Sales Challenges & Innovations Integrated With Digital Technologies
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The way we sell is dramatically changing as we begin to adapt to a new normal with coronavirus. Person to person meetings to close big deals are temporarily halted, and sales people need to learn how to cultivate relationships remotely, while trying to understand how different industries are reacting to their circumstances. Having technology that allows sales teams to sell remotely and sales managers to get updates even when teams can’t meet is critical to any business.
For businesses, now is the time to assess, adapt and face uncertainty head on. From our interactions over the months, we have compiled a list of the top five COVID-19 challenges faced by sales teams today and the role of technology in solving the same:
●Sales Leaders Have To Make Decisions Faster Than Ever, But Are Faced With Uncertainty: Sales leaders are forced to make decisions in a matter of weeks or days in comparison to six months or more earlier. Leaders are also putting together reports themselves in some scenarios. Given all the uncertainty, many leaders have taken a scenario planning approach to their sales forecasts to account for best case, likely, and worst case outcomes.
●Virtual Selling:Many businesses are responding to the current economic climate by shifting online almost overnight. However, if not done properly, this can cause major operational issues. It’s more important to make sure everyone has access to a collaborated, mutual view of their customers.
●Lack Of Visibility Into How COVID-19 Is Affecting Customers:The key goal of any sales organisation right now is to help customers successfully navigate through this time. This means developing strategies to understand your customer better and elevate your role from provider to valued partner. Teams across the organisation need to efficiently understand the current state of customer’s business, and tailor their outreach accordingly.
●Productivity and participation:In the new remote sales world of no more in-person meetings, sales people may feel unmotivated, overwhelmed, and under pressure to be productive. According to the Salesforce State of Sales report, pre-covid, sales reps spent 36 percent of their time actually selling and the majority of their time (64 percent) was spent doing manual administrative tasks. Technology can help automate repetitive tasks, making more room for sales reps to focus on business requirements.
●Working with distributed cross-functional teams: We know it takes a village to get a deal to cross the finish line. But when there is no more possibility for the usual corridor conversations between departments, deal information is scattered across multiple systems and all teams feel stretched with extra work and an influx of video meetings. Sales Cloud puts all your customer information in one place and gives teams an insight into their customers as well as intelligent recommendations about the best leads.
Some of our customers such as Edelweiss continued to support customers seamlessly through the pandemic. Since adopting Salesforce, the company’s customer satisfaction rates have jumped from 78 percent to 92 percent. Teams are better able to monitor customer sentiment, personalise services, and resolve issues faster.
Cloud Helps Sales Rep Catapult Productivity
According to Gartner, 43 percent of CEOs expect to return to revenue growth in 2021, exceeding 2019 levels, and sales teams are going to drive that growth. There is an urgent need to have the right tools, processes, and agility to adapt and take hold of a new competitive landscape. Salesforce is reimagining Sales Cloud as a growth platform to provide everything a business needs to transform sales, from anywhere for anyone at every stage of growth.
Even when salespeople get back on the road, 51 percent expect to travel less than they did pre-pandemic so seamless, virtual interactions will continue to be a critical part of field sales.
●Salesforce Meetings makes meeting prep and wrap ups simple when you’re in back to back calls and Einstein Conversation Insights helps to understand trends in customer conversations and train sales teams.
●Moving forward, Sales is going to be extremely data driven. Tableau aims to empower sales teams to analyze data and make smart decisions, faster, without relying on data scientists/experts.
●Most importantly, the pandemic was a clear reminder that successful businesses must be able to react in real-time to changing market conditions MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce now allows business users to connect data and apps without writing code, such that, sales operations teams can connect apps and systems to Salesforce, automate sales processes, and unlock richer sales insights without waiting on development resources.
●Lastly, enablement and training will adapt to virtual environments too, so new reps can onboard quickly right within Salesforce from Trailhead, Salesforce’s online learning platform. Sales people can see relevant education materials like competitor analyses surfaced right in their workspace.
Like our customers, Salesforce has also reimagined how we sell over the last 12 months. When we sent our sales teams home a year ago, we issued a challenge to our team to complete one million video calls with customers. We not only hit this milestone, but vastly exceeded it completing six million video calls from April 2020 to January 2021.
Salesforce Adaption To The Digitalised World With The New Technologies
Today, Salesforce is most relevant to our customers than ever before. Companies around the globe are turning to Salesforce to deliver success from anywhere. An all-digital, work-from-any where world every company has to be able to work, sell, service, market, collaborate, and analyze data from anywhere. And Salesforce was built for this world.
Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we work and play, and every app we use is now smarter and more personalized. AI is making selling smarter and more productive by providing recommendations and insights in real time.
With products like Slack, Work.com and Vaccine Cloud, Salesforce is creating the operating system for the new way to work and closing the innovation gap as customers, and their employees, make the necessary transition to that exciting future.
The companies that will emerge stronger are the ones that embrace change. In India, we are seeing accelerated adoption across the Financial Services, Oil & Gas, Education and Manufacturing sectors. We will continue to accelerate our focus on re-imagining what technology can do for certain industries, creating an ecosystem of trailblazers, delivering the power of the Salesforce platform to drive business growth with scalability, agility and resilience.
