Using Digital Tools to Boost Sales?

Start by identifying your goals

Today companies can’t afford to ignore buyer behavior and fluctuating markets. And they must remain vigilantly flexible and resiliently adaptable. It’s more critical than ever to outline your goals and identify your buyers. Digital tools make that job easier.

To be sure, the world of sales is changing. The days when you picked up a phone or met over lunch to close a deal are fading fast. Today, it’s nearly all digital, with hosts of tools and methods at your fingertips to reap, keep and grow customers.

This radically expanding digital trend is part of a climate in which businesses are learning to do more with less. Companies are stretched thin on resources, time and people. Budgets are trimmer. There’s greater emphasis on lean processes with proven results.

New business leaders are already emerging from the shakeout the pandemic caused. One trait these successful businesses share is having reliable set of sales playbooks. And Step 1 of a winning sales playbook is identifying what success looks like—goals, metrics and a way to track KPIs. Once you start collecting data, you’ll gain advantage by continually tracking and analyzing it.

Focused on the trees

Often companies become too focused on solving one issue—addressing one client or customer need. But when they peel back the onion another layer or two, they may find the goal is much bigger. For instance, they may want an easily adaptable tool to sell TV sets. But pulling back 10,000 feet, they discover they need greater insight into issues customers have with their current TVs. By seeing the bigger picture, the company can better identify buying habits and trends. Armed with these insights, they can sell more than TVs—maybe frames to hang the sets, cables, speakers and other accessories.

So, adopting the right digital tools is only part of a winning sales strategy—one success factor. It’s a step toward creating a set of assets to help you measure success and build a culture around it. Yes, the right tools ultimately help your team garner more sales. But those same tools should also help them monitor opportunities. Real success is having a way to follow leads and close deals—turning opportunities into revenue. And that helps create repeatable processes—methods to generate even more leads and close more deals. Real success means having the means to gauge ambition and monitor risk while discerning what is measurable and achievable.

Smart companies are looking to overcome challenges beyond the immediate. They’re not looking at just one tree—they’re seeing the whole forest. They’re finding that the right tools each have their own advantage. And they’re marrying their goals with those tools.

A major manufacturer, for example, likely has multiple sources—and multiple buyers. Understanding their win/loss ratio—how many projects they’re bidding on measured against how many they’ve actually acquired—is an important part of their sales process. They need to identify their goals and discover success metrics. A Microsoft Dynamic 365 tool can be the perfect way to help track those variables, giving the manufacturer insight into what it means—and costs—to win. These tools also help companies see the journey clearly and where there might have been inefficiencies along the road.

Organizations large and small, local and global, public and private, have an opportunity to seize the digital moment and boost their ROI by understanding what success looks like. From there it’s a matter of choosing the right tools.

Read our eBook to learn more about the other key steps in winning sales digitally.