Often attributed solely to the marketing domain, your company’s digital transformation nonetheless affects all its services and functions. This is particularly true for your sales organization, whose performance can be significantly enhanced by adopting the right digital techniques.
Here are 5 approaches to sales management 2.0 that will help you improve your sales team’s results.
Social selling, or “social selling”
Quite reductive, the term social selling doesn’t fully convey the scope of this approach. It’s not just about selling your products and/or services through social media. It’s more about proactive listening that enables your sales team to better understand your prospects, in order to offer them the most suitable solution possible.
Social media has gradually transformed into vast databases, offering you first-hand information on the ‘pre-purchase’ phase of your prospects and customers. By adopting the social selling method, you first ensure that your prospects find all the information they are looking for about your offer, even before they need to contact you.
More than a sales method, social selling can be considered an essential preliminary phase for an optimized customer journey.
Activity-based selling, the ultimate agile method
Activity-based selling is not just a sales technique: this approach can be sustainably integrated into your company’s management culture, provided its founding principles are respected.
This method is based on the following observation: your sales team has no direct control over the revenue they generate, regardless of their level of training—or their talent.
Rather than focusing on ‘uncontrollable’ financial objectives, activity-based selling involves focusing on the elements over which you have real control, particularly those that make up the sales cycle. What works, and what doesn’t? Quality processes and optimized customer journeys, rather than meaningless sales closures: these are the objectives of activity-based selling.
Inside sales: a revival of telemarketing?
The inside sales method is similar to telemarketing in that the sales representatives involved make direct contact with prospects, by phone or email. However, the way prospects are generated and then qualified is completely different.
While telemarketers merely follow a generic script, sales development representatives have significant leeway. This should enable them to pre-qualify prospects, allowing them to approach them with a precise and personalized action plan.
A like or a share on Facebook or LinkedIn can be enough to trigger the process: your inside sales representatives must then transform this data, sometimes minimal, into sales opportunities, particularly by offering a tailored journey to the prospect.
Performance Management, or How to Avoid Being Trapped by Numerical Targets
Within a company, performance is often understood as a measure of revenue or company profits.
However, performance can no longer be reduced to mere numerical metrics. The arrival of Generation Y in the workforce clearly highlights the limitations of such a performance approach: both young managers and sales professionals need a broader framework than just numerical targets. It’s essential to give meaning to their sales actions by providing them with a company vision and enabling their participation.
Performance management therefore involves establishing a common framework for measuring the effectiveness of sales actions, while defining a system of values within your sales team. This roadmap must allow your sales professionals sufficient leeway, in order to guide them while fostering individual initiative.
The manager then acts as a coach, abandoning their role as a controller or administrator. They show the way, then guide their sales team along the defined path—instead of merely checking who crosses the finish line.
Predictive Analytics: Rediscovering the Meaning of Sales
The emergence of Big Data has enabled most companies to adapt their marketing approaches to their customers. What if you used this data to improve the performance of your sales teams? It allows you to better understand your prospects, making it easier to engage them when it comes to sales.
Predictive analytics is not just about collecting your prospects’ data: you must be able to analyze and prioritize it, in order to model typical consumption journeys. These models will then allow you to adjust your prospecting and sales methods, thanks to an enhanced understanding of consumers.
Each of these 5 management approaches highlights the essential element of online sales: customer knowledge. Regardless of the digital sales technique chosen, you must first and foremost strive to better understand your prospects: that is where the key to success for any sales organization lies.
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