Digital Transformation for the Sales Department

Amy Smith
4 min readMar 8, 2021

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Table of Contents

  • What is digital transformation?
  • The biggest challenges in sales digital transformation
  • Where is the digital transformation in sales heading in the next 5–10 years?
  • Four Steps to a Successful Digital Sales Transformation

With technology and the digitalization of society, sales have also changed. To compete in today’s hypercompetitive market, organizations must not only embrace technology — they must prioritize it as a mission-critical pillar of contemporary business.

Sales teams are now faced with the sizable task of pursuing a complete digital transformation. Those that do will be equipped to succeed, while those that do not will rapidly be left behind.

Source: salesforce
  • 45% percent of companies reporting a positive business impact of digital transformation also reported higher net revenue growth. (Deloitte)
  • The digital transformation market is expected to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 22.7 percent from 2019 to $3,294 billion by 2025. (Research and Markets)
  • Digital transformation is expected to add $100 trillion to the world economy by 2025. Platform-driven interactions are expected to enable approximately two-thirds of the $100 trillion value at stake from digitalization by 2025. (World Economic Forum)

What Is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation refers to the organizational, cultural, and operational change of an organization, industry, or ecosystem through smart integration of digital technologies, processes, and competencies across all levels and functions in a staged and strategic way.

Digital Transformation i.e. the implementation of digital technology to transform services or businesses, is done by every digital marketing agency.

Biggest challenges in sales digital transformation?

When it comes to a successful digital transformation in sales practices, there are many inhibiting factors.

First, the business has to be clear about its overall strategy. What is it you want from this transformation process, and why are you putting in the resources to make it happen?

If there is no real alignment between the mission and vision of the company, then the objective or purpose of the sales digital transformation will not be apparent either. Accordingly, decisions are made on gut feeling and without certainty.

Some other challenges companies facing are:

  • Internal and external customer alignment
  • Resistance to change within the organization
  • Costs
  • Security
  • Poor organization infrastructure

You must listen to the market and customers during the transformation process because there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Sales representatives transmit to administrators what’s happening on the front line, what customers are requesting, and what competitors are doing.

With this information, sales teams can optimize the sales stack and their processes of implementation to the company’s particular situation.

Where is digital transformation in sales heading in the next 5–10 years?

The digitization of the customer retention and acquisition process will be where we see the most substantial changes. The incremental growth of “Big Data” and the capacity to analyze customer data encourages us to instantly forecast which profiles fit certain products or services.

There are already tools that can bring us that sales insight on a fundamental level but look for this to grow exponentially over the next couple of years.

Perfecting the timing and delivery of information, as well as the quality of content will lead to an improvement in qualified leads entering the sales funnel. More leads, more potential sales!

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4 Steps to a Successful Digital Sales Transformation

Here are four steps to help guide your organization through a digital sales transformation. These steps will maximize the effectiveness of your transformation initiative and help drive your sales team to new heights.

1.) Data: The Foundation of Digital Sales Transformation

Governance and data management need to be at the foundation of your digital sales transformation program. The potential to rely on the data in your CRM for all business decisions will provide you with actionable insights.

For both finding alignment and tracking progress, a central point of truth is important. Your main goals should focus on setting up a firm data foundation to build on.

Establishing and maintaining a single source of accurate, meaningful data leads to higher quality sales engagement and data-driven decision-making.

2) Sales Process: Understanding the Customer Journey

The most critical piece of a digital sales transformation is defining your lead-to-revenue process. It should be a representation of your actual sales process.

Your goal should be to establish customer lifecycle stages to track progress and KPIs across the sales process.

Begin with recognizing the crucial steps in your sales cycle. Then work with sales operations and your entire revenue organization to decide on Service Level Agreement (SLAs) between marketing, sales, and customer success.

The process needs to be clear, and all members of the team understand the process and expected outcomes.

3) Improve Sales Engagement with the Right Tools and Processes

Once you have a better knowledge of your lead to revenue process, specify areas for improvement for sales engagement at each stage of the sales cycle.

Work with your sales managers and get feedback from your sales reps on the front lines to audit potential bottlenecks and gaps. Their insights will help you decide what engagement tools and processes can be implemented or optimized. Get seo marketing packages in San Diego for improvement of your website traffic.

Sales teams end up spending loads of time doing inefficient, non-sales-related activities for most of their working day without enterprise solutions such as computer telephony integration (CTI) or sales engagement platforms.

4) Increase Quantitative Sales Performance with Continuous Training

One of your greatest responsibilities of being a sales leader is to motivate your reps. Your reps are your biggest asset. With continuous training and coaching, you can empower your teams to succeed by driving them to perform their best every day.

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Amy Smith
Amy Smith

Written by Amy Smith

Amy is the content manager at PROS — Internet Marketing & Technology Company in San Diego https://www.internetsearchinc.com/

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