Old Meets NewUsing Modern Technology to Reinforce Classic Sales Disciplines

Digital disruption impacts every aspect of modern business. Access to peer opinion, knowledge, and self-service capabilities, from almost anywhere and from almost any device, has hugely transformed the way we run our businesses and lead our lives.

In sales the repercussions of this transformation are felt on a massive scale. Digital disruption has affected both sides of the relationship—that of the buyer and the sales rep—in different but critical ways. Perhaps most pertinent is the difficulty brands now have engaging with the customer.

Think about where most of us start our buying research today. Whether for business or leisure, the majority of those journeys start on websites and social media where we try to understand more about products, brand reputation and so on. For this reason it’s imperative that you focus on building a strong online presence, otherwise your customers are likely to find a competitor that has just a click away.

How is Digital Disruption Doing This?

In this short paper, we’ll explore how sales reps can engage customers and prospects at the right time, with the right message, and through the right channels to increase their chances of selling to them.

We’ll look at how modern technology can help organizations overcome some of today’s biggest challenges, enabling you to understand where prospective customers are in their buying process so you can use that information to adjust your strategies to align with their needs.

For buyers, digital disruption has provided unprecedented access to information. Consumers no longer rely on a brand to inform them about their products, but instead trust the opinions of friends, colleagues, third parties, and even unknowns. They can research and discover your brand at entirely their own pace and through the channels they want to use. The result is they are able to build a virtual wall between themselves and the brands trying to sell to them. Only when they are ready to buy do they need to engage with a brand, and even then it’s on their own terms—because by that stage they understand exactly what it is they want, why your offer is best suited to their needs, and what’s available elsewhere.

On the other side of the coin sales representatives are feeling the pinch, with the customer not engaging until far later in the sales cycle and willing to discount brands before any interaction takes place. Reps know that the more research customers do, the more risk there is of them becoming, at best, order takers and, at worst, redundant.

In addition, there is internal pressure to deliver from senior management, who feel that with all the increased levels of information at our fingertips selling should be easier. The result is that sales targets are on the rise despite customers being harder to engage.

Ultimately, for sales teams to succeed, they must remove barriers to interaction and learn to re-engage with this new type of empowered customer.

How Do Sales Re-Engage With Prospects and Customers?

Sales Coverage

Among the myriad questions facing sales leaders, one challenge retains a certain aura of mystery: how best to deploy a team. To be specific; how best to activate a team that maximizes revenues and margins, has the appropriate incentives and compensation for the reps, and ensures the achievement of the organization’s strategic objectives (which may stretch from establishing an industry beachhead to geographical expansion). It’s a common scenario where all too often, in lieu of anything more reliable, sales leaders are forced to rely on their gut feeling, resulting in the compromise of a ‘good enough territory model’.

Once that territory is defined, the sales leader has to drive the team to pre-emptively engage prospects with the highest potential to purchase, or those most likely to help them achieve the business’s strategic growth objectives. But beyond instinct and anecdotal evidence, how do you know what a ‘sweet spot’ or ‘good fit’ looks like? Once again most sales leaders often revert to gut-feeling and a simplistic ‘good-enough’ analysis.

Clearly the missing component here is access to useable and reliable data that can prove and support, or challenge and reset decisions that in the past have been left to intuition. But it is fixable. Modern sales technologies can quickly place in the hands of sales leaders purpose-built analytics that inform territory definitions and targeting to maximize the latent potential of the sales organization.

Ultimately, the speed, accuracy and usability of data and analysis gives sales leaders the time needed to focus efforts on monitoring and coaching teams to achieve high levels of performance. That situation is set to improve further as deeper use of predictive analytics will fuel more real-time decision making, with changes to territories done on the fly in response to changing market conditions and shifting internal resources.

Influence the Influencer

Improved Productivity from deeper visibility

Social

Mobile Capability for Better Engagement

One of the biggest forms of digital disruption has been the advent of “social” technology. Initially used for personal communication, social networks have developed into tier one channels for selling, sharing, buying, comparing and complaining. Companies have woken up to the marketing and service positives (and potential negatives) of social media, and now it’s time for sales to embrace the social disruption.

Mobility isn’t simply about providing sales teams with mobile devices. Reps want to be out in the field but they also have to remain in touch with the center to be productive, provide feedback and receive support when needed. Having fought to gain the customer’s time it’s important that a rep can position the company message and answer questions accurately and quickly. Mobile enablement allows them to do this while engaging customers and driving sales.

