This spring, various digital collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Zoom have become more and more familiar to all of us in sales work. Solution sales have become much more challenging when you have not been able to meet the customer on site and thus ensure your customer’s undivided attention. Regardless of the pandemic situation, customer behavior in B2B sales will become increasingly consumer-oriented in the 2020s.
However, virtual meeting collaboration tools are one small step toward the world of digital sales in solution sales. Digital steps have long been taken in sales, especially in the sale of simple products and services. However, in the areas of investment goods and demanding technical trade, digitalization has yet to come. Today, a variety of applications are beginning to be available enabling a new kind of digital sales in solution sales.
According to research, in general, B2B shopping has begun to resemble strongly e-commerce shopping. In the 2020s, customers expect to be able to make even more consumer like purchases in the technical B2B trade as well. The new digital solution sales tools will provide their users with many of the benefits and competitive advantage now needed as the challenges of the 2020s meet.
In particular, digital sales tools will benefit and improve your company’s competitiveness in at least the following ways:
- You simplify the sales process yourself with digital sales tools.
- You get more information about the customer as you gather the customer’s needs into a database.
- You generate more sales revenue when you leverage the digital sales process.
How does the sales process be facilitated by digital sales tools?
Sales becomes more independent of time and place. Solution sales becomes a smooth process in which everyone’s role is clear and tasks progress in good order.
The efficiency of a sales organization increases when roles and processes are well thought out and product-related information is easily utilized by salesperson. Because the technical information related to the solutions is available from the sales configuration system, sales no longer need to rely on the support of product managers and the pre-sales organization in the same way as before. In practice, the wheel is not reinvented again and again several times. Time wasteon continuous information retrieval, which at worst is a manual and constant inquiry about individual issues from across your organization and the customer, will be prevented.
This makes sales processes clearer and more efficient with digital tools, and makes the salesperson’s job easier.
More precise information also benefits sales to provide the customer with better solutions and win more sales.
Knowledge is power, and this classic saying also applies to sales. More accurate information improves the probability to close the deal. Knowing your customer better also ensures that you can serve your customer better.
In the sales process, you will be able to identify the customer more accurately and better understand your customer’s needs. For example, with the bidding tool available on your customer’s website, you understand your customer’s need before you’ve even talked to them. The conversation with your customer is much smoother and you can more easily win him over when you use the information gathered about your customer’s needs intelligently.
With the help of sales tools, you get an accurate and extensive database of the quotes made and the content of the won trades. You will be able to accurately analyze the quote with which you win the trade and with which quote you lose.
With the help of a digital sales application, you get a lifecycle view of your customer’s needs and the solutions proposed to him – what has been quoted, on what price and on which terms. You will better understand your customer, and in the future you will be able to make quotes to the customer that will make you more likely to close the deal and win the sales case.
With this new kind of transparency and real-time data, you get a new grip on managing your own sales as well as your customers. In this day and age, knowledge management and transparency are essential to a company’s success. You also lead your sales work genuinely with facts.
How will digital tools improve your company’s sales performance?
In the 2020s, integrated digital tools are a prerequisite for success. You can no longer do well enough with old tools. With the digital tool you can improve:
- sales success i.e. you win more deals
- productivity i.e. you make more quotes with the same team
- customer satisfaction because the quotes better meet the customer’s need.
With digital sales tools, you simply make more deals. You make your winning quotes faster because the quoting process is smoother overall. The time and cost spent on quoting is reduced because you are able to produce a quality quote with fewer resources. You also need less in-depth technical expertise for your sales team. Our customers have good experiences with this, read our customer Outotec’s experiences on how to increase sales efficiency by up to 80%.
Efficiency also increases when you make better use of your knowledge of your own solutions and customer needs. As a result, you use existing data more efficiently, increasing the productivity of your sales team. A more productive team can make more quotes, which also increases the probability of winning the deal and, in general, an understanding of customers ’willingness close deals.
Winning deals is easier because you make your quote better quality in terms of both process and content. You leverage your customer to gather information more efficiently and accurately, making the valuable information you gather genuinely benefit you in sales.
Customer satisfaction will certainly improve as your sales process runs better, smoother, and as the customer becomes more confident in the solution that best fits the need.
Are you interested in developing your sales process to win more deals?
With Klaro, you can easily develop the quotation process.
Find out more about our solutions to support smart quoting: https://www.klarocpq.fi/en/make-quoting-more-agile/
Contact us and book an appointment! At the meeting, we will tell you more about your company’s opportunities to develop quoting processes: https://www.klarocpq.fi/en/make-quoting-more-agile/#content-bottom