2 Questions Sales Teams Need to Answer to Survive in the Digital Age
Remember back when customers interacted with sales associates in real life, in real-life stores, in person, over physical products? In an era ruled by e-commerce and digital sales, that world can feel something akin to the Stone Ages.
Selling in the digital age introduces a whole new set of complexity to sales. On one hand, you can reach more people than ever before, and you can do it faster than ever. On the other hand, you have both more and less information on your customers than ever before.
And if your sales team wants to thrive, they have to learn how to strike a balance. Here are two essential questions to help you see what you’re missing from your sales interactions and how to make up the difference.
How Sales Teams Can Survive in the Digital Age?
Chances are, you have a lot of data, but not a lot of truly useful information to turn those data points into a map of customer behavior. And that’s the paradox of the digital era that sales teams have to solve.
1. Is This a Customer Journey, or a Touchpoint?
Want to sell to customers? It helps to see the world the way your customers do. The trick, of course, is knowing when you’re seeing a touchpoint and when you’re seeing the customer journey as a holistic experience.
A customer journey involves every interaction customers have with your product, service, company, or brand. A touchpoint is a single transaction, or if you prefer, a single dot on the timeline that makes up the customer journey. You could have a fantastic product, but any other weak links in the timeline will break the customer journey and the customer won’t progress further.
In most companies, the interaction points that comprise a customer journey are managed by different functions of a business, like the marketing department or the sales department. The result is that a sales team associate may not know about a form that a customer filled out or a recent transaction made with the company.
On the other hand, the customer can’t see what the associate can’t see–all they know is that the associate doesn’t know how to help them. And in a time when customers expect personalized service, that isn’t going to cut it.
It pays to ask yourself: am I looking at the customer journey or a touchpoint? And if I can’t see the customer touchpoint, how can I change my process to make the journey visible.
2. Why Do Your Customers Do What They Do?
This leads into the next question: why do customers do what they do?
Customer profiles are a cornerstone of marketing best practices. They allow you to define your target marketand tailor your sales. The problem, of course, is that profiles only get you so far.
Profiles give you generic assumptions, broad sweeps with which to see the portrait of your customers. But if your sales team wants to actually know your customers, you’re going to have to dig deeper and fill in the personal details.
The good news? If you’re in sales, you’re fantastic at interacting with customers. Use that to your advantage and spend time around customers. Get to know them. These interactions can help fill in the personal details that your target customer profile lacks. This, in turn, will make it easier to speak to customer behavior–or rather, why customers behave a certain way.
3. Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age
In the digital age, data and information are your two greatest assets. But you have to know how to use them. That’s where we come in.
Sales teams manage a lot of details. Traq is built on the understanding that no detail should be lost, making it easy to capture every word, separate signals from noise, and visualize your sales progress based on that data.
In short, it’s exactly the tool that sales teams need to thrive.
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