The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a lot of talk around hybrid work and digital selling, but it has been 10 years since Pitcher was first asked to help automate marketing and sales content and processes for companies. The first to recognize the importance of this was the life sciences industry, then the consumer goods, services and manufacturing industries, and many more followed after that.
On reflection, the pandemic has only accelerated a process that started long ago. As customers shifted in position, from in-person channels to digital alternatives, sellers started to engage digitally instead.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, sales organizations will require sellers to develop new digital skills, using channels that enable remote selling to customers. What’s more, according to Gartner, “60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from experience- and intuition-based selling, to data driven selling, merging their sales process, sales applications, sales data, and sales analytics into a single operational practice”.
Knowing your ideal customer’s needs, wants and offline and online habits is a must if you want to succeed with your digital selling strategy. From our experience, there are four essentials that make digital and hybrid selling successful in B2B:
- People, skills and organization
- The customer’s digital experience
- Data and insights
- Sales enablement technology
For B2B organizations that are looking to perform the best, technology and data are clearly the most significant challenges in achieving granular sales maturity.
People:
General skills, incentives and processes, as well as the alignment of teams and leadership to achieve commercial success, are critical factors in motivating and driving any digital effort within the organization.
Customer experience:
Being able to create the most effective and seamless experience with your product and brand, while keeping relationships with buyers personal and highly interactive, is what pays the most.
Data:
To orchestrate all your customer touchpoints, both online and offline, access to high-quality and consistent data is mandatory for any organization. This also makes it possible to make decisions on content, strategy, processes and budgets in order to allocate funds and invest.
Technology:
Sometimes, more is simply better. Carefully choose the sales technology stack that gives your commercial teams the most. Remove complexity, streamline daily activities, integrate processes and expand your skills training to maximize output and collect data to close the marketing loop and build further upon your efforts.
So how do you choose the solution that fulfills your needs? You choose a sales enablement stack that offers a robust and seamless experience for your teams. A great user experience mandates that a variety of data, content and automation tools work nicely together. The seamless integration of all the applications that your sales teams use on a daily basis, alongside the orchestration of workflows and processes from different business platforms, impacts your productivity and improves not only your teams’ satisfaction, but ultimately, your customer experience.
At Pitcher, we put a lot of dedication and expertise into developing an easy-to-use sales enablement solution that works on its own. We are proud to have built one great piece of software to help you provide anything your field reps need to excel in their daily work. With offline capabilities, we help to make operations straightforward and your strategies more effective.