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The sale is live!
Technology's ever-accelerating development means that its function in sales must adapt accordingly. In light of new technologies, developing use cases, and a constantly evolving digital world, it's more critical than ever for salespeople to stay technologically up-to-date to continue giving their customers the best support and stay ahead of the competition. When a company has access to many different sales tools, it can be easy to get distracted by all the options instead of focusing on what the company needs. As a first step, leaders must identify the most pressing issues and the best ways forward and choose the technologies wisely to achieve returns.
Do you know
In 2020, the global sales intelligence market was worth $2.78 billion. By 2030, it is expected to be worth $7.35 billion, which means it will grow at a CAGR of 10.6% from 2021 to 2030.
When scrutinized, sales technology has a hand in many aspects of sales and can potentially affect sales results significantly. Consider the following for a quick overview of how technology could increase salespeople's productivity:
1. Increasing the Role of Data
Only about 1 in every 20 bits of company information is used. Consequently, there is a mountain of gold in untapped data just waiting to be mined. You can only hope to help your target audience if you know how they think, what they want when to reach out, what their struggles are, and what they need from you.
2. Making Contact with Customers and Potential Buyers
These days, establishing human connections is easier than ever. To connect with prospects and clients at the appropriate time, on the right platform, and with the correct message, sales technology may assist keep salespeople organized across all these channels.
3. Enhancing the User Experience
The capacity of modern sales technology to enhance the buying process for both customers and salespeople is a significant perk. The sales process can be improved by standardizing and automating as much as possible and improving communication between team members.
4. Methods of streamlining
Regarding data input, contact management, deal management, communication, and other similar duties, technology may take over and free up reps' time to focus on more strategic endeavors.
The Role of Technology in Boosting Sales
Due to the epidemic and innovative practices, the market is expanding exponentially, hastening the transition to online sales. With the rise of online sales, businesses are spending more on sales tools. One recent Gartner survey revealed that CSOs saw a 20% rise in sales technology spending and virtual sales staffing in 2022.
The quality of sales technology implementation is equally as crucial as quantitative tech stacks. Enterprises are shifting away from the typical sales tactics of yesteryear and instead concentrating on end-to-end enhancements, such as full digital adoption, infrastructure upgrades, personnel upskilling, machine learning, algorithmic procedures, and even the possibility of quantum computing.
Now let's peek over those technologies that drove the market in 2022 and expected for higher scope in the coming years.
Agile Customer Relationship Management
Modern customer service practically necessitates superhuman abilities to forge meaningful relationships with clients. It includes constant contact via electronic means such as email, telephone, social media, online forms, and real-time conversations. In addition, even the most competent workers need help making decisions and analyzing data due to the sheer volume of available client information and profile features. To help in this regard, there are Customer Relationship Management systems available. They're a crucial component of modern corporate operations. Successful CRM implementation allows sales, marketing, and support teams at businesses of all sizes to work more efficiently.
By automating data collection, organization, and reporting, CRMs boost accuracy and facilitate the practical application of collected information by sales teams. With the help of third-party software, you can use a more extensive database to verify information's accuracy and create forecasts based on overall patterns. Projections will place the value of the CRM industry at $128.97 billion worldwide by 2028.
The CRM's integrated communication features make it easy to handle your business's activity management, data enhancement and report retrieval needs from one location. This aids in preventing data loss and boosting productivity while reducing expenses.
Automation
- Contact management automation
Data collection and storage mechanization are starting points, notably in contact management. Time and effort can be saved, and mistakes can be avoided by automating as much of the contact management process as possible in sales. Digital technologies can harvest all information from all corners of the internet and store it in a unified central database, so sales executives and salespeople don't even have to see a potential client or connect with them in any way to obtain their contact info.
- Lead-nurturing automation
Customer relationship management (CRM) establishes, standardizes, and assigns specific responsibilities to salespeople based on objective characteristics. If a prospect engages with your website or other channels, you may automatically give a score to that interaction and prioritize the lead based on that score. The software may streamline processes throughout the company, not just the sales department. It can undertake initial outreach or send follow-up communications to interested consumers. You must create triggers and write messages in advance, but once you do, CRM software handles a lot of work that would take a human sales rep a long time.
Other areas of automation in sales
Proposals: Integrations and Automation can gather data and fill fields to speed up proposal drafting.
Negotiation: Log, track, and manage every sales touchpoint in an automation platform
Calendars: Automate prospect meetings to save time.
