Have you ever wondered how much time it took your traditional sales representative to land a single sale? All those time slots booked for phone calls, meetings and lunches were investment not guaranteed with success. With the democratisation of the internet, the sales process had to be reinvented. Let us see how.
Regular customers and B2B buyers’ habits have changed today more than we realized as it evolved as fast as technology did. Their eased access to information via social and digital channels empowered and accelerated their decision making. At the same time, it made it easier for sales teams around the world to gather important data about them and transform those into a valuable tool to turn their target audience into buyers.
Now appears the question: If said buyers have become more digital and sophisticated in their research, what should sales teams do?
The simplest answer to this question is that those who have access to crucial information possess the ability to make quicker and faster decisions. It is therefore crucial to include the use of virtual channels to reach out to prospects, offer a solution that would meet their need and eventually proceed to negotiations and so on so forth until an agreement is met.
The first step toward digital sales will consist in generating leads faster and more efficiently. Over time, developers came up with ideas born off this need and designed tools specifically moulded around it. Here are a few favorites from our teams to yours:
- HubSpot offers a free CRM platform as well as tools to track and organize your sales, marketing, content and customer services efforts.
- Next is Phantom Buster. While extracting reliable data from the web to generate business leads, it also helps with the automation of many tasks to improve your workflow.
- Apollo.io is a gold mine of sales data, contacts and more. It also easily integrates itself with HubSpot mentioned earlier, all email providers and many more.
Once you’ve made up contact you should have the opportunity to showcase your goods. However, compared to lead generation, the mediums used to present and negotiate around your offer did not change in the last decades. Mostly using PPT presentation, PDF files, paper catalogs, flyers and so on.
Manufactured goods for instance are quite difficult to review nowadays as most purchases are made remotely. At EEXAR, we thought of new ways to showcase physical products from afar, giving companies the tools to differentiate themselves and sell more efficiently. Have a look at our article regarding the use of Augmented Reality in sales.
Curious to know what we do? Take a look here.
