Mastering the art of selling is more complicated than ever. Widespread smartphone penetration is helping customers compare prices, research products and weigh competing offers, all in real time. These customers are armed with information and eager for real-time engagement, expecting personalized service and experiences at every touchpoint.
But delivering always-on, personalized experiences can be challenging, especially if a sales team is bogged down by slow, inefficient processes. So how can sales teams keep up in a fast-paced and demanding environment?
A recent Forbes Insights ebook, A New Era of Selling Is Here. Are You Ready?, sponsored by Salesforce, explores four ways growing companies can accelerate sales in a highly competitive environment:
• Staffing your team with the right people
• Creating and instilling a marketing mindset
• Doing more with automation and artificial intelligence
• Connecting your data for a better customer experience
Together, these strategies can ensure customers are met with compelling and consistent experiences at every step of the purchasing path.
A brand is only as good as its best sales rep. But hiring the right talent takes more than evaluating a candidate’s skill sets and work experience. It’s important to hire consultative sellers, not order takers.
Nor should sales reps rely on heavy product pitches. A whopping 80% of business buyers say it’s absolutely critical or very important to interact with a salesperson who doesn’t try to sell them products they don’t need, according to the Salesforce 2016 State of the Connected Customer Report.
The result is a new breed of sales associate — a fast-thinking problem solver and a valuable business partner. Moving beyond the traditional script of selling goods and services, this individual creates personalized customer experiences.
Adopting a marketing mindset is equally as important for growing businesses. For salespeople, that means looking at everything through the eyes of the customer. The old paradigm of marketers generating leads and sales qualifying them is fast crumbling. Today’s sales forces are borrowing a page from the marketing playbook: seeing the selling process as a prime opportunity to build a positive customer experience.
Yet many sales teams can’t focus on customizing the customer journey because they’re bogged down by time-consuming administrative tasks and inefficient processes.
In fact, a recent study by Adam Rapp of the University of Ohio discovered that 32% of front-line sales managers’ time is spent managing their sales team, but as much as 44% of their time is spent managing information and performing administrative tasks. Rapp’s research also revealed that managers who spend more than four hours per week managing information experience a reduction in productivity. Intelligent technologies promise to change all that.
Artificial intelligence is already the top growth area for sales teams, with 139% growth in AI usage expected over the next three years, according to Salesforce’s State of Sales report.
By combining and crunching the right data sets, brands are removing the guesswork from identifying leads and targeting high-value customers. For instance, an AI system can reveal a customer’s readiness to close a deal, a particular segment’s buying behaviors, a sales team’s top performers or the prospects most likely to generate profits.
AI shines a light on all these blind spots, illuminating the sales pipeline so sales reps can determine the best time and channel to connect with customers. Emboldened with information they’ve collected on their customers, these growing businesses can begin to deliver more personalized and predictive customer experiences without the luxury of a global workforce or sprawling IT environment.
But as an IT environment expands, it can become riddled with data silos — disparate and disjointed pools of customer information. As a result, salespeople often lack a unified, integrated view of their customers and have no way of knowing about previous interactions a customer has had with the brand.
The benefits of a comprehensive customer view are twofold: On the one hand, it’s an opportunity for sales reps to understand customer behavior in context and pinpoint the right times and channels to take action. For growing businesses, connecting the dots creates a solid foundation for making executive decisions on everything from product planning to marketing spend to new hires. Either way, this unified view helps to create exceptional customer experiences.
Talent that’s trained to add value, closely allied sales and marketing teams, reps rich in AI’s predictive powers and leaders willing to recognize that customer experience is as much about mindset as it is computer models — these are the strategies businesses need to grow.
