Digital Sales Transformation

Discussing how to transform marketing and sales digitally under different topics may be confusing for some. Isn’t marketing and sales the same? No, they are not. Marketing is different from sales. Marketing does the work of informing and attracting leads and prospects to a business and product/service. Sales, on the other hand, does the work of reinforcing and hammering the value of the company's solution to convert prospects into customers. Marketing is all about attracting leads and new customers; sales is about converting the leads.

Even though the two business functions are different, they share the common goal: to generate revenue by attracting leads and converting them into paying customers

What are the objectives of transforming your sales digitally?

The first reason why you may want to transform your sales digitally is so that you’d be able to manage your pipeline efficiently. Nowadays, a pipeline is called a funnel. While the word gets thrown around a lot, ‘pipeline’ is not just a buzzword; it is an important sales tool. A sales pipeline or a funnel plays an important role in the success of any business. It is an organized, visual way through which multiple potential buyers can be tracked as they move up through different stages in the purchasing process. It can be said to be a visual representation of where prospects are in the sales process. There are usually different stages to a sales process, potential buyers are moved from one stage to the other as they move through the sales process.

Based on the sales pipeline, there are 3 types of leads that can be generated:

1. Hot leads

A hot lead is a qualified lead that is interested in your service/product. This lead is ready to buy, and they are ready to make direct contact asking for the sale. This lead meets all the criteria that is required to make a purchase.

2. Warm Lead

This lead is still at the stage of decision; their mind is not made up yet. Usually, they are missing one or two criteria that are required to make a purchase. In some cases, the deal breaking factor would the budget.

3. Cold Lead

In the case of cold leads, you are still trying to convince them to consider your service/product. This kind of lead requires nurturing to move them through the stages of the sales pipeline. When it comes to converting leads, it is not always an overnight success. There are some leads that would be ready to move through the stages immediately, some are going to require some nurturing.

The second objective for transforming your sales digitally is to streamline or capture your sales efficiently especially if you handle volume of transactions. Here are some examples of how that can be used:

eCommerce

What is eCommerce?

eCommerce or electronic commerce is a business model where sellers offer goods or services using a website or a mobile app over the Internet and the buyer buys from those platforms with online payment.

Physical products that are bought via an e-commerce website are usually delivered physically through a courier while services are executed through online bookings and actual on-site visit of the service provider. There’s also a business model where the seller offers digital products such as ebooks, online courses, etc, and these types of transactions happen purely via the Internet.

What are the benefits of eCommerce?

eCommerce is so important now for small businesses more than ever because of the unfortunate pandemic we are all experiencing as of this writing.

A lot of small businesses were not prepared and don’t have any means to capture orders or transactions; thus they were crippled now. Restaurants, for example, stopped operating especially those who were not registered to delivery service companies such as Grab Food or Food Panda.

So, with this realization, enabling our businesses to eCommerce is a no-brainer and the way to go. It will take months, or some predictions say years before things will go back to normal after this pandemic and so, if you are passionate about your business, then it is logical to go online.

Other than survival, here are the main benefits of eCommerce:

Wider reach. If you are a retail or restaurant in a certain city, then you can be able to expand your reach even outside your vicinity. This indirectly equates to a brand awareness boost.

Seamless transaction. Less hassle, less human interaction, and an increase in buyer convenience.

A decrease in operational overhead. You don’t have to focus your effort on your brick-and-mortar store, which is heavy in maintenance costs.

Increase in revenue. Wider reach + extended operating hours means more revenue.

Here’s the checklist in enabling your small business to eCommerce:

1. Identify your eCommerce model.

There are several business models in eCommerce.

If you are in retail or a restaurant, then this falls under the business-to-consumer (B2C) category.

If you are a solo entrepreneur and selling products/service to an individual, then this is a C2C or consumer-to-consumer category. Platforms such as Amazon, Lazada, Fiverr, or Upwork will be the way to go.

Another model is if you are an online influencer, then you can sell ads to businesses, and this will fall under the consumer-to-business model.

2. Choose your platform. Now that you have identified your eCommerce business model., the next step is to choose your platform. You can either build the website yourselves if you have a technical background or hire someone to do it for you.

For retail or distribution, there are a lot of options such as Prosperna, Shopify, Woocommerce, or Magento.

For food, then register yourselves to delivery services such as Grab Food or Food Panda or again hire a developer if you have a unique requirement.

