The work from home concept is not alien to global technology sales professionals, in fact, the tech marketplace has been one of the early initiators of a remote working world and remote work culture over the years.
With the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic paving the way for more industries to adopt a strong remote work process that assures business continuity; Digital Transformation initiatives were the center stage of most business concerns in 2020. However, with global sales and marketing trends still evolving in today’s new normal, there are a few important considerations that sales and marketing leaders should keep in mind as they plan ahead for 2021.
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Build Strong Sales Processes with Artificial Intelligence and Human Intellect
According to an earlier Salesforce State of Sales report, adoption of AI by sales teams has increased by 76% since 2018. With the growing influence of artificial intelligence on how salespeople can improve their work, sales leaders and Operations heads need to understand the importance of employing AI powered sales technologies to enable their sales talent and make them more efficient.
With sophisticated algorithms by their side to help analyse high volume customer data, to helping in the entire prospecting process, centralized AI powered platforms can help global sales teams align efforts, scale their outreach and optimize their processes no matter where they or their prospects are based.
With AI powered dashboards to show real-time reports on sales activities and predictive capabilities that help predict outcomes on certain accounts, sales teams can be more competitive in a marketplace where everyone is trying to scale their remote sales strategically.
Moreover, with today’s remote work and new normal work culture, sales reps could benefit largely from AI capabilities that help deliver useful insights to questions like what opportunities are best to drive further engagement for, given that their sales leaders are not going to be in front of them to handhold them through every stage of today’s remote selling process.
When entire sales and marketing teams have to replace their face-to-face meetings with any other engaging remote prospecting model, they need a different set of technologies to help them work smarter and enhance their existing capabilities.
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Central, Unified, even Mobile CRMs are now Need of the Hour
Your CRM is meant to enable better business decisions. But what CRM capabilities are needed by a remote workforce are different than what was needed in let’s say the pre-Covid sales days. Sales leaders especially should be connected to their CRM feed, even via mobile to have an overview of everyone’s sales pipeline, live sales opportunities, cold leads and other crucial insights. This afterall defines the health of the company and is information that has to be secure yet accessible to leaders on the move with a team that’s working from home.
While most sales teams and sales leaders will have access to their CRM on their work laptops / desktops, in today’s new normal, ensuring multiple team members are aligned despite locational and time differences also means that sales teams have to be more connected to their systems and data to have better control over sales and business health.
A mobile-friendly technology approach, in which sales leaders enable their sales teams by providing technologies that help log prospecting calls that they run on their mobile into the central system automatically eases the stress of the sales team member too.
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Tools that Allow for Enhanced Video Conferencing Capabilities
Video conferencing technologies are now more than an after thought for sales and marketing teams. But with so many sales teams using common applications (Zoom, others!) to hold their online meetings, the next step now involves identifying tools and capabilities that can enhance this online meeting experience. Sales leaders, as they prepare for 2021 should think about how they want to enhance this prospecting experience as a company: does it make sense to focus on add-ons that boost inter activities in sales demos? Or should the company have a customized standard corporate meeting background for all of their prospecting meetings? Sales leaders can also think about AR enhanced video conferencing, to create a more differentiated experience for prospects.
There are various ways for salespeople to enrich their online sales prospecting meetings with better video or other conferencing capabilities today.
While most of these technologies here have been in the market for a long time, as business and economic trends redefine the state of marketing and sales, it is beneficial to readjust a team’s tech capabilities and tech arsenal.
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