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The Role of Digital Transformation in the Startup Sales Process

Set yourself apart with a modern sales experience for your customers and clients.

By Jessica ThiefelsPublished 4 years ago 4 min read
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By the end of 2019, the amount of money that industries are projected to spend on digital transformation will exceed $2 trillion, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). This means that 40 percent of tech-related spending will be to advance digital transformation in multiple business sectors.

Modern startups have even more of an edge when it comes to digital transformation because you know digital. Based on the 2018 State of Digital Business Transformation survey, 55 percent of startups already use methods of digital transformation, compared to just 38 percent of traditional enterprises. What’s more, those startups who are successful in their digital-first strategies can increase revenue by 34 percent.

So the question is: how does this impact sales processes and why is it crucial for the modern sales team to understand and implement? Here’s what you need to know about digital transformation and sales enablement for your growing business.

Digital Transformation Is All About a Quality Customer Interaction

The goal of digital transformation in sales enablement is to make it easier for your team to maintain efficient, personalized, and convenient customer interactions. As the customer demand for real-time information, support, and communication increases, sales teams must respond in a quick and direct manner that feels authentic and conversational too. That’s why digital transformation in this area of your business may look like the installation of chat bots or increased automation throughout the funnel.

Your goal is to streamline how customers and sales teams interface with one another, so that you can address their needs at all points in the sales funnel—while spending less time and money to do so.

Digital Transformation Sets Your Business Apart

As a startup, digital transformation is your chance to stand out and differentiate yourself from what other established companies are offering customers. Consider how digital transformation has enhanced the customer relationship and sales enablement strategies of the online health insurance provider, HealthMarkets. Michael Stahl, the CMO, explains their experience and the value they saw as a result:

“A little more than five years ago, when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was coming into play, we knew that we had to make some changes to the way we did business. It was imperative that we provide our customers with the choice to do business with us however they wanted to—whether that is with an agent, via phone or online.

As such, HealthMarkets underwent a digital transformation whereby we altered our online presence and made changes to how our agents work with customers. Change isn’t always welcome, but in our case, it was the right thing to do. We went from selling $500 million in new business premium to $1.8 billion.”

Research conducted by the Harvard Business School echoes this, finding that companies who are leaders in digital transformation earn a three-year gross sales revenue margin of 55 percent, on average, as opposed to the 37 percent that other companies earn, reports CIO Magazine.

Your growing company’s competitive edge may be in how you respond to the evolving digital space.

Digital Transformation Tools for the Modern Sales Team

Despite the clear benefits and measurable success that digital transformation offers, the idea of change—no matter how beneficial—can also bring on resistance, from both employees and leadership. Ease and optimize the digital transformation in your own sales model with these enablement tools.

Streamlined Customer Conversations

Tool: Live chatbots

Chatbot software has allowed many businesses to automate and manage a live chat platform for your website, either from a customizable templates or from scratch with your own configuration. As a small company, streamlining something as time-consuming as customer and sales support is no longer optional, but necessary.

Use the chatbot data to monitor how satisfied customers are with the chatbot’s performance and determine how much you should continue investing in this technology.

Improved Sales Tracking

Tool: CRM

Sales enablement metrics from your CRM provide critical insight and visibility into how each link in your sales chain is operating. The Aberdeen Group found that companies who leverage the analytics obtained from CRM tracking meet their sales quotas 84% of the time which is almost a 20% increase from companies who don’t track CRM.

The issue for many companies is committing to the CRM and then creating consistency in tagging, cataloging and messaging across the sales and marketing team. The two teams need to be working in lockstep for you to get the most out of your sales data. If some people are tagging contacts and some aren’t, for example, you won’t be getting a complete picture.

Distributed Content

Tool: Centralized file system

A centralized content hub allows you to circulate information that all divisions of your sales team needs to be successful. This is a place where team members can share files, publish interactive content, distribute market research, and converse openly with one another.

Like with a CRM, part of digital transformation is making sure your team is effectively using this as a tool, by creating consistent naming structures and providing the right access to the right people. What’s more, it needs to stay up to date. When some sales members are using old messaging and some are using new messaging, you create a disconnect in your brand, which can be detrimental to a small and growing business.

Digital Transformation and Sales Enablement Can’t be Ignored

When you use digital transformation to build engagement and communication between your sales team and the customers, the result is both an accelerated and effective sales enablement process. This ultimately leads to growth for the business, both in less money spent and fewer resources needed to be successful as a small company.

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