For digital products, then you may consider a simple WordPress website with online payment, ClickFunnels, or a subscription platform.

For services with booking requirement, then the platforms such as Shopify or Woocommerce has plugins for online bookings such as Sesami or BookThatApp or you may need to again hire a developer if you have a unique or proprietary requirement.

For C2C, as mentioned above, you may register your accounts easily with those platforms.

3. Choose your payment method. This requires a little work because it varies per country. The entity which handles the payment of your eCommerce is called the payment gateway. They are a separate entity, and their business model is that they get a share from each transaction called a transaction or processing fee. The percentage share varies depending on the features offered by the payment gateway.

The easiest way is to activate a payment method is through PayPal account as a merchant. Most eCommerce platforms have ready integration with PayPal. But if you want a more competitive transaction fee, then you may consider other payment gateways such as Stripe, 2Checkout, Google Checkout, or ApplePay.

In the Philippines, we have Paynamics, PesoPay, 2C2P, or Dragonpay. eCash or eWallets are also a trending option now such as GCash or Paymaya or where I currently serve as the CTO, MegaPay PH.

They have unique offerings for merchants that make it more seamless and quicker to implement.

4. Define Your Order Fulfillment Process. This is one of the most important aspects, the product or service delivery. There are several models of order fulfillment. The traditional way is to buy your stock inventory and fulfill the order through an in-house delivery process or outsourced. Another model is called dropshipping, where you don’t need to keep products but executes the order through a third-party supplier who then ships the order to the customer. Amazon FBA, is an innovative model by Amazon where anyone can send their products to Amazon warehouses and then Amazon does the rest from shipping to fulfillment.

A service company with a booking app such as Airbnb, Uber, or Grab should have a way to manage the services through a seamless communication utility within the app and a rating system.

5. Manage Your Back-Office. Another important factor in making sure your eCommerce business has a strong ground, is to manage your back-office well. Having a good business process model from procurement, inventory management, HR, admin, and accounting will serve as the backbone of your operations. I will discuss this further in the next chapters.

Lastly, don’t forget about government compliance, such as your business permits, tax filing, and labor.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer relationship management software can be very useful in helping your business grow by managing the sales processes; right from lead scoring up to enhance long-term customer relationships. Many fast-growing companies now use CRM technology to turn more sales leads into revenue. The management software can help in giving you an overview of your projected sales for a specific period. With such forecasting data, you can effectively plan your marketing campaigns and prepare your business for increases or dips in sales volume.

Customer relationship management is a way to manage your sales pipeline or funnel on a centralized location digitally and promote your team’s interaction with your customers seamlessly. Its main objective is to acquire new customers and keep them. Internally, it is the best tool to measure your sales team’s performance.

Here are the Benefits of CRM or Customer Relationship Management:

1. Consolidated/centralized data. We all have been tired of getting customers’ master list or sales information from different sources Each salesperson has their contacts stored in a spreadsheet locally, and some of them store it in the cloud. One major benefit of CRM is to have a centralized location that you can always refer to in real-time.

2. Customer acquisition history. A good sales management system is when you have a clear history trail of a customer from how you acquired them as a lead/prospect down to closing the sale. With CRM, you can be able to browse each customer and its historical information anytime.

3. Better decision making and strategy. Imagine a pipeline dashboard that shows how many leads were acquired for the week, how many moved from cold to hot, and how many customers were converted into sales. With this information, you can be able to decide where to focus on, what strategy to implement, and what to do with your performing and non-performing salespersons.

So, for your digital transformation initiative, implementing a digital CRM for your business is a good way to grow your sales and keep customers.

As a bonus, here is a business process template in implementing a CRM.

1. Define the sales team. Depending on the size of your organization, you should define your team in groups. Define the group’s team leader, and the sales manager on top of all. This is to give you transparent accountability.

2. Capture leads. There are several ways to capture leads. Manually encode or import them in your centralized database. Automate them from your digital marketing campaigns such as email campaigns, website inquiries, or from your social media channels. There are online interface programs that automate the importing of a lead from your website.

3. Assign leads. The sales team leader should manage the assignment of leads based on your defined rules or policies. Some companies assign leads based on location, territory, or industry expertise.

4. Manage pipeline. Require your team to record all sales activities in the CRM from quotation preparation, meeting schedules, minutes of the meeting, call logs, follow-ups, and next action.

