The Future of Sales: Leveraging Advanced Mapping Software for Competitive Advantage
Sales development is a critical component of every sales organization. Traditionally, sales development top-line contributions were linear – incremental headcount investments produced total revenue.
But traditional sales models are ripe for disruption, with buyers doing their research, supercharged by AI, and self-serve purchasing on the rise. The pandemic has allowed sales leaders to reimagine their strategy and resource allocation.
Collaborative Sales Teams
As sales leaders know, effective teams are critical for gaining and sustaining a competitive advantage. They must make a sales territory map and many other tools to foster a collaboration, communication, and trust culture that supports their success and the organization’s goals.
Providing the right tools is essential to cultivating a collaborative culture. This includes virtual workspace platforms that offer a wide range of advantages for boosting productivity and accelerating team performance. For example, Kumospace’s augmented reality features enable salespeople to share information and collaborate virtually on customer accounts and projects.
Leveraging the power of collaborative selling can help sales managers build stronger relationships with buyers and win more business. But for this to work, salespeople need access to the best data. A centralized database of accurate and up-to-the-minute sales data can streamline the entire process, from one-on-one meetings to quarterly business reviews.
Today’s empowered buyers wield much power in the sales process, choosing to research products and services before reaching out to an expert. As a result, the most successful sellers act more like consultants, collaborating with customers to provide tailored guidance. Sales engineering (SE) team members, who typically handle the most technical aspects of a sale, also need easy access to comprehensive data to inform their proposals. Account maps, for instance, allow us to view a prospect’s professional background and technical know-how at a glance and strategically tailor their presentations.
Streamlined Sales Processes
As the competition in the digital age becomes increasingly competitive, sales teams need to be able to streamline their processes and deliver exceptional customer service to remain ahead of the curve. Streamlining the sales process means creating a unified communication system and implementing tools that facilitate collaboration, increase productivity, and reduce time spent on manual tasks.
Using CRM systems and automated tools, sales teams can eliminate inefficiencies that may slow the overall process and improve customer satisfaction. Additionally, businesses can further optimize the sales process by providing sales training programs and resources to enhance employee skill sets.
Other essential aspects of the sales process include fostering open dialogue between sales and marketing teams, creating a culture that encourages feedback and provides opportunities for employee development, and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine whether changes in the sales process are yielding positive results. KPIs can include conversion rates, sales cycle length, and revenue per salesperson.
Ultimately, the best way to gain a competitive advantage is by adopting and implementing effective strategies for improving the sales process. Streamlining the sales process will make it easier for your team to reach potential customers and increase revenue, and it can also help you quickly weather a recession. By leveraging solutions such as FORWARD, sales rooms, sales automation, communication and collaboration, training your team, and utilizing data and analytics, you can optimize your sales processes to take your business to the next level.
Hyper-Personalization
Hyper-personalization is about delivering personalized experiences for each customer that capture their attention and interest. This type of customer engagement is more meaningful and builds trust, leading to loyalty. For example, some businesses use hyper-personalization to deliver targeted digital advertising, like video ads on Facebook that mention customers by name. The response rates for these ads are demonstrably higher than traditional, non-personalized digital advertising.
The first step in implementing hyper-personalization is to collect relevant data. This includes quantitative (personal and transactional) and qualitative data. Quantitative data relates to how an individual interacts with your business and may consist of website behavior pre-call information gathered when a customer schedules a callback or purchase history. Qualitative data, however, relates to what motivates or influences an individual to engage with your brand. It may include survey responses, product reviews, and social media posts. Some companies also purchase consumer data sets from 3rd-party providers to fill in gaps in their data collection.
Once you have collected and optimized your data, you can create hyper-personalized customer journeys. You can do this by creating segments based on specifics about each unique profile, optimizing your content management system for these profiles, and unifying the delivery of your personalization across all touchpoints using a digital experience platform (DXP). The result is an improved customer journey that increases the likelihood of conversion and fosters trust and loyalty.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool businesses use to gain a competitive advantage. This technology helps them automate manual processes, streamline tasks, improve decision-making, enhance customer experiences, and act as an extra brain to drive innovation.
Companies can better understand customer buying patterns and preferences using AI-powered software. This information can then be used to provide personalized recommendations and improved marketing campaigns, boosting sales and customer loyalty. AI-powered chatbots can also assist customers with product questions and support, reducing call times and improving customer satisfaction.
Additionally, AI can streamline product development by analyzing customer feedback and market trends. This allows companies to design products that better meet the needs of their customers, boosting brand equity and gaining a competitive advantage.
AI can make real-time decisions by predicting data trends, identifying potential risks, and alerting managers of changes. This is particularly useful for industries with high volumes of data, such as finance, retail, and healthcare.
Advanced mapping software such as Maptive can be utilized to identify the best areas for a business to target its sales and marketing efforts, quickly identifying hot spots in a given region. With the ability to create geographic boundaries, color code maps, generate heat maps, and incorporate demographic data, Maptive is a valuable tool for marketers, sales teams, city planners, real estate agents, and more.
