Buyers spend only 17% of their time to meet with suppliers, as opposed to digital research (27%). These hard facts add new challenges to how sales team successfully engage and convert potential buyers.
More than a thousand B2B sales and marketing leaders debated on the recent stats around personal engagement in sales presented at The 2017 CEB Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas, with discussion centred on customer engagement across the various channels and the increasing role of data-driven systems to bridge the gap between sellers and buyers.
Research showed that sales teams have minimal time to engage in-person with buyers successfully and must employ a digital approach to understand, analyse and support the buying journey of the B2B customer.
When personal time is limited, the use of digital channels and communication is key. The sales team has to come up with the right framework to deliver impactful customer engagement and interact the way customers increasingly want to connect with brands – online.
According to Microsoft research, a new hybrid-sales model has emerged. This new sales model is powered by an orchestration layer, which consists of an ecosystem of data, sales technology and intelligent business processes that empower sellers to engage in identifying, building and managing relationships at scale.
The new approach to the sales process combines an intelligent data-driven ecosystem with intelligent business processes and automation, BI analytics and sales tools to empower sales teams.
The resulted omni-channel assists sales to leverage their efforts across all channels, peruse data-driven customer insights to create personalised customer engagement, anticipate client needs thanks to big data analytics and machine learning, streamline sales tasks through automation.
The above integrated approach to sales is vital in balancing digital channels with valuable in-person connections, making the most use of the little time sales teams have to impress their customers by already having the finger on the customer pulse.
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