Using Digital Tools to Generate Sales?

Make sure you’re giving your team incentives to use them

Savvy companies are using digital tools to boost their sales efforts. Making the most of these tools involves three critical steps:

1. Identifying your goals
2. Categorizing your buyers
3. Driving adoption of the tools among your sales force

Encouraging your salespeople to adopt digital tools can help you strategize and refine tactics, offering you clearer insight into how the team works. Assets such as gamification and recognition can be a huge advantage here, helping the salesforce strengthen their weaknesses and sharpen their skills.

It’s going to become increasingly important to hone employees’ digital sales skills as more of them work from home offices. Tools such as Microsoft Viva are already producing enormous benefits for companies seeking to drive digital sales. Melding communications, knowledge, learning, resources and insights through office tools such as Outlook and Teams, Viva helps identify where people excel and where they can improve. It can help companies develop mentor/protégé relationships and improve time management, for example.

But many company leaders struggle when motivating their teams to use digital sales tools such as Viva. They express frustration that their new tools lay dormant while their sales teams go about their work the same old way (with inefficient methods, inconsistent communication and lackluster results). They search for ways to encourage—even inspire—their teams to take advantage of their digital investments.

Incentives and rewards are strong motivators. Offering people a premium or bonus for using a digital sales tool typically increases adoption. Strategies such as gamification, too, can be effective. However, gamification requires a maturity model. Creating a game-based tool adoption strategy means laying out the steps that lead up to offering the games themselves.

Patience, acceptance are keys

Indeed, incentivizing digital sales tool adoption requires a certain amount of patience. In addition to creating a maturity model, motivating your staff requires no small amount of acceptance. Too many times we see companies let great get in the way of good enough. This is particularly true when companies delve into budgets to invest in new sales tools. They are best served accepting the idea that good enough will ultimately win more sales than waiting for the great tool to come along.

To be sure, developers can spend nine months in a lab creating the next great tool. But in those nine months, the world can change drastically (look at the pandemic). So, when those developers emerge from the lab, the next great tool may be all but obsolete.

Developing, choosing and adopting the right digital tool offers companies the freedom and flexibility to manage sales across their entire ecosystem (rather than using disparate tools throughout the organization).

Adopting the right digital tools is also invaluably helpful to standardize streamlined business process flows, helping your customers meet their targets. Streamlining and continuous adoption will also help you adapt for improvement—tailoring data (and tools) for continued growth and expansion (gaining more customers while improving service levels).

Today, companies have an impressive array of digital sales tools at their disposal. But making the most of them entails certain requirements, starting with identifying your goals.

Discover the other key steps in winning sales digitally.