How to make a digital leap in your sales process
Over the last few years, digital technologies have had a major impact on our daily lives: we wake up reading the online newspaper on a tablet, work on our laptops throughout the day, host remote meetings, and go to bed scrolling through social media on our smartphones. These changes are forcing companies to reinvent their businesses and to make a digital leap. However, merely digitalizing the internal processes is not enough. Let’s take a look at why you should transform your sales process and how you can do so in today’s modernized world.
What is digital transformation?
A lot of companies tend to get stuck in the processes, strategies, and mindsets of the early 2000’s. They are afraid of change because what they’re doing “works”, and it’s the way they have always done it. However, the market as it is today looks nothing like what it did in 2000. So why should your business processes?
Digital transformation, or the use of new technologies to improve the teams’ performance, is crucial to meet the changing requirements on the market. Contrary to popular belief, it does not stop at implementing new systems or changes in the IT department. It focuses on improving the way you serve your customers in a digitalized world and on allowing your company to grow faster than your competitors in the future.
Digitalizing internal processes such as production and logistics comes rather naturally to companies, leading them to wrongfully assume that they have already digitalized their business. However, the fact that you are using machines in the factory, does not necessarily mean that you have successfully made a digital leap. Companies often overlook the importance of transforming the sales process. And that’s a pity.
Why you should digitalize the sales process
Companies should serve their customers the way they want to be served. However, customer behaviour has changed. To stay competitive, companies should react quickly to these changing requirements, and leave their slow and cumbersome methods behind.
The biggest market change is the influence of the online B2C innovations on the B2B buyer needs. The latter are now relying on their experiences as private consumers. The excellent customer experiences on the B2C market have set new standards, i.e., online purchases should occur on a fast and user-friendly platform. Customers also want to be in control of their own purchases. They want to have the possibility to buy products independently from sales representatives and prefer to do so digitally.
These recent developments are the driving force behind the digitalization of the sales process.
How to digitalize the sales process: self-service portal
One way of digitalizing the sales process is to offer a self-service platform that meets your customers’ needs since it allows them to purchase products online without having to interact with sales reps for a lot of projects. This enables your sales team to focus on more challenging tasks. Making a digital leap by investing in this kind of online portal has some significant benefits:
- Product information is available 24/7 to your internal sales team, your distribution network, and your customers. The information is always up to date and is presented in a structured way so that everyone can quickly find what they’re looking for.
- Product knowledge is no longer exclusive to one or two experts, thus reducing the risk of forming a bottleneck and slowing down the process. The guided selling tools and 3D models in online portals make your products easy to understand, even for laymen, and give users the right information at the right time.
- By design, sales and R&D logic are in sync.
Getting ready for the future
Digital transformation is not just about driving sales; it is about getting your company ready for a future that has no room for companies that have not evolved. Take a look at the difference a digitalized sales process can make:
Old sales process
- Is slow and cumbersome
- Is repetitive and prone to errors
- Takes up a lot of time from skilled resources
- Keeps bottlenecks in place
Digitalized sales process
- Fast and available to users 24/7
- Eliminates mistakes through automation
- Saves your teams time, and empowers external users to make purchases themselves
- Drives more sales
Want to know how Hive can help you digitalize your sales processes?
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