With customers and prospects doing their own research and assessment of your brand long before you are aware of it, sales has to find ways to reach those targets earlier in the buying cycle. That is easier said than done, especially when customers don’t necessarily want be reached until they’ve made their decision. To counteract this, sales needs to ask certain questions: where are prospects going to get their information? Who are they talking to? Is that information correct? How can we influence that decision?

The best way to reach buyers earlier in the cycle is to influence the influencer. We are all influenced by the views and opinions of others, and in the same way friends, colleagues, families and independent sources are all influencing purchasers. Therefore, to touch targets sales reps need to influence the people their customers are influenced by. They can do this by using social tools as a platform for sharing their messages. The use of blogs, specialist sites associated with your products, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. all give sales the chance to engage with influencers and prospects.

Sales teams need complete visibility of net new prospects as well as the ability to understand the opportunities presented by the current install base. Analyzing previous purchases and looking at what similar companies with similar needs have bought can inject new leads into the pipeline with a higher propensity to close. Today’s reps want to know not only what’s happened in the past but what is likely to happen in the future so that they can adjust their sales approach accordingly.

Feedback from the field

Support from collaboration

There are various types of information that a modern sales person has to feedback to the center depending on the company. Forecasts, orders, losses, quotes, etc. are all sources of information that the sales organization needs to both understand its current sales position and make future decisions. To ensure reps remain productive they must be able to do all these tasks in the field, and as simply as possible.

Modern sales teams cannot work in isolation. Increasing levels of product and customer complexity mean that selling is, generally, too complex for one person. Therefore sales teams need support and they need it immediately when out with customers. Corporate social tools allow you to communicate with and support reps, providing them with the information they need to accelerate their selling cycles. Using social tools to link sales to various support groups within the company means reps in the field can get answers to customer questions immediately. This speeds up the sales cycle, enhances the credibility of the sales person and brand, drives customer satisfaction and, ultimately, boosts brand loyalty.

Measures

Traditionally sales organizations have focused primarily on “lagging” measures when assessing the performance of the sales teams (Has the team hit target? How are they performing against quota? Etc.) If a rep didn’t hit target at the end of the year then they were often “let go”.

Many companies adopt the three-tier measurement method:

• Target

• Opportunities

• Activities

There are however some obvious drawbacks to assessing performance after the event. How they got there was often of little concern, and factors such as territories, opportunities, win rates, and day to day activities were either ignored or only reviewed when it’s too late to change them.

For this reason, organizations are increasingly looking at more “leading” measures to assess performance and provide early indicators of what might be impacting sales activities. The ability to surface problems quickly provides more time to adjust and take corrective measures to make sure goals are met—rather than waiting until the end of a sales cycle when it’s too late.

Thanks to constant updates and visibility, anything preventing sales reps from success can now be rectified swiftly. This means your reps have a better understanding of their own performance, and you don’t end up wasting weeks or months with your sales teams being hamstrung only to find out at the end of the quarter.

The chance to overcome the challenges caused by digital disruption should make adopting new sales technology—and metricizing that process—an appealing prospect for any sales organization. But what’s the bottom line for the C-suite?

The Bottom Line for Executives

In a digitally transformed Sales organization:

• Performance issues are easier to manage because they’re much more visible and quantifiable

• Customer experiences are stronger because salespeople work together—and with other departments— to deliver stronger, personalized customer journeys

• Issues are easier to detect and problems that previously would have gone unnoticed become immediately identifiable

• Response times to major issues are shorter as changes are easier to communicate to everyone

• Fewer deals are lost because data and information is shared and stored more intelligently—giving different people the chance to collaborate and contribute to the work of other teams

• Sales reps are happier in their jobs because they can clearly understand their performance, track it accurately, and flag up issues before they become a problem

• Reps spend more time selling and less on traditional admin tasks thanks to greater access to data

• Revenues are stronger, forecasts are more accurate, and pipeline effectiveness is maximized because everyone has access to the right, reliable data at every stage of the sales process

This all adds up to one thing: greater revenue and margin growth. And that’s something every CEO and CFO wants.

Start your sales transformation journey

Are you ready for a Sales organization where everyone can access the data and tools they need to boost productivity, improve efficiency deliver better customer experiences and manage a stronger pipeline? We thought you might be. It’s a process we’ve gone through ourselves, so if you’d like to see how Oracle can help bring your Sales organization into the future while reinforcing the traditional principles it was built on.

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