The last frontier of an organisation which is getting disrupted or transformed is Sales. Evolution of sales or sales transformation as we call it is not anymore about how products are sold in this digital-first world but it is more about how organisations will sell their products to the customers who know more about the products and the services that he intends to buy.
Customers are rapidly changing how they learn about and buy products and services. To cope up with this the tools, data, and analytics used by sales teams are getting dramatically sophisticated.
Some of the factors driving the transformation of the go-to-market approach are as follows
1) Data driven sales – Sales in a digital first marketplace is decided by advanced marketing analytics, process reengineering, mobile strategies, and deeper analytics.
2) Digitization– The advent and access of the internet to more and more customers and their subsequent digitization have given rise to the following changes
a. The Information arbitrage - An increasingly informed set of customers who at times knows more than the semi-trained sales team knows. A result of this objection handling is becoming more and more technical and more design oriented than being feature centric
b. DIY customers - The rise and rise of the DIY customers who accesses information at their own preferred time and pace, researches the pros and cons, compares with probable competitions, gets a trial and purchases on their own. And all of these without any interaction with a sales person.
c. The super connected salesman – The sales force in the digital world thus have to be equipped with the right information with the latest changes updated. They have to be connected on an anywhere-anytime basis. They have to be empowered enough to make faster decisions and be responsive to the changing customer needs.
3) Being Glocal – Internet has improved awareness and demand of traditional products in newer geographies. Thus global companies get to sale in various emerging markets which they had no presence in previously. But this also pushes the global entities to be flexible enough to incorporate local features in their product line. Success in emerging markets requires local strategies, local talents, local resources and most importantly localised products.
4) Rebalancing go-to market – Various industry leaders are realising that with the advent of technology and with changing customer preferences and dynamics they have to change their approach to the sales channels. The traditional expensive channels are slowly getting replaced by digital teams and inside sales.
The Benefits of Sales transformation – Organisations has to start transforming their sales force by merging these new trends with the existing powerful, traditional sales force levers of customer targeting, time on task, and messaging. Together this can contribute to the following
· Uncovering new opportunities
· Improving efficacy
· Improving Sales TAT
· Improving revenue and profit for the organisation
This post has been written by our Guest Sales Author Kaushik Chakraborty (VP- Digital, Tata Capital) for Relatas.com (Sales AI). If you wish to share your Sales Stories with others, please write to us for access: hello@relatas.com
Relatas is the Sales AI platform that successful B2B sales teams use for Accurate Sales Forecasting using Relationship Intelligence and AI. Relatas helps Sales Professionals sell better and faster, with NO-DATA-ENTRY & helping Sales Managers reduce revenue loss and better sales forecasting.
