Advanced tech solutions impact every profession, from healthcare to education. However, its effect on the sales ecosystem is impressive. Modern salespeople have sophisticated techniques, resources, and tools at their disposal. That allows them to find new customers faster, build stronger relationships, and retain consumers in the long-run.
Here are the five most obvious benefits of technology on the sales process.
1) ELIMINATING THE SILO MENTALITY
Your sales and marketing team should work hand in hand. However, in reality, they often operate separately, with little or no collaboration. That can slow down company growth and harm customer experiences.
With customer relationship management (CRM) tools, eliminating the gaps between sales and marketing teams is easier than ever. They reduce the need for complicated and confusing Excel spreadsheets and boost employee communication. By centralizing customer data under a single platform, CRM makes it available to everyone in the team.
Unified communication allows your sales team to track the journey of a lead between marketing and sales, enabling them to create more relevant campaigns.
2) PERSONALIZING USER EXPERIENCES
Over the past few years, personalization has become the backbone of the sales process. According to Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers relevant to them.
That is where CRM tools can help. CRM software integrates with a wide range of sales and marketing tools, capturing customer data across various channels.
No matter if a customer interacted with your brand via your website, live chat, email, or call center, CRM will catch their data at every touchpoint. When interacting with a customer, your sales team will have full insight into their previous behaviors, problems, and purchases. That way, they will be able to deliver more relevant offers and close deals faster.
3) MOBILITY INCREASES THE FLEXIBILITY OF SALES
The evolution of wearable technologies, such as smartphones and tablets, benefits the sales process on multiple levels.
For customers, they are the opportunity to research, compare, purchase, and review products and services across multiple devices, irrespective of their location. You can combine chatbots with phone calls to deliver omnichannel customer services and make the purchasing process more convenient. Customers can now seek help and get relevant feedback faster, which helps them make shopping decisions faster.
Let’s take the example of a CPR Savers’ website. If you want to purchase a first aid kit, you do so via mobile and desktop devices. They also focus on data transparency by providing live chat, customer surveys, customer testimonials, etc.
Sales tools, such as CRM, offer mobile apps for sellers. Built on the cloud, they provide employees with easy, remote, and immediate access to vital lead and customer data.
Cloud call centers and VPN technologies take the sales process to a whole new level. In the era of Coronavirus, when most companies have shifted to remote work, VPN technologies are precious. They allow salespeople to communicate with customers from various locations and devices without compromising call quality or brand consistency.
4) SALES AUTOMATION
Automation can be the answer to your sales team’s worries. It streamlines manual and time-consuming tasks, such as scheduling sales appointments, sending follow-up emails, email tracking, and updating the customer base.
Sales automation improves your sales team in multiple ways. It increases sales reps’ productivity, improves data accuracy, and speeds up the sales process. Most importantly, it reduces response time and boosts customer satisfaction.
You can automate almost every aspect of the sales process by investing in the right tool:
- Sales CRM unifies company communications and boosts sales data transparency.
- Lead enrichment tools automatically collect information from thousands of data sources and provide you with detailed lead profiles.
- Contact creation tools will add new contacts and sales opportunities to your CRM for you.
- Appointment and meeting scheduling tools allow customers to schedule meetings with your sales reps more conveniently. They can choose any time that is convenient for them, avoiding back-and-forth emails.
5) IMPROVING TEAM MANAGEMENT AND REPORTING
Sales managers have different roles and responsibilities than sales agents.
Sales managers usually spend several hours daily collecting data, creating reports, and sending them to employees via email. With CRM software and reporting automation tools, you can streamline this process. For example, you can send a daily stack ranking to your sales agents or build a weekly revenue report for your boss.
New tech solutions also allow managers to keep their reps focused on the most relevant prospects. Fortunately, instead of scoring leads by hand, you can do that automatically. Lead scoring tools analyze demographic and behavioral data to evaluate prospects and determine how qualified they are.
OVER TO YOU
Those are just some of the numerous ways technology improves the sales process. As sales tools grow more sophisticated, they will keep changing the sales process. I hope these insights help.
How do you use technology to streamline the sales process?
