ADAPTING OUR SALES MODEL TO DIGITISATION
by Jose Martrat. Partner at ActitudPro.
If we want to define our Digital Sales Improvement Plant (DSIP), we must first evaluate the level of digitization in the sales area of our company. It is important to determine its strengths and weaknesses. It is also necessary to look at the digital sales system that works best in the sector, and how can we generate competitive advantages by being more cost effective or by being able to acquire more sales leads at a reasonable cost.
This diagnosis must lead us to an improvement plan and to agree agree on the digital levers that have to set the path of the growth via digitization, and its priorities.
Once we have started the implementation, we must guarantee the monitoring by establishing an integrated digital system for measuring results and KPIs for monitoring the activity.
In the model that we have built in ActitudPro and that we are successfully implementing, we identify 7 main areas that we must take into account when setting up a our Digital Improvement Plans. We are going to describe each of every work streams where we must focus our actions that we will have to implement.
COMMERCIAL STRATEGY
Ensuring a business strategy in line with the current environment, with a marketing model designed and validated to be able to face the new market challenges, becomes key at this point.
If we want our strategy to be successful and want to be able to deal with possible deviations or corrections that we presumably have to make, we must have a set of methodologies and tools to monitor digitally the sales performance indicators.
CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE
We must review our profitability by customer within our different customer segments. Digitisation may have changed the relationship of the customer to our company and the associated costs. It is important to review the strategy of customers through the googles of the digitisation, reviewing the portfolio and its optimal distribution is another necessary mile stone in this model.
COMMERCIAL TEAM
Which are the profiles of our team? We must make ensure that the digital gap of our sales representatives is minimal. For example, we usually recognize if a sales person is capable or not, when he is able to switch digital tools depending on the situation in which he finds himself, even in a same meeting with the client. The point is that every sales goal defines what tool to be used. Is your sales team able to do that?
COMMERCIAL FUNCTIONS
It will be time now to align the roles and responsibilities of the different members of our sales team. It is important for example that we master the system of distance selling, as it has becomed a new channel and has spread rapidly and massively, which is sure to have caused inefficiencies that are now time to resolve.
OUR CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Is our current customer journey still valuable? We must review it to ensure that we are capturing our leads and identify the set of digital moments of the truth of the sale in the current environment.
OUR SALES METHODOLOGIES
What are the sales tools and methodologies that I am providing with to my team? Do I have to change any of them? Is my CRM good enough for the digital challenges? Is the frequency of visits the right one? Are my sales scripts actualized according to the digital challenges? And the rewarding system of the team? All of these questions must be put on the table again to make sure that we are facing the digital challenges.
NEW ONLINE CHANELS
Let us re-imagine our model, are our current sales channels still valid? Is our team ready to deal with hybrid sales?
Another question we have to solve is whether our marketing channels are the right ones or not, the purchasing model of our customers has undergone abrupt changes over the last three years, it is time to work on channel optimization.
Here is a list of possible and practical questions that we propose from ActitudPro when it comes to rebuild our business model, to adapt it to digitization.
In order to optimally monitor these growth axes in many business organizations, the role of a Project Manager is highly recommended. He or she is the one that must assemble all the pieces that we have activated with the different levers that we are implementing.