Achievable digital selling strategies post-pandemic: Empower your sellers

The Empowered Buyer is not the same person from a year or two ago. Regardless of the product or service being sold, buyers now expect seamless orchestration throughout their experience. They want interactive engagements, whether in real-time or over an extended consideration period, across industry and role-specific solutions, that deliver on targeted business outcomes.

To match this new paradigm, organizations need to outfit their sales teams with robust digital selling strategies to create moments of connection and resonance. In a post-pandemic environment, how you digitally engage with buyers will determine the success of the sales organization.

Do you have the right tools for effective digital selling?

Though sellers will hold in-person meetings again, the virtual world, accelerated by the pandemic, is here to stay. According to Forrester, 40% of B2B reps plan to permanently modify their tactics to adapt to remote selling activities. Companies will need to invest in mature digital tools and serve industry knowledge to guide revenue teams through a modern buyer’s journey. To do so, companies must first:

• Assess digital sales and marketing maturity: re-evaluate key priorities, opportunities, and challenges in achieving targeted business objectives. Are sellers, marketers, and product owners equipped with the right skills, knowledge, experience, and tools to drive meaningful engagements with targeted buyers?
• Design modernized seller and buyer journeys: update sales stages and advancement criteria for qualified leads to match buyers’ expectations and needs throughout the consideration process. Are sales, marketing, and enablement GTM motions aligned with shifting buyer behaviors?
• Rebuild analytics, reporting, and performance metrics: revise tracked KPIs and measurement dashboards that reflect current business requirements with speed and accuracy for actionability. Are you able to positively react to the signals that your data is showing?

Companies that can quickly pivot with nimble digital selling strategies, while also avoiding large capital investments up front, will be able to transform to a more digitally-focused sales environment post-COVID.

New digital selling strategies in action

In order to gain insight into their highest-impact accounts and activities, Microsoft needed better data analytics tools to provide this important information. Concentrix Catalyst partnered with Microsoft to create mature digital reports and tools around:

• Planning: business, territory, and account.
• Execution: account targeting, account management and growth, pipeline/opportunity management, and inventory management.
• Performance measurement: seller, manager, partner, program, business

Concentrix Catalyst’s resulting Surface High Propensity Tool has allowed Microsoft’s sales teams to analyze which accounts to prioritize and which accounts to provide with special offers, as well as a history of what has worked to engage each customer. In turn, the tool has helped sellers reach their quotas and, more importantly, which activities are likely to close deals.

Similarly, Concentrix Catalyst helped Adobe enable its sales teams in providing a modern, digitally focused buying experience for its customers. Concentrix Catalyst created tools and training to attract customers where and how they want to engage at every stage of their buying journey. This helped to improve sellers’ rapport with customers and their ability to solve customer problems with the right solution and desired business outcome.

Empowering sellers

Buyers expect innovative, digitally native learning experiences that prioritize effective content. To capture moments that matter, enterprise sellers must reskill, retool, and re-strategize their GTM motions but sales and marketing leaders are faced with the difficult decisions of prioritizing investment of budget, resources, and time to drive towards desired business outcomes.

By empowering sellers to drive high-impact engagements through performance and attribution analytics management across the buyer’s journey, enterprise sellers can accelerate revenue recognition by improving sales and marketing orchestration. You’ll need industry-specific, bespoke digital solutions to provide sellers with the right knowledge and tools to engage buyers while providing sales leaders visibility in what is working and what is not.

Learn how we can help your teams emerge from a year of remote selling to be stronger and better prepared for what’s next.

About the authors

Jared Dodson serves as sales enablement practice lead at Concentrix Catalyst. He has deep expertise in customer acquisition with a focus on B2B marketing and sales, and his passion is helping companies leverage technology to create personalized and relevant customer engagements at scale. Working with Fortune companies—such as Adobe, T-Mobile, Microsoft, Johnson Controls—Jared has led large-scale initiatives focused on lead generation & management, account-based marketing, B2B & partner marketing, marketing technology, sales process, and sales enablement. Jared’s experience spans industries including high-tech, software, telecommunications, energy, and insurance.

Christopher An serves as enablement strategy manager at Concentrix Catalyst. He is a digital enablement strategist helping modernize enterprise sellers. Chris enjoys bringing people, processes, and technology together to create practical and effective solutions.