The way we sell is dramatically changing as we begin to adapt to a new normal with coronavirus. Person to person meetings to close big deals are temporarily halted, and sales people need to learn how to cultivate relationships remotely, while trying to understand how different industries are reacting to their circumstances. Having technology that allows sales teams to sell remotely and sales managers to get updates even when teams can’t meet is critical to any business.
For businesses, now is the time to assess, adapt and face uncertainty head on. From our interactions over the months, we have compiled a list of the top five COVID-19 challenges faced by sales teams today and the role of technology in solving the same:
●Sales Leaders Have To Make Decisions Faster Than Ever, But Are Faced With Uncertainty: Sales leaders are forced to make decisions in a matter of weeks or days in comparison to six months or more earlier. Leaders are also putting together reports themselves in some scenarios. Given all the uncertainty, many leaders have taken a scenario planning approach to their sales forecasts to account for best case, likely, and worst case outcomes.
●Virtual Selling:Many businesses are responding to the current economic climate by shifting online almost overnight. However, if not done properly, this can cause major operational issues. It’s more important to make sure everyone has access to a collaborated, mutual view of their customers.
●Lack Of Visibility Into How COVID-19 Is Affecting Customers:The key goal of any sales organisation right now is to help customers successfully navigate through this time. This means developing strategies to understand your customer better and elevate your role from provider to valued partner. Teams across the organisation need to efficiently understand the current state of customer’s business, and tailor their outreach accordingly.
●Productivity and participation:In the new remote sales world of no more in-person meetings, sales people may feel unmotivated, overwhelmed, and under pressure to be productive. According to the Salesforce State of Sales report, pre-covid, sales reps spent 36 percent of their time actually selling and the majority of their time (64 percent) was spent doing manual administrative tasks. Technology can help automate repetitive tasks, making more room for sales reps to focus on business requirements.
●Working with distributed cross-functional teams: We know it takes a village to get a deal to cross the finish line. But when there is no more possibility for the usual corridor conversations between departments, deal information is scattered across multiple systems and all teams feel stretched with extra work and an influx of video meetings. Sales Cloud puts all your customer information in one place and gives teams an insight into their customers as well as intelligent recommendations about the best leads.
Some of our customers such as Edelweiss continued to support customers seamlessly through the pandemic. Since adopting Salesforce, the company’s customer satisfaction rates have jumped from 78 percent to 92 percent. Teams are better able to monitor customer sentiment, personalise services, and resolve issues faster.
Cloud Helps Sales Rep Catapult Productivity
According to Gartner, 43 percent of CEOs expect to return to revenue growth in 2021, exceeding 2019 levels, and sales teams are going to drive that growth. There is an urgent need to have the right tools, processes, and agility to adapt and take hold of a new competitive landscape. Salesforce is reimagining Sales Cloud as a growth platform to provide everything a business needs to transform sales, from anywhere for anyone at every stage of growth.
Even when salespeople get back on the road, 51 percent expect to travel less than they did pre-pandemic so seamless, virtual interactions will continue to be a critical part of field sales.
●Salesforce Meetings makes meeting prep and wrap ups simple when you’re in back to back calls and Einstein Conversation Insights helps to understand trends in customer conversations and train sales teams.
●Moving forward, Sales is going to be extremely data driven. Tableau aims to empower sales teams to analyze data and make smart decisions, faster, without relying on data scientists/experts.
●Most importantly, the pandemic was a clear reminder that successful businesses must be able to react in real-time to changing market conditions MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce now allows business users to connect data and apps without writing code, such that, sales operations teams can connect apps and systems to Salesforce, automate sales processes, and unlock richer sales insights without waiting on development resources.
●Lastly, enablement and training will adapt to virtual environments too, so new reps can onboard quickly right within Salesforce from Trailhead, Salesforce’s online learning platform. Sales people can see relevant education materials like competitor analyses surfaced right in their workspace.
Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we work and play, and every app we use is now smarter and more personalized
Like our customers, Salesforce has also reimagined how we sell over the last 12 months. When we sent our sales teams home a year ago, we issued a challenge to our team to complete one million video calls with customers. We not only hit this milestone, but vastly exceeded it completing six million video calls from April 2020 to January 2021.
Salesforce Adaption To The Digitalised World With The New Technologies
Today, Salesforce is most relevant to our customers than ever before. Companies around the globe are turning to Salesforce to deliver success from anywhere. An all-digital, work-from-any where world every company has to be able to work, sell, service, market, collaborate, and analyze data from anywhere. And Salesforce was built for this world.
Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we work and play, and every app we use is now smarter and more personalized. AI is making selling smarter and more productive by providing recommendations and insights in real time.
With products like Slack, Work.com and Vaccine Cloud, Salesforce is creating the operating system for the new way to work and closing the innovation gap as customers, and their employees, make the necessary transition to that exciting future.
The companies that will emerge stronger are the ones that embrace change. In India, we are seeing accelerated adoption across the Financial Services, Oil & Gas, Education and Manufacturing sectors. We will continue to accelerate our focus on re-imagining what technology can do for certain industries, creating an ecosystem of trailblazers, delivering the power of the Salesforce platform to drive business growth with scalability, agility and resilience.
