In the early 2000s one of the leading business newspapers in India published a report which said that 70% of senior executives believed that technology would replace human interaction with customers in the next couple of decades. Data of last year shows that in the B2B sales domain, approx 75% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media to engage with their customers. In the current “Covid Crisis” context the latter figure is only going to move northwards.
As the shock settles in, sales professionals are thinking (as they must) of ways to respond to the several questions that are coming in their mind pertaining to their business sustainability and of ways to be prepped for the actions they’ll need to take with their customers to lead their business in the “new normal”.
As an inference from the second data point above, it is interestingly conclusive to note that the rate adoption of digital technologies by customers also has been very high. Therefore, metaphorically speaking, B2B sales professionals just need to cater to the already existing appetite. Let’s look at 4 ways in which sales professionals can respond to the demands of the market, situation and their customers.
Connect with existing customers immediately:
A helping hand in crisis is remembered for long. Hence sales professionals and sales leaders must deeply analyze and understand the main customer challenges and identify the actions they can take for them immediately. One way of doing this is to gather data from the field and other related indicators to create a scenario-based forecast that draws a realistic view of demand and supply. This being done, they must deploy an agile but phased approach to ensure quick and targeted responses to each customer.
Start regimented “Social Selling”:
Social selling is about leveraging and capitalizing one’s social networks to find the right prospects, to build trusted relationships with existing customers and ultimately to help the sales person achieve his sales goals. The social selling process is characterised via engagement through the use of social networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook , Twitter and the like.
In a digital world, the sales person needs to have a well-defined personal strategy, that is aligned to the organisation strategy, to reach and engage with the right target segment. Since, in the digital world, social selling is a cost-effective digital way of generating leads, it is also crucial to build discipline into this approach and measure the activity metrics in a regimented manner.
Develop “Virtual Executive Presence”:
In the interest of the company’s image and the personal brand of the sales person, it is crucial for the sales professional to cultivate a strong virtual executive presence.
Some ways in which this can be done is by progressively building a digital persona, positioning one-self as a domain expert, engaging with customers on several socially and economically relevant topics, sharing one’s thought leadership and networking with industry leaders as much as possible. Concurrently, sales persons also need to sharpen their knowledge and skills to operate digital /virtual meeting platforms and make virtual presentations to communicate, interact and sell in a digitally professional manner.
Digitalize the customer experience:
In a digital world, a unique and improved digitalized sales experience offered to the customer truly leads to a differentiated customer experience. Towards this, the sales person would necessarily have to leverage digital technologies to make product presentations and demos, use new age digital technologies like Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality or 3D Computer Vision or Extended Reality to create an impact and activate the customers’ buying motivators.
GrowthSqapes’ several Sales Capability Development Solutions empowers you to train and develop both the skillset and mindset to be able to sell in a digital world.
This blog has been written by Baalmiki Bhattacharyya, Partner & COO at GrowthSqapes.