Smart Communication Tools
Having a conversation has never been more straightforward or more difficult. It might be challenging to juggle multiple modes of communication at once, such as phone conversations, emails, chatbots, SMS, social media, video conferencing, etc. That's illogical, yet it's the truth. Even though there has never been a more robust selection of channels through which salespeople may reach out to leads, prospects, and the company's target demographic, the proliferation of these channels can bog down operations if the proper tools aren't in place.
At this point, technology can assist salespeople in making sense of the information and alleviate some of the burdensome manual labor they would otherwise have to perform.
Chatbots
Artificial intelligence tools can use customer data and conversational history to assist in steer talks. It's still doable even if your reps still need to participate. For instance, conversational interfaces driven by artificial intelligence provide around-the-clock service to users. They answer basic questions and resolve difficulties, decreasing customer service engagements.
By 2024, experts anticipate the worldwide chatbot market to be worth $1.34 billion.
Video Conferencing
Traditional video conferencing setups were expensive and required large, cumbersome, and complicated devices. Nowadays, anyone with a webcam and an internet connection can join a video chat. Owners with sales teams across the country will find this a big help.
Email Campaigns
More innovative emailing practices are now in use, where you can spend less time on administrative tasks like email composition, scheduling, follow-up, and analysis and maximize your productivity. Envision a future where all your most common emails are automatically sent and followed up on, and the results are broken down into simple metrics that show you exactly what works and what doesn't. This isn't something that can only exist in your head; the people you're trying to defeat are using real-world technology.
AI and Machine Learning
AI and ML may be invaluable assets from initial contact to finalizing a sale. Agents can benefit from AI and machine learning's ability to make sense of large amounts of data and pull out the information they need to complete a report or write up some supporting paperwork. At the same time, chatbots powered by AI can be used to initiate conversations during the vetting and communication stages.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can also be utilized in forecasting to determine the future based on the present and the past. This can aid in identifying potential new clients, identifying times when negotiations with existing leads are likely to conclude, and forecasting future sales, all of which can be used better to align the objectives and expectations of sales teams.
Sales technology with AI is expected to contribute to a 95% annual growth rate, and 64% of enterprise-level IT directors want to incorporate more AI into the sales process.
AR & VR Tech
In the past few years, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) have come a long way in giving users a first-person view of a product or service. Virtual and augmented reality technologies are crucial for businesses that rely on aesthetics to drive revenue.
The rapidly growing augmented reality market is expected to bring in $461 billion by 2030 due to changing consumer tastes and the increasing online presence of most businesses.
As things are, we continue to witness our planet's transformation. Many customers now choose to do their shopping online, which presents both new opportunities and challenges for businesses trying to meet the demands of these customers.
AR and VR are potent tools that enable e-commerce to provide a more engaging and immersive virtual shopping and product experience for consumers. The bottom line benefits as a result.
Utilizing Data and Aligning Marketing
A company's marketing department is often the source of this information; therefore, the two teams must work well together and can share information freely. This is where technology plays a role. AI, ML, CRM, and automation are all tools that sales staff can utilize to make data collection and reporting more efficient. Numerous technologies, such as those listed above, work together to enable this, but perhaps the most crucial part of sales technology is the enhancement of data accessibility and usability. By analyzing this information, you can learn more about your audience's tastes, where they live, and who they are.
Also, with the help of numerous innovative tracking tools, management can keep a close eye on the team's overall sales success and the output of each member. This strategy increases sales team accountability and identifies ineffective methods that can be modified.
As a bonus, you can pinpoint the best employees and practices. A complete investigation will disclose which customers or industry verticals are more successful. Eventually, you'll have access to a wealth of data like this, which will let you isolate and characterize the most productive behavior patterns.
Integrating New Technology Effortlessly
Implementing new technologies can sometimes be very challenging. During implementation, several things could go wrong, including training representatives on best practices, ensuring everyone has the technology they need to use these new tools, and setting rules to ensure all best practices are followed.
When technology is not set up well, it can cause problems for salespeople and other users, leading to downtime and lost revenue. Suppose you want to be sure that you take advantage of every opportunity because of a technical glitch. In that case, specialists are available to assist you in selecting the best possible solutions and crafting a strategy for putting them into action.
For this reason, it's crucial to have a strategy for embracing new ideas and putting them to good use. To ensure that all your cutting-edge technology works as quickly as possible, you need to have this kind of experience, whether it's an in-house IT team or a team of professionals like those at the impact you hire.
Performix can help you with both. Amazing right.
