Top 5 Keys to Success for a Digital Sales Team

Four years ago, I joined the Digital Sales team at Microsoft to lead up the strategy and program management for the newly developed Demand Response team which is focused on working marketing qualified leads in the unmanaged customer space. At the time I joined we had two Digital Sales centers, one based in Fargo, North Dakota and another in Dublin, Ireland and we had fewer than 50 sellers. In that first year our team was tasked with growing our teams in Fargo and Dublin and opening offices in Japan, India, China, Australia, and Costa Rica. We set out to drive a standardized, globally consistent approach across areas. We have learned so much over the last four years about what it takes to lead a global team, how to recruit and retain amazing talent, and how to maximize profitability and impact. We now have over 450 demand response sellers across our centers and are in the process of launching a new team focused on customer acquisition in the managed space.

The last year has seen an explosion of activity for the Digital Sales profession as sales teams moved from meeting with customers face to face to remote selling. If you are just getting started on your journey or are looking to take your team to the next level, I’d like to share some tips on how you can increase the impact and success of your Digital Sales team.

Top 5 keys to success for a Digital Sales Team

1)     Partner closely with marketing to generate high quality leads

The foundation of my team’s success lies in a successful partnership with marketing. The Demand Response team works leads that result from digital signals from customers which are generated by the global demand center marketing team. Over the last several years we have iterated closely with marketing on improving the quality of the leads by establishing strong feedback loops, closely reviewing results each month on the qualification and disqualification rates of leads and partnering together on taking the business to the next level.

2)     Leverage machine learning to prioritize leads

One of the innovations that catapulted our results and impact was the incorporation of machine learning into our lead scoring models. Rather than relying on point systems to score and prioritize different types of leads based on a perception of what would qualify through the funnel (for example 25 points for a webinar lead, 25 points for a trial), we launched machine learning models which looked at over 200 attributes of a lead to predict the likelihood of a lead to result in a sale. Attributes like whether a domain name matched a company name, size of company, type of and frequency of engagement, and title of the person engaging with content, among many others were included in the model. These models were trained on the hundreds of thousands of leads we had worked prior to the launch and then set up to “learn” continually as we adjust our model and continue to raise the bar on what success looks like for our team. When you generate over 1 million leads a year, machine learning becomes incredibly impactful to your model. In our case it massively increased our conversion rates and revenue we generate through the model.

3)    Deploy BOTS to increase hand raising

Another exciting innovation was the launch of email BOTs to reach into the lead pool to warm up leads and drive hand raisers who wanted to work with sales. The premise here is simple, we have more leads than we have time and resources to reach and many leads are not yet ready to connect with sales. We solved this by creating intelligent email bots that would reach out to customers to follow up on activities they performed and determine if they wanted a sales connection. Once a lead confirmed they wanted to have a conversation, the bot would either set up the time with a sales rep or send the lead to sales as a high priority lead that would get followed up on within hours.

4)     Invest in proper tooling to increase scale and maximize reach

Another incredibly important key to our success has been a continued investment in tooling to help improve the productivity and results of the sellers. We have made a number of improvements over the last several years to assist with this. The one I’m most excited about is the launch of Sales Accelerator, which has been a game changer for our team over the last 8 months. Sales accelerator serves up leads to our sellers with sequences applied to the leads based on the type of and priority of the lead. For example, a sequence could include 10 touches and include a variety of different ways to reach a customer including phone, email, InMail, meeting invite, etc. This takes the guess work out of the best actions to work a lead and also puts the best templates in the hands of our sellers. Our team partnered with the Dynamics product team to scope out and test this product as “customer zero” for a period of several months before we launched it to our entire Demand Response team in July 2020. We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of leads we have reached YOY as well as the total customer touches. You can read about this product, which is now in general availability here.

5)     Train sellers on Digital Sales best practices

The final and perhaps most important key to success is in training your sellers on Digital Sales best practices. The motion we have is founded in responding to digital signals from customers and reaching customers at the right time, with the right message. We advocate conducting research on the customer prior to reaching out to understand what factors might be impacting the customer. Is the company hiring lots of people? Are they conducting a merger? Are they launching a new product? What is the role of the person they are reaching out to? Are they already a Microsoft customer and if so what products do they use today? Does the seller have any connections from the customer in their network on LinkedIn or do you know someone else at Microsoft who does? What marketing content has the contact engaged with recently? These are just a few of the questions sellers research prior to reaching out to a customer. The seller is then trained to reach out with a relevant informed message and offer of assistance.

I hope this post has provided some useful tips and tricks! I’d love to hear your feedback and best practices!