#52Women52Weeks: Salesforce's Tiffani Bova asks businesses, are you delivering the latest innovation? If not, your competitors will

Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, where as an industry thought leader, she watches overall market trends to uncover best practices on how to improve sales performance and enhance the overall customer experience. She was named one of Inc. Magazine’s 37 Sales Experts You Need to Follow on Twitter.   

1. What does an innovation evangelist do?

For 18 years, customer success has always been the top priority for Salesforce. My role was created to help companies re-imagine how they can not only grow bigger but grow better with innovative business models and technology. I am constantly on the lookout for best practices and transformative stories to share with our customers to help them innovate and achieve new levels of success.

2. Aside from profits, what is it about sales that can make or break a company?

I like to say that sales is the last mile for executing a company’s strategy or the first mile when a customer wants to engage with a brand. Executives must start putting in the same level of rigor, analysis and planning into building an effective sales engine as they do throughout the rest of the business. Since top-line revenue growth is imperative to the health of many, if not all, businesses, getting the ‘job of selling’ right has huge implication to a company’s future. 

3. Why are customers more disruptive to a marketplace than technology?

There has absolutely been a power shift away from brands to the customers they serve. The modern buyer begins engaging with a brand long before they ever reach out to a sales person, which means the old way of sharing content, marketing a product and differentiating against the competition must be reassessed. This shift disrupts the status-quo challenging many companies, including the biggest brands in the world, to rethink current sales and marketing practices.

4. As a "recovering seller" yourself, how can one get better at sales?

While there is a long standing debate as to whether sales is more art than science – I think with all the advancements in technology, we finally find ourselves in the perfect blend of both. I myself have been guilty of managing my own pipeline on just my gut—with technology organizing my ‘rolodex’. But we have come a long way since then. Intelligence and automation are the future of sales, enabling teams to pursue the best leads, discover insights from data, recommend actions that help close deals, build meaningful relationships with customers and be even more productive.

5. In a competitive market, what's the number one way for a company to differentiate itself?

Customer experience is becoming the new competitive battleground—if you aren’t delivering the latest innovations or being a strategic advisor to your customer, your competitors will. [S1] When companies take seriously the impact every touch point has on the overall relationship customers have with their brand—how much they spend as a result of that experience, they may in fact view how they differentiate differently.

[S1]If you are giving the customer what they need (innovation, transformation, support, etc) to be successful, your competitor will. 

Link with Tiffani Bova HERE

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