Organising sales roles and processes while maintaining an integrative view of the customer value is crucial. Progressive sales organisations rely heavily on the coordination of inside and field sales, online platforms, and business partners to deliver value along the multiple touchpoints in the customer purchase process.
Consider what drivers should define the sales force structure (i.e. size, composition, KPIs, management, processes and skills) to effectively influence success in team selling and collaboration with other functions and external parties. Acknowledge that implementing new technology and accessing new data without fundamentally challenging the old way of doing business will generate past results.
Digitalising sales requires changes beyond the sales force, including product development, marketing, distribution and customer services. Successful companies have found creative ways of pulling together the best resources from across the organisation.
They have aligned their incentives and set up effective communication mechanisms to deal with potential conflicts derived from salespeople wearing multiple hats (hunting, farming). The main objective is fostering trust and mutual credibility.
2. Sales Funnel digitalisation
AI has mostly been used for leads and opportunities scoring. The more innovative leverage AI to predict churn’s probability-based on industry characteristics and peer’s behaviour.
Organising sales roles and processes while maintaining an integrative view of the customer value is crucial. Progressive sales organisations rely heavily on the coordination of inside and field sales, online platforms, and business partners to deliver value along the multiple touchpoints in the customer purchase process.
Consider what drivers should define the sales force structure (i.e. size, composition, KPIs, management, processes and skills) to effectively influence success in team selling and collaboration with other functions and external parties. Acknowledge that implementing new technology and accessing new data without fundamentally challenging the old way of doing business will generate past results.
Digitalising sales requires changes beyond the sales force, including product development, marketing, distribution and customer services. Successful companies have found creative ways of pulling together the best resources from across the organisation.
They have aligned their incentives and set up effective communication mechanisms to deal with potential conflicts derived from salespeople wearing multiple hats (hunting, farming). The main objective is fostering trust and mutual credibility.
2. Sales Funnel digitalisation
AI has mostly been used for leads and opportunities scoring. The more innovative leverage AI to predict churn’s probability-based on industry characteristics and peer’s behaviour.
AI technology can capture the implicit sales knowledge that has gone unnoticed in the past; it can be used to build market-sensitive capabilities. It can help sales managers with accurate forecasting, cross-selling, lead and opportunity scoring allowing sales team performance monitoring, and skills enhancement. This collective knowledge can be analysed to create intellectual capital and facilitate the dissemination of information that builds on a competitive advantage.
The key is not just to automate the existing funnel process but also to change the way people work together and influence each other. AI can provide activity-based and success roadmaps with early warnings events about the progress of deals and the overall health of the customer’s relationship to trigger proper salesperson responses.
However, salespeople must receive thorough explanations of these AI-driven recommendations. The critical consideration of this advancement is how much leeway should companies afford their sales force to overrule AI-based recommendations.
As AI is becoming smarter, the biggest differentiator of success is residing on the personal touch. Successful sales managers have leveraged the new technology and masterminded their ability to:
- Ask the right questions.
- Actively approach the exceptions AI highlights.
- Excelling in the areas that AI will always struggle: ambiguity and emotional engagement.
3. Offering digitisation
Digitally transformed offerings typically provide customers with the information required to deploy a product effectively. Other organisations provide customers with personalised product recommendations based on purchase history. Leveraging customer data, some companies are also including predictive maintenance analytics.
However, the sophistication of digital offering brings over the sales force an extra layer of complication. Some of the enhanced offerings are often beyond the salespeople’s expertise and evolve rapidly. Hence, making it difficult for the salespeople to understand and explain their value to the customers.
The digitisation of offering also has a noticeable impact on the revenue models, as usage-based pricing become prevalent and on-demand sales platforms emergence. The organisation must evaluate its sales force’s knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) to continue creating value and manage the transition toward fully digitalised offerings. It is also essential to gather and manage customer’s feedback on the specialised platforms, as they become more and more prevalent.
Keep things simple to start with
AI can work with incomplete data as long as it is free of systematic bias. AI can improve the quality of the data by predicting missing values or identifying possible errors). Innovative organisations have kept things simple to start the process while remaining agile as they implement and engage the right team. They have seen results and have not underestimated the time and effort required.
Remember that applying these technologies to flawed processes will severely handicap the results you will be able to achieve. You can start now by stabilising processes before implementing AI.
A firm of any size can leverage sales digitalisation to optimise sales performance. This analysis reveals that the influence of sales digitalisation technologies (i.e. Digitization, AI) is likely to be more significant and more far-reaching than previous sales technologies. It is not a question of whether these technologies will change selling, but rather a matter of how soon.
We will cover the impact of Sales technology on the salesperson in our next article.
