Eighteen months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the nature of B2B buying and selling has changed. In-person sales meetings have morphed into Zoom calls. Live marketing events have become virtual webinars. Service call centres have given way to home offices. And buying has shifted from brick-and-mortar stores to ecommerce portals.
Many of these shifts are here to stay. For instance, about 70%-80% of B2B buyers now prefer digital self-service or remote interactions with sales reps. Only about 20% hope to return to in-person sales, even in sectors where field-sales models have traditionally dominated, such as pharma and medical products.
With these shifts in buying, most sales reps (79%) have had to quickly adapt to new ways of selling. The majority of B2B companies have shifted their go-to-market sales models from traditional to digital. And close to nine in ten of them expect digital sales practices to be a fixture throughout 2021.
But let’s face it—digital transformation can be hard. So many things need to be rethought—be it sales planning, forecasting, quote management, or customer engagement. How do you move all of it online—fast? How do you make digital purchases seamless? How do you replicate the personal touch of in-person sales interactions online?
Given these challenges, it’s no wonder that 74% of sales leaders don’t feel completely capable of adapting their team culture to change. And yet, as the following Trailblazers demonstrate, sales teams can find ways to adapt and thrive in a fast-changing, all-digital, work-from-anywhere world:
- During the COVID-19 lockdown when customers couldn’t visit Titan stores, Titan took its stores to the customer by replicating the entire offline shopping experience online.
- When the pandemic struck, White Hat Jr quickly enabled its sales teams to work from home without disruption, and spend more time engaging customers on calls than on uploading data. Sales productivity shot up even as sales volumes soared.
- Startupwala witnessed 1,500 new sign-ups on its legal service platform in one month, despite the lockdown.
- Edelweiss continued to delight customers during the lockdown by giving them 24/7 access to their funds and to financial advisors. Customers could set up a new account, place orders, access money, liquidate funds, and more.
All four companies have one thing in common: they use Sales Cloud.
Achieving sales success with the world’s #1 CRM
Sales Cloud 360 gives you all the tools you need to galvanise sales growth, forecast with accuracy, and close more deals faster—from anywhere. With Sales Cloud, you can:
1. Skill up your teams for a digital reality
Becoming a best-in-class sales organisation starts by empowering your sales reps and managers with the new digital skills they need to succeed in a COVID-19 world. Sales Cloud helps you upskill and train your teams to be ready for every kind of sales engagement.
- Understand the new scope of selling: Quickly enable reps with resources about new products, new sales methods, and new messaging through myTrailhead.
- Learn new ways to connect: Helps teams strengthen rapport with customers across both virtual and in-person engagements using built-in CRM insights.
- Develop new methods for managing: Align, manage, and motivate remote sales teams with collaboration tools and Trailblazer best practices.
2. Help reps connect and work better virtually
Building meaningful connections with customers when you can no longer meet them face-to-face can be a real challenge. But with Salesforce Meetings, you can strengthen customer relationships and provide trusted experiences in a completely virtual way.
- Make every video meeting memorable: Enable reps to do better before, during, and after customer video meetings using Salesforce Meetings.
- Drive digital sales excellence: Analyse video conversations, capture AI-powered insights on sales rep performance, and use them to personalise rep coaching—all with Einstein Call Coaching.
- Share best practices at scale: Design best-in-class sales processes for every stage of a deal with High Velocity Sales.
- Transform field sales, safely: Determine which areas are safest for travel with Salesforce Maps Field Safety Kit. Gain easy-to-build travel approval workflows and customisable health checklists to ensure field sales teams are both efficient and safe.
3. Accelerate sales from anywhere
Today, sales reps must be able to sell, service, market and collaborate from wherever they are—be it at home, on the road, or in the office. Sales Cloud can help you unlock new levels of productivity and customer success from anywhere.
- Reimagine sales processes: Standardise and scale your sales processes with best-in-industry templated sales plans.
- Gain a single view of your data: Close deals faster by keeping all your data, processes, and conversations inside Sales Cloud.
- Make faster and smarter decisions: Send important updates to your sales teams through real-time alerts. Help them sell more efficiently, and make faster, data-driven decisions.
How Salesforce uses Salesforce
Like our customers, we also used Sales Cloud during the pandemic to drive growth:
First, we skilled up our people: In two weeks, our entire sales team went virtual. Our CEO challenged us to reach out to customers and find out how we could support them better. He set the bar high at one million customer conversations across the sales organisation. We achieved it in just one quarter using Sales Cloud. The next target? Five million customer conversations.
In parallel, we scaled up our processes: In May 2020, we launched Work.com to help businesses reopen safely. Within 2-3 months, we created new virtual sales and support processes, trained our field sales teams, and closed our first few deals for Work.com—all by selling virtually, thanks to Sales Cloud’s flexibility and adaptability.
We also explored ways to speed up revenue growth: We needed to eliminate manual approaches to quoting and order processing, so that our sales teams could save time and reduce potential errors. With Salesforce CPQ, we automated 99% of quote approvals, and enabled a seamless buying experience for customers.
Why choose Sales Cloud?
- World’s #1 CRM: For the eighth consecutive year, Salesforce has been named the #1 CRM provider by IDC. We’re also the market share leader in the sales application segment.
- Rapid time-to-value: Sales Cloud’s industry-specific apps and best practice processes help you realise value fast.
- Scalability and flexibility: Swiftly build and extend apps on our platform—or choose from thousands of solutions on AppExchange, the leading enterprise cloud marketplace.
- Trailblazer success and community: When you buy Sales Cloud, you don’t just get a product—you also gain access to 150,000+ sales teams that are passionate about solving sales challenges, and sharing best practices to accelerate growth.
- Customer 360: Truly know your customers by unifying interactions across marketing, commerce, sales, and services in a single source of truth.
Find out more about how Sales Cloud can help you achieve sales success here.
Also read:
4 Ways to Improve Productivity in a Remote Sales Team
