Today’s digitally connected and informed B2B buyers use multiple channels on a daily basis: online marketplaces, informational and self-service websites, trade shows, webinars, referrals, social media, email, SMS, and of course salespeople. An engaging customer experience is only achieved when the interaction between buyers and sellers is value added and coordinated across all these digital and personal channels.
When reaching business customers, digital channels offer many clear advantages: they are cost-effective, have a wide reach, are available 24/7, and can scale quickly; they are easy to track, and with the right data and algorithms, personalization is possible. While salesperson turnover is skyrocketing, digital departments have zero turnover. Salespeople have their strengths. By studying and recognizing buyers’ nonverbal sentiment, intent, and engagement, salespeople can help identify opportunities (even potential ones) and develop solutions. Sellers can cut through digital clutter and capture buyers’ attention. And salespeople can help solve complex problems in corporate buying when decision makers have different views and goals.
The harmonious blend of digital and personal selling channels creates a powerful synergy for buyers and sellers. Efficiency is higher when digital channels take over certain sales tasks: B. generating and qualifying leads, placing orders, sharing product information. This gives sales staff more time to be creative and offer a personalized approach to customers. Moreover, AI systems can help make sales efforts more effective, for example by suggesting which product offerings, marketing messages, or prices and promotions best suit each customer’s needs and preferences. Buyers benefit from a better experience that delivers business value, and sellers achieve influence and efficiency.
But there are obstacles to overcome, mainly brought about by the combination of personal selling. The true source of a salesperson’s power to create a great shopping experience is complex. Salespeople bring empathy, creativity, and flexibility, but also ego and the need for control. Digital channels are rules-based and transparent; salespeople can be unpredictable and opaque. When sales incentive plans tie seller payment to performance, this dynamic becomes even more complicated, creating the risk of overselling and customer manipulation. The goal is clear: achieve increased customer loyalty and business success by addressing customer pain points, creating value with every interaction, and unifying the unpredictable paths buyers use to make decisions. Delivering a great customer experience starts with integrating digital technology with your salespeople, which requires a robust digital support system. Key elements include foundational digital platforms, data analytics, and tools that provide a holistic view of the buyer and enable the alignment and orchestration of the buyer journey. But equally important is the transformation of the sales system and culture, which requires ongoing adjustments to sales roles, success profiles, compensation, and management practices. In this article, we’ll focus primarily on these elements of the sales system and sales culture. Digital Backbone
Digital capabilities provide the foundation for sellers to synchronize customer communications across digital and in-person sales channels. These capabilities provide sellers with data-driven insights that enable them to add value to every customer interaction.
Customer relationship management tools are increasingly being implemented quickly and becoming easier to use. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems capture customer information, but more importantly, these systems empower sellers with more comprehensive and better integrated customer data and analytics. AI capabilities give sellers real-time recommendations on the best actions to take with customers. By using analytical insights to improve salespeople’s decisions, companies can improve the customer buying experience and achieve better sales results.
Most companies also have a marketing activation platform to manage the execution of marketing campaigns and experiences. Leading companies like Microsoft have gone a step further and built a Digital Customer Hub. This hub connects all customer interaction data, intelligence engines, and digital assets including channels and programs to provide insights to customers and sellers. This enables sales and marketing to work together to deliver a better customer experience. Microsoft’s hub synchronizes customer interactions across digital and personal channels. Content and offers are tailored to each buying decision maker. And because the hub aggregates data from all regions and channels, Microsoft gains new insights to optimize experiences and create the most value for customers.
Changes in sales structure and culture
A digital backbone is essential, but it is not enough. Delivering great B2B customer experiences requires some change in a rigid sales mentality, supported by changes in roles, success profiles, and sales management practices. The typical characteristics of a successful salesperson undoubtedly remain: curiosity, empathy, patience, customer and product knowledge, and selling skills are fundamental requirements. Informed buyers are looking for more than “talking brochures and websites” to get orders. Salespeople must anticipate customer needs, collaborate, leverage digital channels and analytics, and constantly adapt to change.
Consider a Microsoft Account Manager (AE) selling a cloud infrastructure solution to a unicorn startup. With experience spanning dozens of unicorns, AEs are well-positioned to anticipate client needs, opportunities, and pain points. AEs can bring in other Microsoft product and solution experts to align decision makers with different perspectives. By anticipating customer needs, AEs deliver superior customer experiences.
Successful salespeople coexisting with digital channels depends on both their mindset and their skills. The traditional and continuing aspiration of many salespeople is to control the customer relationship while at the same time treating their selling methodology as proprietary and not sharing it with other team members. The new world of customer experience requires transparency and trust. Top sellers combine a new mindset with the ability to leverage and coexist with digital channels. Additionally, these sellers bring value to customers by sharing digital information coming from AI systems. With digital natives expected to make up more than 75% of the workforce by 2025 and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating technology adoption in the workplace, new mindsets and skills are fast taking hold.
