Enterprise Sales Has Been Disrupted - Why Sales Pros Should Care

In recent years, the practice of enterprise sales has gone through a massive change. Today's market demands that you, as an Enterprise Sales pro, must connect with prospects and clients through a comprehensive digital approach.

A new disruptive sales model has emerged, that of digital-enabled enterprise sales. In some ways, it closely mimics the B2C e-commerce models. Now your enterprise customers can define their problem, identify solutions, shortlist you from among competitors, test the product, and even pay, without moving away from their computer. All of this involves minimum sales touches. Now, are you wondering what is on your prospect’s mind and what motivates them to make decisions?

A report by Gartner revealed that:

·        Clients today are looking for more value, faster time-to-value, and more innovation from their service providers.

·        Clients are willing to look for alternatives to their usual partners to help them with more agile and innovative projects.

This is a brave new digital world. It’s clear that enterprise sales have been disrupted. Let’s look at specifically what has changed.

The New Era of Enterprise Sales

1.     The Use of Social Media as a Marketing Tool

Social media has become an important part of the enterprise marketing process. A survey conducted by MyCustomer.com revealed that 87% of B2B companies view social media (other than blogs) as a highly successful element of their marketing mix. 83% say the same for articles on websites, 78% for eNewsletters, and 77% for blogs.  So now, it is not just B2C companies that use social media for branding purposes. This trend emerged with the realization that B2B customers require more information, support, nurturing, and the trust-component to encourage sales. And these prospective customers use several channels for research- websites, LinkedIn, Twitter, whitepapers, podcasts, customer reviews, etc. to make the final choice. According to a survey conducted by IDG Connect, 86% of B2B IT buyers are currently using social media networks in their purchase decision process. Social Media Today revealed that the top five social networks used by B2B marketers to distribute content are LinkedIn (83%), Twitter (80%), Facebook (80%), YouTube (61%) and Google+ (39%).

2.     Content Creation Over Cold Calls

In the past, the most common way to reach out to potential customers was through emails and 'cold calls.' However, today the landscape of enterprise sales is very different. A study conducted by Harvard Business Review revealed that cold calling does not work 90.9% of the time. Apart from being ineffective, it is also expensive and time-consuming. According to HubSpot, cold calling costs at least 60% more per lead than other forms of marketing, and less than 2% of phone calls result in a meeting. The new era focusses mainly on inbound marketing, which is both effective and relevant. Inbound marketing involves attracting qualified sales leads to your website by creating content designed especially for them. That way, when they conduct a related search, your content shows up in the search engine results, and they view you as at least a viable option, if not a market leader. The more relevant content you publish, the more your site visitors increase, until the point when they become your brand advocates and loyal customers. That’s the theory anyway.

3.     Heated Competition

Digital disruption has made the competition even more fierce in enterprise sales. The prospects engage with the vendors later in the buying process, so it appears as if the buying cycles in this era have become shorter. But there’s a lot that happens at the prospect-side without the involvement of the vendor. Content talks and vendors can also be replaced more quickly. Nowadays it is common for customers to purchase products as a trial or proof of concept, and then convert to a broader deployment over time, or otherwise shut the usage of the product down altogether. For this reason, it is vital for companies to keep pace with evolving customer requirements.

In conclusion, yes enterprise sales in going through a disruption. Sales has always been very people-oriented however technology is changing the way things are done now. The change could further accelerate in some areas too. With the help of artificial intelligence, digital communication with customers could become more human-like. Big data is giving sales professionals more prospect information than they had access to before. And to top it all, Machine learning is predicting the needs and wants of clients before they even ask for it.

Companies and the sales pros in them have to embrace this change. They must start demonstrating relevance in this technologically-enhanced landscape of enterprise sales. Either that or watch the deals dry up!