There’s a lot of science involved in today’s sales practice. The teams that are most successful have embraced data-driven marketing and analytics, and the balance is shifting away from the art of the sale and toward the automation enabled by data intelligence. All of that is a good thing for sales teams. However, even in an age when tech drives business and robots rule, personal connections will remain paramount.
There are several ways this will play out in the new year.
Congratulations! You’re in sales (and customer service and marketing) now.
If you think you work in a non-customer-facing department, you’ll have to readjust your perspective in the months ahead. To align internal departments and reach shared business goals, teams like product development and others that haven’t traditionally been exposed to customers will have to seek out that exposure. To productively support sales teams and help the whole company win, non-sales staff should join customer calls and find other ways to create real connections with prospects.
As the tech gets better, humans can focus on what they do best.
We’ll see leaps in the sophistication of sales and marketing technology in the coming year. Solutions will get more intelligent, more automated and more able to curb manual interactions. As those advances make administrative tasks more automated, sales pros can get out from behind their desks and spend more time in the field with prospects.
Data will get small, and ROI will get big.
Big data buzzwords aside, we’ll see more sales teams able to sort data into smaller categories with specific goals in mind. The returns of will be significant. When sales pros can build customer personas and analyze specific user behavior patterns, sales pros can more easily uncover insights and act on them. Smaller data = better data.
Goodbye, single-use tech tools.
Business owners will benefit from the increasingly competitive technology space. Instead of buying multiple, single functionality tools, they’ll be able find their email client, product management and file-sharing in one product. If they’re in the market for CRM, they’ll be able to adopt solutions that come with added security and automation. Technology will work harder to support the goals of B2B companies, and that will leave teams with more time to build relationships with customers.
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