5. Manage and keep existing customers. CRM does not end in the sales conversion. A good sales management system is to keep existing customers by consistently providing them with useful information about your niche, offering sales promos, discounts, and upselling other products. If you are a service company, you may want to provide them with a channel for support and inquiries.

Build Customer Relationships.

While acquiring new customers is great, maintaining a good relationship with existing customers is equally as important. Detailed data from every interaction you have with each customer can be stored by CRM applications. The information can be used by your sales and marketing teams to anticipate the needs of your customers. The most commonly used CRM is Salesforce, but there are other options like Zoho CRM, Insightly, Freshsales, etc.

Point-of-Sale (POS) - Retail Cashiers, Restaurant Systems

This is another example of sales automation, it is what is commonly used at the point of making sales at retail shops, restaurants, and even service shops.

The benefit of implementing a POS in your store is to capture sales real-time, print official receipts, automate the tracking of inventory and record cash inflows.?If you have an e-commerce website, then you can ask your technology partners to integrate it with your POS.

Most of stand-alone off-the-shelf POS has a module to track inventory, but if you are a small business with more than one branch, then it is essential that you have a centralized web service to synchronize sales real-time to your head office and track inventory online per branch.

Here’s a checklist in implementing a POS in your store:

1. Define your products/SKU. A stock keeping unit or SKU is the identifier of your product. It is normally a unique code or can be the barcode. Provide the product description, selling price, discount and tax option of each product.

2. Define your payment methods. Most shops accept all types of payment methods such as cash, credit card or check. There’s a trend now to accept bitcoins and e-wallet payments such as GCash, Megapay, Grab and Paymaya in our country or Apple Pay, Google Pay in the US.

3. Define your customer profiles. Customer profiles can be used to offer discounts based on the profile. You may have customer profiles such as regular customers, VIPs, employees, and each one has its own parameters when they purchase in your store.

4. Define user controls. It is important that each cashier has their own credentials in the POS and supervisors to approve sales returns or sales adjustments. It is a common practice that sales are not allowed to be reversed unless the branch supervisor is called and overrides the sales return.

5. Define your BOD and EOD process. Beginning of Day and End of Day process should be well defined in order for the store personnel to have a seamless transition of cashiers and supervisors. Normally during BOD, the cash registers and drawer numbers are cleared and EOD is where the cashier ends his/her shift, closes the register and print sales/cash reports called X, Y, or Z Readings. They are used for audit purposes.

Reservation Systems and other Sales Capturing Systems

Online reservation systems are another common example of sales automation. People who are going on a trip can easily book a room in a hotel and eliminate the fear of being stranded. Alongside booking for hotels, you can order for a ride with online cab hailing services, and you can book a spot at a restaurant, etc. This helps the customers enjoy the best service when it’s available, it saves them the stress of booking in person. There are many examples of reservation systems; Bookwhen, Cloudbeds, Hotelogix, etc.

There are off-the-shelf reservation systems available online or can also be installed as a plugin in your Wordpress website. But if you have a unique requirement, then commissioning a software developer can be a good way to customize it or even do it from the ground up. These are applicable also for events, concerts or theme park ticketing.

Some other sales capturing systems are proprietary for specific industries such as real estate, hospitals, etc. These are called vertical solutions. Real estate, for example, has a module to link it to their lot, or house inventories and auto computes the amortization. For hospitals or clinics, there are modules for ER, laboratories linked to billing and collection.

Loyalty Management

The main goal of loyalty management is to convince your customers to repeat the order. The role of a loyalty platform is to automate the collection of data, identify the customer profile, define rewards and incentives based on the customer profile, and monitor repeat sales and claims. The most common way of gaining rewards is through points. Points are earned based on the value of the purchase by the customer and a loyalty card as a tangible proof that you are a loyal customer. Depending on the company goal, those points can be converted into cash, a rebate or discount and a treat from a third-party partner.

Traditionally, these points system are incorporated in the Point-of-sale used by the store, or the e-commerce website, but there are various online platforms in the market now that you can integrate with.

In our country, we have Zap, Appsolutely and ShareTreats.

Mobile App

A customized mobile app is another way to automate sales. It can be the mobile version of your e-commerce and/or your loyalty platform. It is important to partner with a good mobile developer in developing these types of app especially if you want your own branded mobile app. Social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have already started making their platforms accept sales directly.