Sustaining long-term profitability is what you can expect from a hybrid sales model.
The time has come when you should adapt your sales force to leverage modern digital skills and a hybrid sales model, this will help you align your team with new buyer trends and ensure that you have a future-ready workforce.
We cannot deny the fact that B2B buyers’ needs and aspirations from the brands they deal with have dramatically changed after the pandemic. To accommodate these changes, B2B brands such as Salesforce, HubSpot, etc. have already understood these shifts and have made their teams adapt to these by implementing new outreach methods to meet their buyers’ demands.
According to Gartner, 80% of B2B transactions and sales interactions will happen between customers and suppliers through digital channels only by 2025. The covid-19 pandemic accelerated the trend.
Adapting to digital skills is imperative for modern B2B brands and a hybrid sales model can help your team align with new buyer trends. Hybrid sales require an omnichannel approach to B2B sales that will serve customers for years to come.
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Here is how to go about it.
1. Shift to a hybrid sales model
The key to increased sales performance lies in a digital approach. In such cases, a hybrid model reaches out to buyers at the right time with the right message. Using omnichannel sales, a hybrid sales model caters to customers’ digital-first requirements and engages them for life. With these models, software providers can also make the buying decision easy for customers. Moreover, your sales outreach must also narrow down to offering a choice to a customer on how they want to interact with your team.
It is the right time to adapt selling techniques to be buyer-oriented rather than a product-oriented and reach out to buyers at their ground level with the content that suits them. Timing is crucial for your sales team’s success in 2022 and beyond.
2. Train salespeople in digital skills
As buyers have moved to a hybrid environment and use multiple digital channels to find products and information, your sales team should be ready to meet the new-age customers where they are. To gradually move towards a hybrid-sales model, the sales leaders much train their teams to sell through the digital channels preferred by the customers.
It is time that sales reps to adapt to such a dynamic environment. The two most important skills for a hybrid sales rep are:
- Social Selling
- Content Distribution
3. Invest in Buyer data and AI technology
Today, buyers do not like to interact with salespeople more and so every customer touch point should be strategic and intentional. Marketers can leverage buyer intent and behavior data, rather than following seller gut to guide the sales decisions.
When brands invest in intent data collection and AI tools, they can adapt to the increased touchpoints and information needed to provide an effective pitch on digital channels. Some of the top first-party data signals include recent website visits, frequency of visits, event or webinar attendance, engagement with sales representatives, and more.
The Future of B2b sales is Hybrid
- 70-80% of the B2B decision-makers prefer digital or remote human interaction.
- Most of the B2B seller interactions have moved to remote or digital, and that’s what customers also want.
- Gartner has predicted that 80% of B2B sales interactions will be digital by 2025.
The modern B2B buyers are happily using a mix of sales channels. Amidst this dynamic change, if a business wishes to make a mark for itself, it must introduce digital ways to interact with its target audience. The pandemic has already pushed a lot of businesses into digital sales and in 2021, 2/3rd of the buyers already opted for remote or digital interaction with the brand.
The modern B2B teams can outperform and invest in systematic changes to improve their remote sellers’ ability to sense and respond to the needs of the customers. They must focus on customer insights, agility, modern capabilities, and technologies. Prioritizing their tasks towards a hybrid sales approach is going to be the key to success in 2022 and beyond.
While traditional ways of marketing have a role to play, they work properly when paired with a digital-first approach.
Wrapping up
As the marketing-sales landscape is constantly evolving and the pandemic has already forced most B2B organizations to experiment and restructure their marketing strategies. Now is the time to think about the kind of changes required and what they want to retain permanently to create compelling customer value propositions.
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