Keith Fenner, Dynamics 365 Group Business Director, Microsoft Middle East and Africa, says the use of technology to increase sales has been a disappointment so far. But he tells Intelligent CIO the use of AI platforms and the intelligent cloud could be the best way of increasing sales in the future.
If you are a GCC business, then 2018 will probably live on in your memory as the Year of Compliance.
Between regional VAT and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you probably feel that this should really be the Year of Selling More.
The costs of compliance need (ideally) to be balanced by higher revenues, you might think, but applying information technology to the task of driving sales has never worked well in the past.
You are not alone in your disillusionment. Many companies have tried to employ Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions to the problem of keeping the pipeline humming. Indeed, I would like to argue that obsession with productivity is the problem.
Microsoft recently asked sales leaders about how their strategies were progressing and while the survey revealed that more than half (56%) considered productivity to be crucial, a staggering 96% cited engagement to be a key factor.
Many sales units are coming to realise that their strategies are not working – that an emphasis on productivity is overwhelming and demoralising sellers; and a misalignment between sales and marketing functions is leading to an uneven relationship with customers.
The misaligned strategy
Let me tell you a story you are sure to recognise. It is told by Microsoft executives from Redmond to Riyadh. A start-up CEO is looking for a telesales solution and gets a series of emails from a telesales solutions vendor. He deletes all of them, until a friend recommends the product.
So, when the next email he receives from the vendor informs him of a 90-day trial, he clicks a link. He soon hears from a sales rep who asks no discovery questions, launching straight into a pitch, trying to close a deal. When the potential customer asks about the free trial, the rep is unaware of it and merely dictates a standard mantra on pricing flexibility.
The disillusioned customer ends the call. But the following week, a different rep from the same vendor calls again. Again, unaware of the free trial, they are ready to close a deal. The potential customer tells the rep not to call again, but continues to receive call after call, and email after email.
The social storm
What happens next? The customer takes to social media to disparage the vendor’s process and hence their brand, reaching the very people that the vendor would identify as prospects. And the seller’s executive team is left to figure out what went wrong.
After all, the customer clicked on the free trial in the email, so marketing scored a hit for a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). And sales would classify the interaction as neutral – a prospect left to ripen. The customer though feels harassed and mistreated and is telling other prospects all about it.
This is a classic example of technology misapplied. Digital transformation rests on four pillars: engagement of customers, empowerment of employees, optimisation of operations and reinvention of business models.
The right commerce platform will allow organisations to move away from monitoring sellers towards empowering sellers to engage customers. The platform will tie together customer information with preferences, business goals and other data (including what is being talked about on social media), to form a rich profile, ripe for enriching engagement. We have the right data – that is not in dispute – but we need to use it in the right way. We need to allow the intelligent cloud, through AI-rich platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, to deliver meaningful insights into the hands of frontline agents.
Engagement over productivity
Microsoft research has shown that 72% of buyers see rep engagement as a strong purchase incentive, indicating strong demand for a trusted advisor as part of a buying experience. And sales teams that emphasise engagement were found to be 2.3 times more likely to achieve quota success than those who do not.
Think of engagement as synchronising the selling process with the buying process. You need to understand where your customer is in their purchasing cycle and tailor your interaction to match.
If your customer is at the exploratory phase, having yet to define a set of requirements, then don’t discuss your product’s pricing. Instead, address pain points and relief.
The right commerce platform – one that feeds on insights from the intelligent cloud – will help you achieve this mapping of the sales pipeline onto the purchase journey and turn 2018 into the Year of Increased Sales.
