How Digital Transformation Support the Recovery and Growth of Sales – 1

By : Dr. Elfindah Princes, M.Kom, MLSI, B.K.P.

It’s no surprise that most sales executives feel their digital transformation has advanced since 2019. Despite this, many leaders agree that they aren’t quite ready to map critical business priorities to shifting Covid-19 conditions (Carracedo, Puertas Medina, and Luisa Martí Selva 2020; Loayza, Norman and Pennings 2020). In terms of looking at what drives the business resilience and growth during this new norm, there are three key themes in sales report around insights and outside sales Representatives. They are adjusting to the new expectations from their leaders and customers, their evolving responsibility and elevating the importance of self-operation, and how they play a crucial role. The organization needs a strategy and tactics that self-leaders adopt and how this helps the sales leader be pitted and grow in the new norm.

From a webinar on 9 Dec 2020 by Salesforce’s Regional VP – Commercial Sales Carol Fong, along with Sales Optimization Expert Tom Abbott, which revealed the State of Sales report and discussed B2B sales strategies. They took a survey with all 600 sales professionals to rate how confident they are in the ability to close out during this new norm, and the result showed that 27% of them were pretty confident they were going to get things done. Meanwhile, there were 65 of them who felt uncomfortable about closing the sales during this new norm.

If we stop a moment to think of what’s going in the world right now since this new normal or maybe the next normal since the crazy 2020 and 2021, the sales reps must adapt quickly to a new way of selling. What happened in early 2020 has taken the world by surprise; not only did the sellers have to deal with the global pandemic, but they also had to face health and economic issues too (Koubaa 2020; Sansom 2020). Challenging and surprising. For companies who had already undergone digital transformation, their reps were perfectly poised and positioned so that they could adapt fast and survive elegantly when something like this happened. The survey result shows that 93% of the Red Sea have adapted quickly to the new selling method after around 6 to 9 months of the pandemic. The result itself identified three key trends. First, build trust and empathy. During this pandemic, trust and empathy are more important than ever. When the sales reps have to do remote selling, the first thing the seller has to do is build trust to make customers feel confident about the safety and quality of the products. Therefore, relationship matters.  Second, leverage insights. The sales leaders need more than empathy and trust; they need to have almost a relevant and value-added conversation with the customers to help them through this. Third, work together as a team.  Sales leaders are looking toward sales off operations to support the sales reps in the sales process.

How Sales leaders pivot, recover and grow

Digital transformation is not new, and this has pivoted based on the current situation, but the survey stated that 89% said this has accelerated since last year. All businesses need to figure out a way to adapt to the new norm and think about where they should condition themselves, look at what type of customers to support, and go after the new markets. So, they need to think about the strategy and operation adjustment. Leaders must have top five priorities when their sales reps are ready and equipped, as seen in the picture below.

Digital transformation has been happening for several years. Still, this pandemic is speeding up the digital transformation for many countries like Indonesia, and the leaders need to support their salespeople and the rest of the organization.

The first support to be top sales teams is turning insight into sales. The top teams who are doing well are leveraging insights that they understood from the customer, whether from the past transaction or industry trends that would be relevant for the customer, and have a relevant conversation with the customer. Hence, insight is more critical than the velocity we see from the graph. The next support is partnering with internal cross-function. Sales training obviously would be #2 and #3 priority. We’re seeing that many businesses now make reskilling, retraining, upskilling a top priority to encourage people rather than letting people go.

Amidst the confusion, the leaders decide to double down and invest in their sales teams, which is encouraging. We have seen that specifically with the third priority tackling visibility challenges. All of the sales team that we’re working with right now are struggling with reaching the customers, advancing fields, and closing deals in this remote environment when they cannot visit customers at all or in a limited capacity. So, the challenge is how to sell remotely and virtually. It’s not a surprise to see organizations doubling down on that investment to reach the customers, which strategically turns the sales operations.

These five top priorities have been proven during 2021 with the better Covid 19 situation, although we are still unsure of the future with new strains of coronavirus that keep mutating. Sales are the most critical thing that keeps the organization running, and digital transformation has supported the path of sales leaders to recover and grow.

References

Carracedo, Patricia, Rosa Puertas Medina, and Maria Luisa Martí Selva. 2020. “Research Lines on the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Business. A Text Mining Analysis.” Journal of Business Research (September). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.11.043.

Koubaa, Anis. 2020. “Understanding the COVID19 Outbreak: A Comparative Data Analytics and Study.” (Mers 2012). http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.14150.

Loayza, Norman and Pennings, Steven Michael. 2020. Macroeconomic Policy in the Time of COVID-19: A Primer for Developing Countries.

Sansom, Rebecca L. 2020. “Pressure from the Pandemic: Pedagogical Dissatisfaction Reveals Faculty Beliefs.” Journal of Chemical Education 97(9): 2378–82.