Dear reader,

In this period everyone is talking about technology and digitalisation.

However, little is being said on the concrete meaning and the extent of these two factors across sales organisations.

Moreover, the digitalisation process is often overlooked by sales teams, usually preferring traditional selling ways.

Digital tools actually help companies manage their relationships with the clients and yield several advantages, like the possibility to strategically organise information to make the sales process more efficient.

Through this month’s newsletter, we wish to give you a few practical insights to help you understand how to implement a strategy to tackle the so called New Normal in the best possible way.

First of all, you should understand the needs of your sales network.

What does your sales network need?

In order to understand how to fill the gaps of your sales organisation, the first thing you need to do is learn what its specific needs are.

Here are the essential points you need to cover first, to then implement a correct strategy:

• Reach the right clients. You should have an automatic classifying system (CRM) to drive sales activities towards those clients that can yield higher ROI, depending on real business development potential.   
• Suggest the right activities. Your CRM can be enhanced through artificial intelligence tools that allow you to make real time analysis and predictions.
• Impress, with your products and services. This means that you need to develop the necessary competence to offer the client an emotionally enthralling experience.
• Encourage advocacy, making sure clients become drivers for your company success. For such purpose, it is essential to define a loyalty and retention scheme and satisfy the clients’ needs in the best possible way.

To understand how geolocation and artificial intelligence can boost your CRM and make your sales network more efficient, watch our tutorials on YouTube here.

The key: customer digital management process

Keeping all this into consideration, let’s now focus on what can be done to fill the skill gaps across your sales network.

First of all, you need a process that can digitally manage your client portfolio. In order to optimise efficiency, it is thus necessary to hand over to technology all the routine and repetitive tasks that really don’t epitomise nor yield any added value.

One of these tasks is, of course, planning.

Once that is done, you should tackle the 3 fundamental pillars of success:

1. The tools, in order to have the right IT support.
2. The processes, to improve the efficiency of your sales network.
3. The competencies, to accomplish the potential value and capacities of your professionals.

Let’s take a closer look.

1st pillar: the tools to support the sales process

In order to implement a Customer Digital Management process, you definitely need to rely on the technology pillar.

An adequate technological support will allow you to gather and manage data, which are broadly considered as the most precious resource.

Technology provides support during the pre-selling stage, allowing to smoothy process a huge amount of data both from internal and external sources, thus helping plan and organise all sales activities.

There are different types of tools that once are integrated with your CRM, will enhance its functionality:

• Business intelligence and report tools.
• Sales enablement tools.
• Sales journey support tools.

Find out how Mapadore can help you plan effective and efficient sales routes:

Nevertheless, technology alone is not sufficient. Boosting the sales team’s internal processes is as important.

2nd pillar: the sales processes and organisation

IT alone cannot provide all the equipment that you sales network needs in order to tackle the upcoming challenges.

You also need to manage processes.

But what kind of impact does digitalisation have on internal processes?

To answer this question, you should explore three different areas:

• The people making the sales organisation work. Not only is it important to reconfigure all sales activities given the potential of new technologies, but it is also essential to consistently update the role and activities of human resources, so that their professional identity can develop digitally.
• The organisational models. Companies winning the market challenges will be able to integrate different company units thanks to seamless data and information sharing practices.
• The managing processes and models. Within sales organisations, processing information allows to free time and focus on relating with clients.  

3rd pillar: competencies and training

For technology to smoothly embed your business, you need to consider training as essential.

To implement an effective training scheme, it is important to encourage the development of specific skills and foster a culture of change, that is responsive towards the opportunities brought by technology.

The main themes on which to focus branch out in different directions:

• Sales activity planning. Providing a solid training base to salespeople will empower them with the skills to organise their activities efficiently, meaning more appointments, more clients won and better cost optimisation.
• Engagement and value creation. Quality engagement with clients allows businesses to build up awareness on how to improve the product/service. 
• The emotional factor. A chapter on how emotions step in and act throughout sales negotiations should also be included as part of a complete training scheme. By underestimating the emotional factor, you could overlook significant change opportunities in your client’s behaviour and choices.

Do you want to see Mapadore in action?