Digital Sales Transformation (DST) has been a hot subject for most companies for the past years, but mainly focusing on the front-end customer experience, e-commerce, digital marketing, and automation (e.g. search/SEO, social media, online shopping, etc.) as well as digitizing the back-end business processes by enabling some software tools.

However, few had addressed the “digital transformation” of a salesforce (the actual salespeople), and how to adopt new methodologies and adjust processes to reach out to clients virtually, build trust, and walk the entire sales journey in a digital world, which is a much more sophisticated process than merely replacing the current face-to-face activities by online communication and Zoom meetings.

Thus, I thought of sharing with you the key components to having a successful Digital Sales Transformation, specifically for your B2B or B2C salesforce. We will address the details of the digital sales transformation for the distribution sales in another article.

I’m sure you’ve heard about this, customers now kick off their engagement with salespeople very late in their decision process; mostly after they have done a lot of research by themselves. But even until a few months ago, you encounter many businesses not considering this matter seriously and following the old school of striving to prospect, as if clients will start their search process the moment the salesperson reaches out.
Today, with the Covid-19 global pandemic crisis and the difficulty it brought to salespeople to reach out to new prospects personally and via other old means, it is time to admit and agree to the above-stated point. We need to start to understand how the customers have changed their buying behavior, in order to know what we have to adapt to. Few things to be mentioned:

• Power: Customers have access to a lot of information and knowledge needed to draw their vision for the required solution, which puts them in power and control over the sales process especially if sales reps kept approaching it with the same mentality.
• Independence: Customers have changed their behavior and prefer to spend as little live time with salespeople (meeting, phone calls, etc.) as possible. Instead, like any other human common interactions these days, they prefer texting or emailing or other methods that give them the chance to settle on things  and reflect before responding
• Value Search: Customers’ expectations from Sales Reps have changed. They do not expect any more from salespeople to provide them with information that they have access to. They seek more specialized people that bring added value to their decision process. This is where the new salesperson’s role is designed and a new set of skills are required.

First and foremost it is important to adhere and align with your customer journey and the dynamic change in his/her behavior and blocks of TRUST, especially that building trust with clients digitally is not as easy as managing it in meetings, coffee times, lunches, and other outings. There are few important elements to note for the time being:

• Prospecting: The old scattered gun approach used to be followed in reaching out, generating leads by cold calling won’t be effective anymore. In fact, you have to think of Inside Sales dedicated for Targeted Lead Generation better based on content creation, along with many other Digital outbound Prospecting.
• Focus on Value rather than Personal Relationship: the old means of building trust, where associating your sales closing to the level of relationship you have established with your client, will not be applicable in digital sales. The sales tactics we used to follow by dropping a visit to different stakeholders while we are at the client site to connect the dots do not apply in digital sales. Thus, the shift should focus on providing value with every step of the process, which requires sales reps to be proficient in questioning in order to run an effective discovery call and better understand clients’ requirements and their decision making and build solid trust.
• Land and Scale: I believe the SaaS industry and e-commerce were the pioneers in deploying this strategy. Traditionally, companies have achieved most of their revenues by securing an up-front contract for a product, service, or solution. In Digital Transformation, we have to think of the Customer lifetime value (CLV) and how to achieve our revenues when customers are satisfied with the product and keep buying more. Thus you have to find a way to hook the client in a trial mode, then in a small purchase until they become an advocate to scale.
• Think Differently: You have to think of the sales pipeline and sales forecasting differently. 

3. RESTRUCTURE AND REALLOCATE YOUR SALES RESOURCES

The days of a sales rep managing the full life cycle of customer engagement are over. The level of expertise and focus demanded at each stage is so high that multiple “selling” resources must work together to achieve success. As a result, we have to look for more specialized people in different sales roles within the sales process. Thus there are two important elements to be considered in your sales restructuring:

• Profile: We have to start looking for different profiles of salespeople. Although this was discussed many times over the past years, today Covid-19 has accelerated the process and put it on top of the list. What used to be a must in a good salesperson from charisma, resilience, and energy has become now only a plus. In fact, new competencies have emerged as a must-have (Structured, analytical minded, critical thinking, questioning) with very high business acumen in order to be able to come up with the right content, structure the value proposition every time they try to engage with the client or strive to aid the client in the decision process.
• Energy and Reach: We always used to take into consideration when designing any sales structure the energy and reach required within each sales role, more than the time (e.g. sales roles will be assigned to certain territory or industry and manage most of the process). But with the rise of digital sales and its impact on the sales process and the client behavior along with other related matters (e.g. travel), this constraint of energy and reach is diluted and new criteria have emerged. Refer to the chart above.

4. INTEGRATE AND LEVERAGE THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY

As clearly stated in one of HBR publications “Digital Transformation is not about Technology”, although technology is a critical part of its success, conditioned that choosing and implementing the right tools should be aligned with the designed strategy and people’s mindset. 

There are many software and tools that could accelerate the B2B Digital Transformation, but first, it is important to design and build the first THREE PILLARS stated above, then choosing each tool in its right fit within the entire transformation.

5. CREATE A DATA-DRIVEN SALES

Ultimately, we believe Digital Sales Transformation is less about “doing things faster” (i.e. automation) and more about “doing things smarter” (i.e. sales intelligence, predictive analytics, AI, etc.). So without having the right Data Governance in place, this would be impossible to achieve. Analyzing and leveraging the available data will not be possible without getting the right data where it is needed, consistently in a unified way. Add to this, the challenge of collecting as much data as possible from the client, which can be huge with today’s digital world. For more details on this matter, you can benefit from our article on how to Prepare Organizations to be Data-Driven.

Imagine Sales Tomorrow 

With Digital Sales, there’s a lot of new opportunities that will reside and will grant your business. You’ll be on the same distance from all clients globally, you’ll have a very competitive edge among competitors from employment, cost, and currency exchange (where it applies), and your sales reps will be able to bring into a client meeting all stakeholders (Salesperson, the client, as well as 3rd parties (partners, suppliers, …) at any time. 

Thus you will not have market penetration limitations, and you will have a more attractive price along with a higher conversion ratio. 

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