Finally, adaptability has always been an important characteristic for salespeople, but it is now taking on a new dimension. Novel and complex products benefit from personal selling. As buyers’ knowledge of such products increases, selling through virtual and digital channels may be the best solution. Even within the same sales cycle, decision makers may want to meet in person initially, connect through virtual channels for subsequent buying steps, and use digital channels for repeat purchases. To create a positive customer experience, sellers must accommodate this variation in buyer knowledge and preferences. At the same time, sellers must address the friction that can arise when they must relinquish some control of their customer relationships.
Redefining Sales Success, Incentives, and Management
When you ask about a successful salesperson, you can expect to hear, “Someone who consistently meets or exceeds sales targets.” Sure, successful salespeople hit their sales targets, but that’s not enough.
Today, success means providing shoppers with a great customer experience and value. Best sellers leverage a variety of resources, including experts and virtual and digital channels, to better understand buyers’ needs and preferences, develop customized solutions that provide mutual value, and build long-term relationships based on trust and loyalty.
Traditional sales incentive plans and sales management practices focused on sales target achievement and hefty individual incentives. This does not align with the new definition of sales success. Salespeople are beginning to rethink traditional sales rep compensation plans and are emphasizing other ways to manage and motivate their sellers. We expect that future sales incentive plans will be more like executive bonus plans, which are intended to encourage people to work together to make the company and its customers more competitive and successful in the long term. Salesperson success metrics will be less focused on short-term individual accomplishments (e.g., quarterly regional sales). Instead, sales success metrics will reflect not only customer success but also the long-term performance of the company and team. Additionally, sales management will adopt a more balanced approach where incentives are just one way to guide, motivate and reward salespeople. New sales roles and success profiles will be enhanced through a refreshed approach to performance management, coaching, training, sales enablement and more, all with the goal of creating a more customer-centric sales culture, better customer experiences and more sustainable long-term results.
Life is Changing
The dizzying pace of change is placing new demands on sales-led organizations. Yesterday’s naive customers are today’s experts. Yesterday’s products are tomorrow’s obsolete. Digital tools are becoming more intelligent and comprehensive. Sellers and digital media need to coexist and constantly rebalance their roles and rhythms. And customers expect nothing less.
Three roles are critical for a sales organization to thrive in this ever-changing environment: Sales Leader, Frontier, and Early Experience Teams.
Head of Sales. Your primary role is to coach, guide, motivate and manage your sales reps. In complex sales activities, sales managers also interact with customers. With digital channels, sales managers now contribute to customer experience in new ways, including aligning digital and face-to-face sales channels, facilitating sales team collaboration and supporting sellers in using data and technology to deliver value to customers. Moreover, managers are key agents of change. They must support their sellers’ transformation while adopting new roles and mindsets. For managers who grew up in an environment where responsibility was delegated top-down or who are resistant to digitalization, this is a big role change.
Border Crossers. The task of designing and developing connections between digital channels and sales employees is not easy. People who understand both personal selling and technology — boundary crossers — play a key role in helping sales organizations navigate the journey. Done poorly, such efforts can quickly be criticized. Technology leaders claim that “sellers aren’t sharing their activity data,” while salespeople say, “I know what the customer is, but the system tells me to do something different. It’s frustrating. A cross-border workforce is essential to make sales more digital.” But perhaps more importantly, they also help make sales more digital by ensuring that solutions are well designed and implemented effectively.
A team with early experience. Today’s fast pace of change requires you to constantly try new things and adapt. Sales organizations find it especially useful to use Early Experience Teams (EETs), which are small groups of users who test new tools or approaches in a controlled environment. EET members provide feedback on usability, functionality, and overall experience. Their feedback helps identify adjustments to improve acceptance and impact. EET members can also act as internal champions to help sales teams adopt new approaches. EET members are also evangelists. Sellers are more likely to trust their colleagues when it comes to questions about value and impact. Companies like Microsoft deal with customers and businesses of all sizes. The sales channels used range from self-service websites to inside sales to field sales, and they have key account teams that are responsible for their largest customers. Other companies use some or all of these channels.
Implementing the necessary changes to the sales system and company culture is easiest for inside sales reps who are accustomed to talking to customers using digital prompts. Key account managers (KAMs) and their teams usually embrace these changes quickly because KAMs already have resources aligned and a firm grasp on customer relationships. For those in-between, frontline workers who may feel like they’re losing out to digital channels, bigger challenges and upheaval await. The winners will be sellers who move faster than their competitors and break down barriers to compelling customer experiences.
