The Right Way to Go About Digital Transformation of Sales and Marketing Functions
Digital transformation is happening at a lightning-fast pace, with organizations across industries and geographies embracing modern technology to improve business agility and performance. Although enterprise-wide transformation is much needed, attempting to undergo the transformation of every function in the business – in a single go – can lead to subpar outcomes. Instead, focusing on each individual business function in isolation can result in far more favorable outcomes. Read on to learn about the right way to go about the digital transformation of sales and marketing functions.
Why sales and marketing functions need to be transformed
Sales and marketing professionals have long been facing several challenges in their everyday lives: from poor visibility into weekly and monthly sales activities to siloed, team-specific reports, no centralized database to store information to poor or substandard communication across the expertise, little or no insight into customer needs to dependence on the manual process – the list is essentially endless.
To overcome these challenges, and to keep up with evolving market dynamics and economic disruptions, what organizations need is to be able to transform their sales and marketing functions, so that –
● Agents can communicate and collaborate with peers across the enterprise – irrespective of where they are or what tools they are using
● Teams no longer have to manually capture data from different sources and compile it in complex spreadsheets.
● Employees can store relevant sales and marketing data in a central repository for everyone to access, edit, and share
● Stakeholders get real-time insight into customer needs, preferences, and challenges and tailor approaches accordingly
● Sales and marketing professionals teams can pinpoint areas for cross-selling and upselling while fuelling better interaction with customers, and thus better engagement
How to do it right
If you want to improve the outcomes of your sales and marketing functions, you need to be able to understand the role technology can play in improving performance and profits.
Here are five tips that can put you on the right path to successful sales and marketing transformation:
1. Establish an integrated strategy: The first step towards successful sales and marketing transformation begins with establishing an integrated, all-encompassing strategy. Since most of the company’s operations are directly or indirectly involved with sales and marketing activities, a sound strategy can ensure seamless and consistent customer experiences across all channels and touchpoints. Defining common objectives and enabling integration between all departments is key to having a robust plan and clearly-defined responsibilities.
2. Identify key areas of transformation: Since sales and marketing comprise several distinct processes, identifying key areas of transformation is a great way to drive the intended results. Assess all your existing processes to see where exactly technology can help in enhancing outcomes: do you want to leverage technology to eliminate manual data entry? Or improve the lead-to-close ratio? Do you want to better manage your customers? Or deliver more targeted campaigns? Understanding what aspect of your sales and marketing function can truly benefit from transformation can help in prioritizing your efforts and achieving quicker ROI.
3. Embrace cloud: Cloud technologies can help sales and marketing teams to improve their effectiveness and become more agile. Using Cloud, teams can achieve sufficient flexibility in how they work while also ensuring high levels of interoperability and collaboration among geographically dispersed members. For instance, Cloud can enable sales and marketing professionals to get a 360-degree view of their processes: right from where a particular deal is at, to deep insight into how customers interact with the business – to better personalize the sales approach and campaign content.
4. Enable automation: One of the best ways to digitally transform sales and marketing functions is by embracing automation. Automation can help in replacing manual, error-prone, paper-based processes with intelligent ones, resulting in exceptional productivity gains and results. Right from optimizing the sales funnel for increased conversions to automatic tracking and sorting of leads as they enter the sales funnel – automation can eliminate several mundane repetitive tasks such as prospecting, lead-to-conversion as well as customer lifecycle management, allowing sales and marketing executives to focus on forging longer and stronger customer relationships.
5. Monitor and manage metrics: To ensure your transformation efforts are leading to the right results, it is also important to constantly monitor and manage key metrics. Since these success factors form the foundation of effective transformation of the sales and marketing functions, they can help in monitoring and coordinating the efforts put towards digitizing your company’s sales and marketing processes across the enterprise. In addition, they can also provide the correct direction for sales and marketing teams and ensure processes continue to be enhanced, while also advising other departments with regard to implementation and execution.
We live in a digital age where businesses, as well as their products and services, are evolving at an extremely fast speed. To keep up with this pace, it’s not surprising for organizations to want to digitally transform their sales and marketing functions. By doing it right, companies can make use of emerging opportunities to keep up with changing purchasing habits and achieve substantial competitive advantages for sustained growth and success.
Connect with us to know how we can help you boost sales productivity, improve team collaboration across the organization, and engage more meaningfully with your customers.