The Beating Heart of Digital Sales

Today, technology is becoming encased into every aspect of our lives and society. We are seeing the rises of smart-everything, internets of things, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. There are apps, and devices that support these apps, monitoring everything, and everyone, around us. This is producing vast amounts of data and the technological edge means that analytics is evolving to better make sense of this data and, consequently, our lives, societies and businesses. Technology is intertwined in nearly every aspect of the enterprise today, with information technology fast becoming a primary driver of market differentiation, business growth and profitability. The question for sales professionals is: How is technology enriching sales?

Digital technology is the biggest agitator of the business world today, and the sales environment is no different. Mobile technology, social media, cloud computing, embedded devices, big data, and analytics have radically changed the nature of work and competition. And digital innovations will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Technology has tremendous potential to be the engine of increasing human, organizational, and economic prosperity. But that is not where it ends. Indeed, digital technology is only the beginning of the technology journey of today. Digital technology in sales is not the true story. Digital transformation is.

Digital Sales Masters

Fulfilling technology’s potential will require sales leaders to recreate the way their institutions operate in a world of digital ubiquity. Sales leaders need to engage their salespeople in a process of redefining how they work and what their companies do. Digital transformation is therefore the key managerial imperative for today’s business leaders. If it is done correctly, sales leaders can evolve the selling functionaries to become “Digital Sales Masters”. Digital Sales Masters (DSM’s) use digital sales technology to drive significantly higher profit, productivity, and customer benefits. They take advantage of the transformative potential of digital technology to radically redesign how their sales organizations operate and compete.

DSM’s achieve so much more because they maintain a dual perspective on the transformation they must bring about. The first one is the most straightforward: they make smart investments in digital technology to innovate their customer engagements, and the business processes and business models that support them. The second is too often forgotten. DSM’s build strong leadership capabilities to envision and drive transformation within their companies and their cultures. They innovate the practice of sales management for a digital world. Along both lines, leadership capabilities are required to turn digital investment into the digital advantage that can lead us to greater human, organizational, and economic prosperity

People Matter

But all to often in the digital transformation in sales there is something missing. That something is people. In B2B sales, people still buy from people. Sales is an imperfect science simply because there are people involved at all stages of the sales process. If we look to transforming digitally and utilizing technology to take over the role of the traditional salesperson, that would be a fundamental mistake. What we need to do is combine the skills and personality of successful salespeople and augment them with the sales technology that is available on the market today. True digital sales mastery will occur if we increase the human experience at the front end of the sales pipeline, then utilize technology to make our processes more efficient in the middle and then blend in the human touch at the end of our sales process. We must not forget that the key fundamental here is the human. Only then will we evolve into Digital Sales Masters.

Research from Salesforce.com has revealed that today’s sales executive function pinpoint items like improved use of sales technology and virtual selling as key drivers of the post COVID-19 sales world. Digitizing the sales function in this way has obviously increased productivity and output by utilizing CRM’s, automated reporting and selling, predictive analytics and lead prioritization, to name a few. All of this has meant that the modern sales function has become more automated and efficient. The sales function within organizations is now tasked with technology-driven sales disciplines such as social listening, sentiment analysis, and key buying indicator examination, which is a far cry from even a mere 5 years ago.

In the current pandemic situation that we are facing salespeople are leaning ever more towards webinar and social based selling methods. But the key ingredient in social selling is exactly that – being social. The key ingredient webinar selling is the person on the other side of the screen. Overall, the vital element in digitally transforming the sales organization, is still the salesperson. And often, they are overlooked. We should not forget that in order to fulfill the human side of the equation we need top class salespeople more than ever. We need people to harness technology and not be driven by technology. The key ingredient in being a digital sales master is to be sales master first.

Outsource for Expertise

Often CEO’s and business leaders are overwhelmed by the need to innovate in the sales organization because sales are perceived as ‘dark arts’ and they shy away from transforming the function. The solution to this can be to partner with, or outsource this function to, a specialist organization that truly understands the nexus of digitizing sales and harnessing the power of salespeople. In this way business leaders can quickly, efficiently and in an elastic approach to access a digitized sales environment in a cost effective and rapid manner.

Digital sales transformation represents a quest to understand how, what Clayton Christensen, in his seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, once termed ‘disruptive technology’, affects the organisation. Much of today’s technological advances can be seen as disruptive in so many ways. Digital sales transformation is thus a result of businesses seeking to adapt to this onslaught of disruptive technologies affecting customer and employee behaviour. As sales technology becomes a permanent fixture in everyday life organizations are faced with an increasing need to update legacy technology strategies and supporting methodologies to better reflect how the real world is evolving. The need to do so is becoming increasingly obligatory. And salespeople are not only the most important cog in the digital B2B sales machine of the future – they are the beating heart of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Gillon

Mark Gillon is the CEO at Buyashara www.buyashara.com, a B2B sales outsourcing company that is positively disrupting the traditional approach to sales in Africa