New Age Selling: A customer-centric approach to sales using AI

This webinar explores the role of analytics in driving sales transformation and the key challenges faced by sales leaders within an organization.

Sales during COVID

“Now the biggest challenge in any sales organization is how do you map the customer? What stage is the customer in the journey that they are in?” - Anil Iyer

Due to COVID, organizations dependent on relationship and partnership approaches to sales are struggling to meet their numbers as markets changed due to

• Informed customers
• Inconsistent message across multiple channels
• Sales tools like personal product demos, training, presentations got disrupted
• Uncertainty in forecasting
• Challenges in training sales staff for online sales

Impact on Sales Strategy

“There has been a shift from a relation and sales driven to a purely value-based and data-driven approach” Kartik Nagarajan

• No need for in-person meetings, follow-ups, etc
• Engaging more customers in the same sales pitch via online conferences
• Cost savings on travel
• Adoption of digital channels, CRM software, productivity tools
• Moving towards multi-touchpoint systems and omnichannel sales approach
• Automation of repetitive steps that freed time for lead generation

The need for Sales Analytics

“Companies need to rethink their sales strategy that is personalized in an efficient, cost-effective way with limited sales force.” Kartik Nagarajan

Sales analytics enables personal engagement and enhances customer centricity for a lifetime value.

• Standardize your sales engine cycle
• Consolidated view of all activities
• Optimize the cost of investment in the sales team by optimizing resources

Analytics for Customer-Centric Sales

“Right data can only give recommendations but the implementations are purely in your hands.” Kartik Nagarajan

Analytics can help sales leaders globally to ensure:

• Targeting right customer
• Solutions provide value the customer is seeking
• Build trust
• Good post-sales experience

Use Case to Derive Value from Data

“The next best action is very interesting - it tells the salesman what content to show to a customer what channel to use to show that content and what follow-up he/she needs to do” Anil Iyer

• Customer targeting: improving lead generation accuracy and quality by focusing on high-value prospects using past internal data-based predictive analytics.
• Penetration opportunities: using customer segmentation to cluster similar customer behavior and globally scale sales
• Sales Training: using NLP to correct facial expressions, keywords to optimize the sales pitch

Usage of CRM

“The biggest boon of the digital transformation is that there's a central repository with the organization in terms of the history with that customer. So in the event of that guy moving on it's not that you are reinventing the wheel or starting from scratch with that customer or on your relationship between the organization and the customer.” Premal Pandya

• Provides operational capabilities and enforces discipline
• Reduction in the sales cycle and easier conversion
• It doesn't give the right actionable insights and next steps to undertake. A combination of CRM with an analytics engine can solve this hurdle.

Adoption Challenges

“The biggest challenge is understanding the role of analytics” Premal Pandya

• Treating CRM as a tracking or performance management tool than a business productivity enhancement tool
• Expecting immediate results
• Inconsistently feeding of data
• Change management - understanding the rationale and gaining the trust of the salesman for efficiency