8 Digital best practices for salespeople
Embracing digital best practice is no longer just the responsibility of the IT department with digital tools now offering sales professionals a competitive edge when it is needed most. From enhancing the customer experience to getting deals closed faster and optimising efficiencies; there are few areas where sales teams won’t benefit from digital innovation.
Here’s our pick of the top eight digital best practices for salespeople:
1. Transition to paperless
To help build momentum and confidence when facing more complex digital transformation initiatives, it makes practical sense for sales organisations to start small. Seeking out opportunities in core tasks to move from paper-based transactions to efficient digital documents and signatures can be an ideal start on the journey to a digital enterprise.
2. Removing revenue friction points
Like every other member of staff in the business, sales professionals only have a limited number of time in the working day to sell, making it vitally important to reduce the time they spend on non-essential work. Sales staff themselves know what administrative tasks can be made more efficient so start asking them how digital processes can be used to eliminate revenue friction points.
3. Making the sales funnel more visible
Accurate sales forecasts are central to any successful budget and growth plan but when contracts reach the execution stage, progress can be obscured due to challenges and complexities of collecting several signatures. By embracing electronic signature technology sales teams can immediately see which parties have signed the contract and who is yet to sign, thereby improving their revenue forecasting ability.
4. Reducing staff turnover
The departure of talented salespeople can have a profound impact on both the bottom-line and the morale of the sales teams. Using the latest digital technology during the onboarding process and to provide more detailed feedback on performance can help sales professionals and, ultimately, improve team retention.
5. Unlock the benefits of mobile technology
Sales professionals often travel to visit potential clients, leaving them unable to access desktop based devices. By fully adopting mobile technology and effective workflows sales teams can quickly complete contracts and agreements on-the-go, wherever they are around the world, ensuring clients are responded to quickly and no opportunities are missed.
6. Meeting geographic regulations
As electronic signatures become the default for many campaigns globally, sales staff who work internationally need to ensure that signature processes meet local standards and are legally binding. GDPR in Europe and different regulations in other jurisdictions that deal with privacy and security should also be complied with through your electronic signature provider.
7. Bringing IT and legal together with sales
With the countless digital tools now available for sales teams to implement, it’s vital these are also used to improve the current CRM investments that have been made. Engaging with both IT and sales will ensure sales tools that are selected will be easily compatible with existing systems and tasks like customer account setup can be automated.
8. Insights from consumer services best practices
Consumer services have arguably led the way when it comes to exceeding user expectations and searching for ways to mimic best practices in this area can help sales teams meet their clients needs better, especially when it comes to offering user friendly processes and innovative mobile technologies.
Summary: Digital best practices for sales people
It’s impossible for sales teams to reach their full potential without going digital. These exciting digital tools allow sales professionals to work in a truly flexible way and following the 8 digital best practices for sales professionals ensures that all members of the team will be best placed to take advantage of a fundamentally improved workflow.
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