Multiplier Effect of Technology on Sales enablement
Industry 4.0 – the biggest disruptive change that industry is witnessing right now is not just transforming the way products and services are designed and developed but also the way they are marketed and delivered.
To ride the disruptive wave, businesses must keep pace with technology-driven changes that are transforming ways that consumers buy -- and by extension, engage with selling organization. Smart B2B and B2C companies quickly revamp and adopt digital technologies for their sales enablement journey, covering the entire gamut of sales operations, from sales strategies to lead identification to sales conversations -- to create a fully empowered, data-driven sales team.
In the digital world, there are a host of tools that can optimize customer outreach and sales processes -- database management, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), intuitive CRM software, NLP-based CRM, etc., for a profitable customer outreach. Smart companies leverage these technologies to bring in greater ROIs on the entire sales enablement journey.
The advantages offered by sales enablement technologies are manifold -- they align marketing processes and goals and empower sales teams with tools and content to increase sales execution and drive revenue.
Changing customer landscape
From a one-size-fits-all approach to focused sales strategies, businesses are now leveraging social media watching, data analytics, IoT, AI, and response management to reorient their sales pitch and tailor it to varied preferences of consumer.
The new technologies help businesses to improve ‘net new customer acquisition’. Sales personnel no longer have to interact with hundreds of organizations through cold calling to identify demand. By leveraging data extraction mechanisms and database management solutions amalgamated with machine learning, the entire process of extracting entity details, mapping them together and then identifying the probable next new customer has indeed become much simpler, and importantly -- more efficient.
Such platforms also help to aggregate and structure distributed data sets to retrieve prospect information and journey stage real time. The powerful value proposition offered by predictive analytics helps businesses to targeted customer profiles and focus on buyers who are most likely to convert into opportunities.
Smart businesses leverage machine learning and data analytics to position brands and products engaging customer with greater relevance, and thus, converting one-time customers into repeat customers. AI helps in customer analytics by spotting buying patterns, providing relevant recommendations, offers and services to strengthen customer relationships. Intelligent platforms also enable enterprises to offer highly customized and relevant experiences to customers, thus enhancing brand engagement and resonance, and ultimately helping to improve brand trust and loyalty.
Thus, smart customer data platforms help businesses organize customer data, monitor customer interactions and create a 360-degree customer view to understand the customer better, identify requirements better, eradicate potential pain points, and build better brand engagement.
Salesperson of the future
While ‘technologi-fication’ is transforming the entire industry landscape, organizations need to note that technology alone cannot provide the critical mass to transform the business. In addition to digital solutions, enterprises need to look at sales enablement as an investment into human resources. In short, they need to empower and enable sales person of future.
From a human resource perspective, the most compelling benefit that sales enablement offer companies is that it provides best practices, knowledge, tools and resources required to be successful. It allows the entire sales contingent to achieve quota in a scalable, predictable and repeatable fashion. From a handful of over-achievers, sales can be scaled up across the entire function through sales enablement.
Enterprises need to ensure that their sales enablement framework is able to coherently organize, search, share, customize and analyze the vast quantum of data that is available -- customer-specific data, as well as data on sales, markets, channel partners, etc. This access to relevant data enables the sales personnel to improve the quality of the time spent on direct customer engagement. There is less time wasted, the interactions are more effective, which implies cost optimization, increase in ROIs and a boost to revenues.
Digital technologies in sales enablement is not just an emerging trend -- it has already gathered much traction in the sales space. According to the CSO Insights 2018 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, there’s been a three-fold jump in adoption of technologies -- 59.2 percent of organizations now have a framework for sales enablement in place as compared to 19.3 percent in 2013. Another finding is that tech-companies have adapted faster -- more than 79% of all organizations in the technology domain already have a dedicated sales enablement initiative or function, as compared to an average of 50% across other industries.
The increasing recognition of the role of sales enablement technologies in enhancing and focusing sales performance implies that it is now an indispensable part of the modern sales organization. It is a vital tool that will empower enterprises to harness the wave of disruption for exponential growth.
