By Mike Marks – Founding Partner – Indian River Consulting Group
It can’t be stressed enough that digital transformation is less effective in isolation than when it’s part of a big-picture, holistic strategy. Digital transformation should be approached as one component of a three-pronged approach, along with sales and analytics.
Those three areas of focus add up to a whole that’s much greater than the sum of the parts. In the spring 2024 issue of FEDA News & Views, I talked about the digital transformation part of the equation. Now let’s look at sales transformation — what it is, how it works and why it matters.
Having a Plan for Sales Transformation is Crucial
The pandemic and the rise of e-commerce have dramatically changed the nature of sales. Changes in buyer expectations and priorities have created new realities and opportunities that require distributors to rethink their existing approach and adapt to the shifting sales landscape. Mastering these changes before competitors will give distributors a distinct advantage while falling behind can mean losing customers and sales.
To succeed, sales teams need to evolve to become a collaboration between inside and outside sales, combining their strengths into a unified process that enhances the customer experience. Ultimately, equipment dealers must understand how customers want to interact with their business and use that information to align their sales process to their preferences. That kind of transformation does not happen on its own, and it often comes up. As research from McKinsey shows, 70 percent of transformation efforts undertaken by businesses to improve performance fail. Companies can improve those odds by developing a plan that includes fact-based goals, creates buy-in from employees and outlines a process for sustaining success.
Five Key Principles to Guide Sales Transformation
1. Rethink the sales team.
Increasingly, customers are expressing not just tolerance, but a preference, for a sales process with less face-to-face contact. Buyers are increasingly comfortable spending time on their own before talking to anyone, especially when it comes to researching a product or service.
This challenges the longstanding conventional wisdom that sales depend on face-to-face contact with outside sales reps. The truth is, according to our research, 80 to 98 percent of customers’ purchases are products they have previously purchased from the distributor. As long as the repurchased product is satisfactory, that repurchase volume should hold steady.