The old world of sales was different back then, especially for sales representatives who were just given materials and were ordered to do things without their managers guiding them nor giving them instructions, all that happened was that goals were set and then representatives are suddenly free to do whatever they wanted to reach the given target.
The overall success of the sales representative or anyone who works on sales are memorized pitches and loads of luck. There were no sales tools nor coaching tools that were part of the overall game plan.
For you to stand out in the modern sales world where there are a lot of different companies who vie for the attention of an audience that is easily distracted, sales leaders need to get out of the box with their sales representatives and provide trainings that are hands-on and specific.
As a manager and as a leader that is focused on sales, the best thing that you can do for your representatives is to ensure them that they have the proper tools that they need to perform at their best and to feel success in your company.
With these being said, here are the 7 technology trends that can improve your sales and the overall performance of your sales representatives.
- Sales and Marketing Technology Integration will become a top priority
There is a shift to account-based everything and it is compelling the sales and the marketing teams to work hand in hand and sales and marketing technologies must be able to follow this trend.
Given the widespread integration and the leading utilization of the sales and marketing tools in the market like MarTech Solutions, challenges in the field are made critical.
There are sales intelligence technologies that needs to get better at helping their customers identify the correct leads across the right accounts while they give their marketing a greater visibility to those said accounts and the ability to leverage those leads for better and improved content and campaign targeting.
This kind of shift will require a better and more seamless integration between the new digital tools and the lead tools that are used by the marketing team to reach and to engage those types of leads
- Focus on services and technologies that put data in the hands of those who need it.
There will be an increase on the focus on services and technologies that can put the power of data directly into the hands of those who need the data the most.
For example, sales and marketing will have more ways and options to sanitize, monitor and analyze data at the edge before the data is dumped into a large and centralized database where it can lose its value quickly.
Companies will look to providers increasingly and that will alleviate the burden of all the data management while still empowering effective sales and marketing initiatives. By being able to deliver good data into the hands of specific sales representatives and marketing leads, they can take more immediate action and informed one.
This is useful especially for smaller companies who can leverage the data in order to compete against larger companies in ways that were prohibitive previously.
- Artificial Intelligence will not transform sales and marketing yet
The hype about Artificial Intelligence continues to grow over the years yet it is not the time for sales and marketing leaders to rely on it fully since its overall technology cannot transform the business functions yet.
The over-reliance on technology can inhibit sales effectiveness if the sales representative moves too quickly to automation tools and they neglect the fundamental skills and the art of the human element of sales.
Instead, the sales and the marketing leaders will look to optimize their existing stacks of technology and the processes to improve the workflow, integration and the ROI.
All of this is done while beginning to test the capabilities such as the predictive intelligence to extract more insights and the value from their overall data.
- The Sales Technology and Development will evolve as the traditional email marketing evolves
The critical component of an organization that is fast growing on sales and marketing is the sales development function.
The email deliverability through the traditional marketing automation system is difficult with an inbox placement that rates down by at least 11 points in just the past year as spam filters become increasingly sophisticated through the years.
There are new sales development technologies such as SalesLoft and Outreach that enables you to coordinate the orchestration between the call and the email sequences as well as the between the marketing and the sales.
This then ensures a one to one personalized outreach from the sales development representative that is supported by the nurturing content from the marketing team that is more traditional outreach methods.
The value that the teams derive from the use of the technologies comes back to how great the data within the system is.
- There are more sales tools now that are available
Currently, there are about 500 sales technologies that are detailed in the Sales Technology Landscape Project this year, which is twice as last year.
The sales representatives are adding new sales technologies to their companies at the rate of about two a year, but most of the companies are still focused exclusively on customer relationship management or CRM.
While CRM is great, many of the new sales tools can enhance workflows that are existing, and it enables sellers to expand upon the tools that they are already used to. If you consider the tools that your employees need, you can note that there are many sales representatives that can use at least six tools at a time.
- There are tools that will allow sales leaders to add multiple tools together
There are tools in the market that can stitch up multiple tools together. When you manipulate at least five to six separate tools to achieve one total outcome and it can get tiring, and this is the reason why sales tool developers are looking into different options that can allow different types of platforms to work together without much oversight.
- The new sales tools will allow companies to sell differently than their competitors
The sellers and the sales leaders want to stand out then they need to be able to find the tools that can engage the audience and their interest. To do so, it is highly recommended to start with the basics like the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
The first one is to understand to whom the representative should be selling. The second one is that the seller needs to know how to engage with the target since many technologies that are emerging this year will be geared toward helping the sellers gain an edge.
Companies like Omegaseo.co anticipates these technology trends that can help improve the overall sales of the company as well as its marketing leads.
Tech Talk 