should expect to be thoroughly researched and scrutinized on an online platform before any buyer decides to approach it for a purchase. The marketing and sales teams must work together to prepare the best possible brand image for these digitally native customers.
This constitutes, but is not limited to, taking care of the following aspects:
- Prepare a brand and branding strategy for your brand’s online and digital persona. This helps your brand create a positive, inviting, and relatable image online for the digital natives searching for you and reading about you before they connect with your salespeople
- Equip your sales teams with tools that help them map lead journeys. Gaining insight into this perspective helps them be prepared to engage a lead with prior information to provide a better purchase experience
- Hire digital natives and administer mobile training for your sales workforce to benefit from new-age skills and digital capabilities that this generation is inherently familiar with. It also helps keep the sales team motivated
Managing Multiple Channels of Customer Communication
Today’s customers have multiple channels where they can access information about any brand or business. A few popular examples are social media, websites, and online streaming channels.
Additionally, signing up for brand communications (newsletters, SMS, RSS feeds, and more) gives the customers further information about your business.
The sales departments now need digital tools to orchestrate an integrated multichannel experience for the customers. Their journey should respond to their needs. For the more straightforward sales (like buying a notebook), the multichannel and cross-channel touchpoints can be simpler.
For the more complex journeys (like buying household appliances), the sales department can scatter digital value at each touchpoint, letting the brand communicate with the customer for a better experience.
The information that a customer gathers from your emails needs to be similar to the information the customer receives from your salespeople; consistency is key.
Brands need to leverage tools to craft a consistent customer experience across all the channels of presence.
Insight-Driven, Analytical Approach to Sales
Gut feeling no longer drives sales decisions. Businesses have come to realize the power of artificial intelligence-powered analytics and how such insights can help them close more deals.
For one, the customer prefers a salesperson always to know what they need. Secondly, the customer always wants to purchase on their terms. An analytical approach helps the sales team deliver customized, personalized sales experiences to a customer, fostering better relationships and aiding customer retention.
Data-driven analytics also help the sales department streamline its operations internally by highlighting processes that are efficient and those that could use some reworking.
Productivity and throughput can be measured quantitatively, promoting better work practices while dissuading wasteful resource use. Automation – a gift of the digital revolution – has the potential to offset human resource requirements for routine, mundane and clerical tasks (such as CRM data entry).
Digitality in the sales universe helps save time and resources.
Wrapping Up
A shift in consumer behaviour did throw businesses on the back foot for a while, but it hasn’t taken long for the commerce world to understand that digitality is a gift. It helps businesses streamline their sales departments inside and out, driving higher efficiencies and productivity and securing more sales than before. All of that and digital solutions for sales always make the customer happy in the end.
