What is digital sales transformation?

Since the beginning of 2020, digital business and sales transformation has been a hot topic in B2B. Companies spend millions of euros and dollars re-designing their customer experience, sales processes, and business models.

The digital transformation of a business and its team members is almost an antithesis. We can provide sales with more software and tools than ever before, but they are still managing human-to-human interactions to educate, enlighten, guide, and do business.
For many companies, digital business transformation is mostly about providing software tools to automate traditionally manual processes, e.g. contact profiles, marketing automation, email marketing tools, CRM systems, ABM software, and content management tools.

Companies realise that merely investing in additional software does not have the desired impact on sales or the business.

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The pillars of digital sales transformation

Successful digital sales transformation is a change that fuels existing business and creates new growth paths. It goes beyond simplistic annual changes in responsibilities, compensation models, and the deployment of new technologies. Instead, it must address the pillars of digital change: 

• Understand digital customer buying behaviour
• Re-allocate resources and roles
• Change coverage, quotas and compensation
• Automate workflows
• Create a data-driven transformation

I will not go into detail on these pillars in this article, but let us touch on each one briefly:

Understand digital customer buying behaviour

You most likely know that digital technology is rapidly changing customer buying behaviour. But traditional sales models based on geographic territories, face-to-face meetings, and events are not keeping up with how customers have changed their buying.

Customers may be smarter than you think

Customers spend less time with sales representatives

Customers expect expertise

Digital sales transformation must begin with a clear understanding of what real added value the customer expects to be provided with from their time investment in communicating with a sales representative.

Re-allocate resources and roles

Some sales teams have evolved into several types of specialists that try to drive qualified leads to closed deals into lasting customer relationships. These specialists need to become experts in the next phase. The days of a sales representative managing the full lifecycle of their customers' engagement are gone; the level of expertise needed at each stage demands that multiple resources must work fully aligned. As a result, we now see increased complexity and a greater need for specialised sales roles than ever before.

In a sales model, these specific roles need to be defined, recruited, trained and aligned, and the sales managers must do an entirely new type of planning to determine how many of each type of sales reps are needed and where they should be deployed. Customers' buying journeys have become more digital, and the multi-channel sales leaders must respond with a different mix of resources and skills. 

Change coverage, quota and compensation

Your digitalised sales force must collaborate to acquire, nurture, and expand customer accounts. The stacking of touchpoints increases as customers demand multi-channel coverage and require different knowledge experts at each phase of their buyer's journey.

The implication is crystal clear – a digital sales transformation requires changes in:

• The needed coverage and resources to land new potential customers and to achieve long-term customer satisfaction
• Who gets credit for deals and accounts
• The activity metrics that are most important for each sales resource
• The compensation incentives and how they are designed and managed

Covering these and some other questions and implications can be challenging – but necessary. What is most often needed is a change in the existing sales organisation's culture. While customers' digital buying behaviour has changed rapidly, sales representatives typically resist changes in year-over-year assignments, quota levels, and compensation schemes.

Automate workflows

As stated above, the available technologies to improve sales performance are impressive compared to just a few years ago. Most recent technology platforms are designed for a specific type of sales representative to do a particular task. The main challenge is that sales representatives increasingly have five to ten separate tools they are asked or forced to use – each one supposedly maximising their productivity.

There are many digital sales technology categories and software vendors – at this point, all the sales reps' desktops and phones are packed with various and disconnected apps.

Unfortunately, software vendors too often convince senior execs that implementing their particular platform across X number of sales reps will result in XX% sales productivity improvement. The lesson is clear: CRM software usually doesn't move the sales effectiveness needle without the right customer strategy, sales resources, coverage and incentives, and correct data.

Create a data-driven transformation

Digital sales transformation is mostly doing things smarter to become more relevant. You and your company must prioritise becoming a data-driven, multi-touchpoint sales team that connects with your potential and existing customers where and when they prefer.

Within most companies, there is an immense and powerful amount of data through which you could dramatically improve sales productivity. Without comprising privacy or data anonymity, predictive data analytics can enable your sales reps and your company to quickly answer the four questions to improve both targeting effectiveness and lead-to-close conversion rates:

• Who should you target?
• What is the preferred engagement channel?
• Which message and content will resonate and be most relevant?
• How can the customer be nurtured through each phase of their buying process?

Auditing your data

To succeed with your digital sales transformation, you must prioritise getting the data where it is needed, which usually means acquiring a decent software solution. Companies should start with a data audit, looking at starting capabilities and gaps.

Want to know more about digital transformation? Through our digital transformation guide, you'll find much more to read!

Digital strategy examples

Apart from the ideas mentioned above, there are other digital strategies to consider and apply. Feel free to download our presentation on digital strategy examples below.